THE ANSWER TO ITS CRITICS
At the beginning of this study it was said that a definition of social
work was in demand for practical use. We have developed a definition
which seems to hold good as far as it goes. We have said that social
work includes all voluntary attempts to extend benefits in response to
a need, which are concerned with social relationships and which avail
themselves of scientific knowledge and employ scientific methods.
It remains to test whether this is sufficiently descriptive and
sufficiently definitive to be of any practical use. Is it inclusive
enough to allow social work to claim all its legitimate functions and
exclusive enough to rescue it from unreasonable demands? These things
can only be tested by trying it out in discussion. It is therefore the
purpose of this chapter to attempt such a trial by assuming that social
work is no more and no less than the definition indicates and requiring
it, on this representation, to run the gauntlet of familiar criticism.
Up to the present time social work has not been the subject of much
serious analytical comment. It has been too inchoate for that.
But a sort of guerilla warfare of criticism pursues it in private
conversation, on public platforms and in the obiter dicta of current
literature. The criticisms are of three principal sorts, those which
say that what it does is somehow unworthy, those which say it does too
much and those which say it does too little; or, more fully stated,
those which charge it with an unwholesome interest in wanting to
play providence to other people, those which think it is attempting
something in defiance of the laws of nature and those which scorn it
for tinkering with abuses which should be fallen upon and annihilated.
In the first group may be classed the view of people who find the world
well enough as it is and think that social workers stir up hornets’
nests from sheer meddlesomeness and love of power. As this belief
never survives any considerable acquaintance with social work or any
but very provincial knowledge of the world it need not be discussed.
More considerable is the criticism of those who object to social work
because they think that to make demands in the interest of other people
is patronizing or sentimental or both. They think that the people
might possibly ask very different things of life from those which the
social worker asks for them; that if the social worker wishes to help
them he should confine himself to seconding their motions; that an
outsider and mere witness of an abuse who has never felt its weight is
not the one to draw up its indictment or to prescribe a remedy. But
their objection is not altogether on these grounds. Even when social
work makes the same demands as its clients have made for themselves
the irreconcilables continue to denounce it for undue interference.
Some of them, to be sure, think that while self-respecting people are
asking their plain rights in their own name and that of justice social
work makes it easy for the community to neglect their demands and
yet salve its conscience by supporting such benefactions as it finds
convenient. But this last belongs with the next group of criticisms
and must be answered along with them. We are for the moment concerned
only with the strange but apparently rooted belief that there must be
something spurious about a movement in which people are not speaking
for themselves.
It is evident that even people who commend social work, often do
so patronizingly as though it were something not to be taken very
seriously because it is not self-supporting and cannot claim the great,
humdrum, unchallengeable sanction of self interest. Moreover people
in border-line occupations when referred to as social workers will
repudiate the name as though it might discredit their work by taking
it out of the busy wholesome world of fair exchanges and putting it in
a world of patronage and possible hypocrisy. Men advocating industrial
welfare work are commonly not satisfied to claim that it pays for
itself and will be no expense to the business that installs it, but
assert with an air of rescuing it from suspicion, that it results in a
net profit to the man who puts it in and is therefore “not sentiment”
but “good business.” Those who, though themselves not originally
industrial workers, go into the labor movement, very frequently
pour scorn on the social worker while feeling themselves safe from
corrupting condescension in a company that is only asking for its own
rights.
The element of justice in the charge does not need to be pointed out.
Bernard Shaw has warned us against doing unto others as we would have
them do unto us for fear they may not like it. But for members of a
gregarious species some tolerance of ministration seems unavoidable.
Within the labor movement itself those with a margin of time and energy
are constantly acting in the interest of those who have none. We all
begin life with several years of sheer dependence on the altruism
of our elders and if we live long enough come again to some form of
dependence. As we look back on the slow mitigation of man’s inhumanity
to man there seems at least good ground for putting the burden of proof
on those who scorn all benevolent interference. We have already noticed
that what passes in one generation for special interest in the fortunes
of others seems to a later time plain obligation.
“Almost every law on the statute books,” says a historian, in reference
to protective legislation, “was forced upon the legislature by the
disconcerting zeal of a few enthusiasts. We marvel at the slight
concessions to humanity which satisfied them, we should rather admire
the originality which led them to denounce cruel and oppressive
conditions which had satisfied the legislature and against which
their victims had not always turned.”[61] There is the crux of the
matter--the victims will not, cannot always turn. In the palmy days
of utilitarianism when the opposition to doing for others was felt
with the mighty impact of which the present vague distrust is the last
faint ripple fading across the public mind, Mill himself will be found
writing that although it can be stated as a general rule “that most
persons take a juster and more intelligent view of their own interest,
and of the means of promoting it, than can either be prescribed to
them by a general enactment of the legislature, or pointed out in the
particular case by a public functionary” nevertheless “there is no
difficulty in perceiving some very large and conspicuous exceptions to
it.”[62] And among these exceptions he proceeds to enumerate protection
of persons incapable of judging or acting for themselves whether from
defective intelligence or immaturity, and the protection offered by
labor legislation and by public charity. Elsewhere he also remarks,
“Those who most need to be made wiser and better commonly desire it
least, and if they desired it would be incapable of finding the way to
it by their own lights.”[63]
It could probably be shown that the great bulk of social work acts
in the interest of people unable to speak for themselves or vaguely
wanting something they cannot find “the way to by their own lights.”
But victimization and helplessness are entirely relative matters and
social work is prepared boldly to extend benefits wherever they are
wanted.
Science has now laid a broad road and is leading the plodding crowd
where the keen feet of Pegasus have always carried the subtle minded,
whatever the contemporary creed. “Darwin” writes a popular social
psychologist “in the _Descent of Man_ (1871) first enunciated the true
doctrine of human motives, and showed how we must proceed, relying
chiefly upon the comparative and natural history method, if we would
arrive at a fuller understanding of them. * * * Social Psychology
has to show how, given the native propensities and capacities of the
individual human mind, all the complex mental life of societies is
shaped by them and in turn reacts upon the course of their development
and operation in the individual. * * * The fundamental problem of
social psychology is moralization of the individual by the society
into which he is born as a creature in which the non-moral and
purely egoistic tendencies are so much stronger than any altruistic
tendencies.”[64] That is to say the problem which social psychology
must solve is the problem of how this moralization is brought about.
The significance of such doctrine for social work is in its entire
discrediting of any naive individualism and its indication that man
being an animal that lives not solitary but in groups some form and
degree of interdependence is, for him, in the first order of nature.
The interests and inclinations corollary to that interdependence are
inescapable for him.
If this is the case objection to the social work we have defined could
not be “on principle” but must be to special forms of service on
specific grounds of inexpediency or because of the manner or quality
of the service. Although it is the manner and quality of service which
make the social work of any given time and place what it is they
are nevertheless incidentals entirely separable from its nature and
principles. Objections are brought on specific grounds of expediency
by those who claim that social work does too much and these objections
will be considered in their turn. Objection is also made to the manner
and quality of the social workers’ services and it is this objection
which really animates the charge against the altruism of social work.
This study is an analysis of the nature and functions, not the
performance of social work. It must, however, consider a general
objection to the nature and quality of the social workers’ services
which so often passes for an objection to social work itself.
This vague distrust of social work which we have just been considering,
this dislike of it as something sentimental or undemocratic, is really
a dislike of these incidentals which social work has a perfect right to
disclaim if it can. It is a moral and aesthetic repulsion, an aversion
for the sort of thing which social work sometimes seems to be.
It is social case work that is most open not only to misunderstanding
but to abuse. In it social work is especially liable to the defects of
its qualities. People who take for granted the social work that is done
in connection with the courts, the schools, institutions dealing with
defectives and in many other connections without troubling to consider
what it is they are accepting and even relying upon, will, because of
what they think social case work to be, pour scorn upon “uplifters” and
social workers generally.
The social case workers’ professional contribution to a situation
consists in doing whatever she does in conscious relation to a
general situation, in the ease of her contacts and the range of her
resources.[65] There is no limit to the knowledge of a situation
which it may be useful for her to have. A speaker addressing the
first students in the New York School of Philanthropy is on record as
referring to “investigation” as a necessary evil which must be bravely
faced and telling them they must always make it plain that “the person
in distress has asked you to help him and that you _mean_ to help
him, to help his soul and not only to feed his miserable body, and
that you cannot help him unless you do _know all about_ him.”[66] Of
course that is to give an ell when an inch is asked for--and an ell
of very different stuff. The statement was made twenty-five years ago
and is not given here as typical either of this time or that, but
as an instance of the sort of thing which is said and passed on and
resented, all in good faith. Obviously the more the case worker knows,
provided she can understand it, the better she can do her work. But
because of the very real requirement to employ trained workers and the
rapid expansion of the profession young people are employed as fast
as the schools will grind them out. And when social work lets loose
on difficult situations people disqualified for dealing with them
by their youth or inexperience or native incapacity or all three it
must expect its reputation to suffer. But, taken at the best, there
is great presumption in the attempt of one mortal life to analyze and
prescribe for the totality of another. A too nice matching up of the
inferential motive with the act to be accounted for, a too meticulous
testing for the qualities presumed necessary for a certain degree of
self direction, entail a veritable invasion of one life by another.
It is hard for the analytical to remember that any explanation, no
matter how true and inclusive, is only one thread drawn from a web. The
generalizations which we can make after taking cognizance of a certain
number of instances are just as much and as little applicable to any
given life as the probability tables of an insurance company. They are
illuminating as guides to general expectation but will not closely
correspond to any particular case. There cannot be any authoritative,
objective determination of the proper elements and relationships of
life, and any attempt to arrange for the life of another as a whole is
profane. The clearest sighted come often enough into unlit passages of
their own destiny where they must grope forward in bewilderment and a
kind of awed respect for things which could go unsuspected and yet all
along be “nearer to them than breathing, closer than hands and feet.”
Who then shall interpret another?
Yet life must be met with a certain hardihood. For the conspicuously
defective we know that self direction is impossible, and for the
intolerably troublesome we accept coercion, but in the case of
the merely dependent there are delicate lines to be drawn. Social
work knows perfectly well that it is possible to degenerate into
“substituting one neurosis for another.” Hamlet, thrusting on the
bewildered courtier the flute which that courtier could not play, spoke
for many an inarticulate protestor, “Why, look you now, how unworthy a
thing you make of me! You would play upon me you would seem to know my
stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me
from my lowest note to the top of my compass: and there is much music,
excellent voice in this little organ; yet cannot you make it speak.
’sblood do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?”[67]
Lincoln is credited with the observation that the Lord never made the
man who was good enough to have power over another man and, by its
option of giving or withholding benefits, social work undoubtedly holds
its beneficiaries very much in its power, not to mention the cases in
which it has actual guardianship, legal or otherwise. A German social
worker accustomed to the strict German notions of regulation could yet
say after a study of American social work, “an individual is never
so absolutely at the mercy of an administration as when he is the
beneficiary of a relief system.”[68] It is the social worker who is
the champion of individual rights all down the line from insisting on
discrimination among the men referred to en masse as “the criminal” to
rescuing orphan children from the uniformity of plaid dresses all of a
length. But who shall rescue the beneficiaries of social work?
Is it any wonder that people sometimes shudder at what social workers
take upon themselves? But these are only the risks incident to great
opportunity. If some social workers run a policy into the ground, if
they have neither imagination, reverence or a sense of humor, that is
the fault of human nature and not the fault of social work. There are
doctors who prescribe for cases they do not understand and fail to save
the patients, there are dishonest and even addle-headed lawyers who
defeat justice, and there are ministers of religion who are hypocrites,
but their existence does not utterly discredit their professions. The
quotations from the national conference and elsewhere must have made it
clear that this sort of personal imposition and finessing in control
are, if nothing else, too poor game to attract the main energies of
social work. These have large issues to absorb them and the effect of
the scientific methods and scientific knowledge which our definition
makes essential is to encourage a robust interest in things clearly
knowable and an attitude attentive and curious rather than dictatorial
and inquisitive. Social work being the lineal descendant of charity
has the family weaknesses and, perhaps even beyond its deserts, the
family reputation. But the one question for anyone willing to do it
justice is whether these weaknesses are characteristic of its present
phase or fading hang-overs from the charity undisciplined by science.
The records of past munificence with their evidence of interest in
giving as a means of grace for the giver, of indifference regarding the
supposed beneficiaries, of wholesale prescriptions of what is proper
for “the poor,” of breaking up of families, imposition of uniform
labor and total disregard of private claims must be either unknown
or forgotten by people who think a decay of neighborly respect and
an inclination to regiment the dependent have been produced by the
innovations of scientific social work.
So far we have been trying to get at and answer the rather vague
charges of those who think social work unworthily employed. Clearer
indictments are brought by the three groups who want us to turn from
the defeated and let them go under. The least extreme of these simply
points out that life unfolds in terms of alternatives and the time,
the skill, the substance and interest lavished by social work on the
incompetent might have given opportunity to baulked ability. Of course
incompetence and ability are relative matters and some forms of social
work could make out a case for themselves as engaged on the task these
critics would prefer, but it is easy to see the general bearing of
this criticism and by our definition social work is committed to the
very concern for the disadvantaged with which they charge it. But the
definition also stipulated for the use of scientific knowledge and
methods and once you have social work and social science playing into
one another’s hands you can answer even the baldest utilitarians on
their own grounds. The effort to help where help is most needed has
been to the social work of our definition a road to prevention of
abuses which affect competent and incompetent alike, a means to better
understanding and control of our social organization. In social as in
other forms of science the normal is often only to be understood after
observation of the abnormal. Moreover, the really imperative services
of social work are evidently forgotten by these critics as well as
by the second group who would say hands off to social work. These
imperative services can be indicated for both groups at once.
This second group are opposed to social work, not as a mere waste
of means which might be better employed, but as an actual menace.
They think it thwarts the action of the salutary principle of nature
by which the “fittest” survive their less “fit” brethren. The tacit
assumption behind this view is that if all social work were suspended
tomorrow, vigor and capacity would have pre-eminent survival value and
the unfit would be eliminated and the race purged of an undesirable
inheritance strain.
The race is to the swift and the battle to the strong, but in modern
life, even where there is no social work, the defeated are not forced
clear off the stage with any degree of promptitude. Complete dismissal
comes only by the arrow that flieth by noonday or the pestilence that
walketh in darkness and our modern versions of these strike the weak
and the strong in a ratio which it would be hard to compute. War and
industrial accidents take not the worst but the best and some of our
most destructive diseases take, fairly indiscriminately, any who are
exposed to them or their predisposing conditions. Meanwhile, what is
there to extinguish the unfit? Though in a sense defeated they continue
to live on and they leave progeny. Even without social work they
would not starve or freeze to death in numbers sufficient to have the
minutest effect upon the quality of the race.
The man of sub-normal intelligence, of bad nervous organization, of
specific defect even, can, in most modern communities keep alive by
his own efforts. He will drag on, abysmally incompetent, indolent,
badly behaved or ill. He may irregularly rent a shelter which other men
would refuse, he will inevitably do his little bit to demoralize the
labor market and the work he from time to time takes up and he may,
for one reason or another, go for awhile to prison. His demands on the
almshouse we will omit as it would probably in this connection count as
social work. He can do our work badly, put the cost of his keep on the
community if he goes to prison, make our pockets or our persons unsafe,
if he happens to be that way inclined, spread disease and even, for a
consideration, vote. What is to be gained by leaving this poor creature
to his own devices and the haphazard propagation of his species? From
a biological point of view, nothing at all, and his running amuck is
a nuisance and a menace. What could social work do? From a biological
point of view, also nothing. If indeed the man were so far defective
that it could confine him to an institution it might in that way
prevent his leaving a family but this simple precaution the biological
critics would probably arrange for through some other agency. But
social work might greatly limit his troublesomeness.
One can only conclude that those who advocate leaving the unfit to
their own destruction do not know, as social work knows, how slow that
destruction is going to be, how costly and troublesome to the community
in which it is taking place, how many people may be, first and last,
involved in it and, above all, how little likely it is to culminate
before the unfit man has left children to succeed him.
Such glaring cases of unfitness are however not typical of the
sort with which social work most often deals. More typical is such
mild cherishing of unfitness as the securing of eye-glasses for a
nearsighted child. Would it do any good to leave him without glasses,
unable to see the blackboard at school, considered a blockhead, unhappy
and defiant and growing up at odds with the world? He would be no whit
less likely to have a family of shortsighted children.
Since the relative security of civilized life allows the unfit, left to
their own devices, to live long enough to demoralize their community
and perpetuate their strain, a humane guardianship supplied by social
work, with an eye to prevention and all the possibilities of the social
situation, is simply the safeguarding of a group in which spontaneous
elimination has ceased to be sufficiently expeditious for the public
safety.
The last of those who would say “hands off” believe that the needs to
which social work at present ministers are chargeable to a few major
abuses in our economic system which could and would be removed by
swift revolutionary measures were it not for false hopes of gradual
reform--hopes which social work helps to keep alive. They think that if
the distress caused by “the present system” were left unrelieved people
would be shocked into summary abolition of the system. The chances of
concerted action on any such program are so infinitesimal that it is
difficult to regard such a proposal as anything but a mere “talking
point” of propaganda. The abuses of the “present system” are too
hideously great for us to risk any momentary discontinuance of their
relief without a very certain guarantee of the desired results.
And when it comes to that we can but remember that the blackest nights
of human oppression have not led to the brightest mornings of human
brotherhood, though there has been many a fine gesture of uprising.
What Mr. Wells remarks in his “Outline of History” apropos of the
results of the French Revolution seems to be true of any attempt to
emancipate life at a blow. “When these things of the ancient regime had
vanished, it seemed as if they had never mattered. * * * the immense
promise and air of a new world with which the Revolution had come
remained unfulfilled.
“Yet, after all, this wave of revolution had realized nearly everything
that had been clearly thought out before it. It was not failing for
want of impetus but for want of finished ideas. Many things that had
oppressed mankind were swept away forever. Now that they were swept
away it became apparent how unprepared men were for the creative
opportunities this clearance gave them. And periods of revolution are
periods of action; in them men reap the harvest of ideas that have
grown during phases of interlude, and they leave the fields cleared
for a season of new growth, but they cannot suddenly produce ripened
new ideas to meet an unanticipated riddle.”[69] Despite the years of
thinking that have elapsed since 1789, the Russian revolution finds
itself in the same case. The present party that has attempted its clean
sweep of previous organization is rich in coherence and intention but
not in organization and expedients.
Much of what social work is now doing is developing expedients of
social practice equally applicable and equally necessary under any
form of government. The question of whether social work as such
should occupy itself with the development of such expedients or
with revolutionary projects belongs not with the discussion of its
overdoing, but of its doing too little. The advocates of revolution say
“hands off” but they really despise social work for temporizing.
To those who charge it with temporizing, the third and last group of
its critics, social work listens very gravely. They touch it where
its conscience is tender. The first group, those who charge it with
unworthy patronage and intrusion do not touch its principle at all.
It knows better than any one else the sort of thing that may easily
be done in its name, knows that its recruits are unregenerate human
beings who will have to learn to put aside personal for scientific
curiosity and resist their enormous temptations to tyrannize. It knows
that the things for which that first group condemns it are things
which will always continue to menace it but things which, on the
whole, it is growing away from. The second group, those who charge it
with interfering with natural selection and wasting opportunity on
lame ducks do not shake its conviction. It knows perfectly well that
not social work but the abundance of mere food and shelter and the
ingrained sympathy or solidarity, or what you will, of civilized man
is what prevents the elimination of the unfit and that these unfit can
only be made innocuous and self-supporting by methods and arrangements
worked out by the intelligence of the especially fit.
But when this third group tell social work that it is not extending
benefits but in the long run delaying their extension, when they tell
it that there is a dragon “privilege” which can grow new heads of
offence faster than it can cut them off, when they say that social work
must be either utterly entangled in its own red tape or corrupted by
the flesh pots of Egypt not to see that it is simply compounding with
the mammon of unrighteousness to allow the continuance of privilege
and abuse, then indeed social work itself is troubled. It has known
all along that those are wrong who say it is a mistake to serve the
disadvantaged, but to be told that it--social work--is not serving
them, that is a very different matter. The charges are two, first that
it is selfish and pharisaical, and second that it is practically bought
for the defense of privilege. The first complain of
“The organized charity scrimped and iced
In the name of a cautious statistical Christ.”[70]
Social work is confessed by the definition, to be “cautious” and
“statistical.” Used in this opprobrious sense the words make a reproach
that could scarcely be more bitter, but who would want a doctor to pour
out without stint the strichnia needed by his patient’s heart? The
development of methods, standards and technique has been referred to
in these pages as matter only for congratulation. But obviously these
have their dangers like everything else. Our childish humanity has been
tempted, from the days of the medicine man on, rather to claim the
confidence of a gullible public by the impressiveness of its ceremonies
than arduously to achieve that confidence by the excellence of its
performance. The temptation to aim at an impression is especially
strong in the case of social work because it often does for people
the sort of things that friends are at the same time sporadically
attempting. When with every intention of producing efficiency social
work tries to establish “standards” it again has to risk the shift of
emphasis from the work to the technical measurement and the resulting
tendency to attempt what can be put through in good form instead of
what most needs to be done.
But the greatest resentment is probably not caused by these lapses,
which social workers themselves know better than outsiders. “Organized
charity” did not, as it is so easy for those who know only the present
to assume, originate suspicious scrutiny. Charity was “cautious” in
the sense of the bitter couplet long before the present organized
charity movement. The fierce old English poor law took no chances
on “impostors”[71] and the dread of them by the private charities
of the continent in the sixteenth century has already been referred
to in these pages. It is, of course, easy to see the necessity for
“investigation” when charity is on a large scale. But it is easier
to resent for oneself, or one’s friends, the mortification of being
suspect; and to many people “organized charity” has never meant
anything more than an attempt to prevent overlapping and imposture.
But in the scientific charity movement precaution soon sank into
insignificance beside the more positive purpose of learning enough
about a situation to tackle it intelligently. This is a trifle harder
to understand and even easier to resent. When we want help we usually
have a pretty definite notion of just what help we need, we are in a
touchy mood to begin with, and unless we are very nice people indeed
we resent any questioning of our preference. It is a matter of common
knowledge that those who do not appreciate the difficulty of the
doctor’s task and the time required for cures drift from one dispensary
to another and try physician after physician in search of one who will
treat their troubles as they think they should be treated and give
them the relief for which suffering dares not cease to hope. What
wonder if a yet greater dissatisfaction is felt with the deliberateness
of the social worker. And if, as we have said in the definition, he
is to proceed by “scientific” methods he must be as “cautious” and
“statistical” as the doctor.
But granting the need of caution in procedure it is shocking and
repellant, on the face of it, that this organized charity should make
the throbbing woes of a fellow creature the subject of dehumanized
records. It is bad enough that people should be required to strip
their predicament bare, exhibit all their helplessness and violate
reticence to expound whatever can “throw light on the situation”--but
why must it be recorded? But it is shocking enough to learn that
someone we care for is known as a certain sort of case in a hospital
and yet we have now so far appreciated medical exigencies as to accept
it as a necessity. In other matters also we may come to realize that
there is no impertinence in impersonal treatment for purposes of
serviceable classification, and for all classification the prerequisite
is records.
A final source of misunderstanding is the double nature of the social
worker’s task. Not only in relief work but in other lines as well he
is not free to do as he would, he cannot always command the means.
He can decide what he thinks would best be done but then he has to
consider what sort of approximation to that best the resources of his
association or community allow. The Webbs, in outlining a proposed
reorganization of the English relief system, say that “Nothing has
contributed so much to make the visits of the Poor Law Relieving
Officer odious as the _mixture_ of his inquiries--as to the sickness
of the person who is ill, or the lunacy of the person of unsound mind,
and at the same time, as to the means of the family and as to what
relations could be made to contribute.”[72] This stewardship for public
or contributed funds and for doing things quite irrelevant to any
intention of social work do more than anything else to make it seem
“scrimped.”
Social work, then, may take heart of grace. It is, once again, being
condemned chiefly on misunderstanding and for the rest on its mere
shortcomings. All human undertakings must expect that and try to amend
and carry on.
It may summon its courage and meet the last charge, the one that seems
to make it most uncomfortable, a charge that not only says it bails
the sea with a sieve and locks the door when the horse is out of the
stable, but goes farther and ascribes motives--“the social worker is
called an apologist for the status quo; he is called a little brother
of the rich; he is accused of taking tainted money;”[73]--and why?
Because social work continues in what its critics consider “remedial”
work instead of addressing itself to wholesale and summary prevention.
Whose fault is that? Let any one who blames it on social work turn to
the reports of the national conference. Let him turn to the “Survey.”
He will find no lack of interest in prevention. The fact is that social
work is paid for by voluntary subscriptions, philanthropic foundations,
and state appropriations. So far all these sources of support, the
potential representatives of the people in the legislature no less than
wealthy donors, are more accessible to an appeal for relief of existing
misery than to an appeal for the prevention of possible catastrophes.
This ties the hands of social work even in the simple matters in which
it might alone do more “preventive work.” But social work cannot alone,
in any but a secondary sense, prevent the situations it is called upon
to relieve. It works prevention as hard as it can and puts it up to
the community in plain terms, but the situations which, at our present
stage of progress, largely occupy its services could only be prevented
by a living wage and regular employment, work that would not poison or
exhaust the worker, sanitary and decent housing, clean milk, and so on
through the list of those simple requisites of a civilized life which
are now inaccessible to a large part of our population. Social work
cannot give employers the will or the ability to pay a living wage; it
cannot provide the masses with decent housing and unadulterated food
nor, all at once, with a corresponding standard and habit of living.
And if it should stop all it is doing now, in order to devote itself
to prevention, neglected children would grow up unhealthy and vicious,
the feeble-minded would multiply and every calamity of today become a
fruitful source of multiplied disaster tomorrow. One might as well ask
that all physicians cease treating from day to day the many diseases
that afflict us, the better to devote themselves to a wholesale
campaign of prevention. The social work of our definition has its own
specific work to do from day to day. It must, like medicine, care for
the handicapped in each generation and prevent the spread of contagion
while it uses the margin of its energies for prevention and progress.
Social work _as we have described it_, is not synonymous with
social reform. It has no more responsibility for reform on “general
principles” than has any other profession or calling. That it should
ever be thought to have is a tribute to its thoroughness and convincing
proof of its devotion to prevention.
We are told, as though to settle the case against social work, that
there are even social workers “who, while they may not say it publicly,
do not hesitate to say privately that they regard social work as a mere
“palliative,” and while they get their living from it, their real
hopes are pinned to the coming social revolution.”[74] The personal
immorality of anyone who would continue to get a living from a calling
he believed to be sailing under false colors is not our business, but,
if social work is what our definition says, there is no reason why
any social worker need hesitate to say, either privately or with all
the publicity he can command, that his hopes are pinned to the coming
social revolution, or to the effects of New Thought or the Seventh Day
Advent or anything else to which he may have happened, according to his
lights and temperament, to have pinned them.
Social work attempts to serve persons in need of help; it shepherds the
rear of the social procession; it cares for the casualties; it also
claims opportunity for the unprivileged and asserts the rights of the
individual lost in the mass. In so doing it finds itself effecting
progress in the many ways already discussed. They are usually indirect
ways. These critics assume that it could induce progress directly by an
attempt to bring about radical social changes that would do away with
the need for its services. They quote against it Tolstoy’s indictment
of our social system--“The present position we, the educated and
well-to-do classes, occupy is that of the Old Man of the Sea, riding on
the poor man’s back, only, unlike the Old Man of the Sea, we are sorry
for the poor man, very sorry. And we will do almost anything for the
poor man’s relief; we will not only supply him with food sufficient for
him to keep on his legs, but will provide him with cooling draughts
concocted on strictly scientific principles; we will teach and instruct
him and point out to him the beauties of the landscape; we will
discourse sweet music to him and give him lots of good advice. Yes we
will do almost anything for the poor man, anything but get off his
back.”[75]
Such a picture makes everyone unhappy to reflect on and in face of it
thoughtful social workers take stock of their position. But they can
only conclude that to accuse social work per se of insincerity and
temporizing, of clinging to a snug berth, because it does not attempt
to end this intolerable situation by revolution is to imagine it both
greater and less than it is. We have already seen that it is only a
calling like others with a day’s work of its own. Reforms merely free
it from old duties and open the gates to new ones and there is no
reason to suppose that changes the most radical would do away with the
need of it or the human impulse that perpetually recreates it. Whether
revolutionary methods would free us from present abuses and confront
us with a new set but, as it were, upon a higher level, is, of course
an open question and a relevant one. But it is a question of pure
expediency facing the social worker of each generation as it faces
anyone else and it in no way involves the integrity or the permanency
of the function of social work.
The alternatives in the interest of which social work is by these
critics condemned are the labor movement and social revolution. But
these are hardly genuine alternatives. Both of them have the allegiance
of people in many callings, but each provides a day’s work to a
comparatively small number of organizers and other workers. There is no
logical reason why a social worker should not be active in the service
of either or both and yet remain in his calling, as the bricklayer,
lawyer, or laborer may.
The labor movement and social revolution and social work are three
things of three entirely different kinds. The labor movement is a tide
in human affairs. It is the projection in practical issues of certain
interpretations and ideals of life. Social revolution is a cataclysmic
expedient for precipitating, in finished form, readjustments which
the labor movement and certain other influences tend gradually and
adaptively to effect. The one is a great movement now under way, the
other a vast enterprise or a vast dream. For them is spilt the martyr
blood that is the seed of every church militant. They throw down a
gauntlet; they raise a banner; they stir our hearts. But why not let
the social worker also plod on with a good conscience and a hope for
his labors.
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly.
But westward, look! the land is bright.[76]
Social work is a group of callings representing a certain function
of civilized society whatever form that society may take. Its nearest
analogy is educational work. Whatever form society may assume education
seems likely to retain the functions of rendering available the
experience and conclusions of the past and developing the capacities
of each generation as it comes on. Similarly we can ascribe to social
work, under whatever system of society it may be conducted, the
functions of completing inadequacy, extending benefits and rescuing
the individual from the category. In a community where no one was
poor or out of work, where abundance of pure food and decent housing
were available for all, where wholesome recreation was attainable
and attractive, and physical and mental hygiene as much a matter of
course as school attendance, the tasks of the social worker would not
be what they are now; they would be changed beyond our imagining.
But they might still be present. In some distant sunny noonday of a
healthy happy world it may even be possible that the supernormal will
need rescue from victimizing by the mass. Even today social work is
concerned for the superior child handicapped by a public school routine
that forces him to keep step with the average and the dull.
What is overlooked by those who fail to see this permanency in social
work is that it has a day’s work of its own. Since its object is
personal service, it tends to focus in the present and since that
personal service is primarily the relief of need, it is relative to the
standard of the times. “Radicalism is not an absolute but a relative
school of thought. It stands for the things that the government is not
ready to do. Hence it is that no government is really radical.”[77]
Social work is radical in the sense that it proffers services that have
not yet become duties. It is by the same token that it is also relative
and will, despite changes in social organization, continue to relieve
new needs, to extend new benefits and to rescue individuals from
newly-felt forms of regimentation.
That social work, as a calling, does not make itself tributary to any
one social philosophy casts no suspicion on its integrity. Nor is
it strange that the majority of social workers individually should
continue to hold, on the subject of revolution, the opinions of the
majority of their fellow citizens. That social workers should become
so much interested in their own methods of relief as to forget the
prime object of all their system, that they should become so devoted
to the success of particular undertakings as to be unobservant of
other and perhaps better attempts to relieve needs is a reproach to
the guilty persons but it no more touches the principles and functions
of social work than similar faults of practitioners in other lines
condition the presumptive functions of their respective callings. Were
this a discussion of social work in practice it would be necessary
to consider the degree to which its practitioners have realized its
possibilities. But a study of the nature and functions of social work
such as this purports to be would lose itself in confusion in any
attempt to determine precisely how far instances have run true to type.
The teaching offered by the schools and the interests reflected in the
National Conference prove beyond a doubt the direction of its main
stream.
The charge we have just been discussing is the last of the major
accusations commonly brought against social work, and the definition we
have been using has now been shown to describe a social work that can
meet its critics squarely and retain a claim to a function of its own
in social economy and a certain character and integrity.
It is one of those human activities which are pursued, as we say, for
their own sake. It can be justified on utilitarian grounds but the
justification never amounts to more than permission to follow our
inclination untroubled. Yet, unlike other such activities, unlike
recreation, art and learning, it does not reach out to life at its
happiest and most conscious, its fullest and finest, but seeks, “Rather
the scorned--the rejected--the men hemmed in by the spears.” Social
work lifts burdens, fills needs, extends benefits.
“Not the ruler for me, but the ranker, the tramp of the road,
The slave with the sack on his shoulder, pricked on with the goad,
The man with too weighty a burden, too weary a load.
* * * * *
Others may sing of the wine and the wealth and the mirth,
The portly presence of potentates goodly in girth;
Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of the earth.”[78]
Social work is interested in all people that need help and classifies
them according to their needs, with no ulterior interest. It tries to
serve them in their individual capacity as human beings with lives of
their own. It is always extending benefits in excess of any recognized
obligation. These we have heretofore said were the habits of charity,
using the word in a broad and primitive sense. When charity adopted a
scientific method and took to studying the social sciences for light on
its problems social work began. Although it has been necessary to refer
to charity often and at length in establishing the nature of social
work, it is not well to dwell on it in general discussion, because,
first, it has lately been applied only to the relief of poverty and
cannot be used in a wider sense without explanation and, secondly,
through centuries of association with an idea of meritorious liberality
towards persons inferior, it has acquired connotations which do not
belong to social work.
Social work as we now have it makes use of modern science. From the
social sciences it takes perspective, generalization and knowledge of
the complication of influences responsible for any given situation. By
statistical methods it relates cause and effect. The discovery of such
a relationship always emphasizes causes and in consequence social work
extends its protective function in the direction of prevention. By so
doing it becomes not only a minister to misery but also one of the
forces operating to make the world a better dwelling place for all of
its inhabitants.
Social work because it is tentative and experimental seems to be
imperfectly developed and still on trial. There is a temptation
to anticipate for it more certainty, more obvious consistency and
more clearly formulated purposes when it shall have become better
established. But any such anticipation fails to take account of its
wholly relative nature. Social work is always feeling its way beyond
clearly formulated obligations, ignoring imposed consistencies and
groping in unexplored regions where sure-footedness is not possible.
Social work will take many more forms and all of them will prove
temporary.
This makes social work hard to compare with the established professions
with the ministrations of which its services have many points in
common, with medicine for example. Although several sciences are
helpful to social work it specializes in the application of no one of
them. It is only in the very loosest sense applied sociology and might
with almost equal suggestiveness be called applied eugenics or social
psychology or any one of half a dozen other things. Conversely its
observations and experiences are valuable to a dozen arts and sciences
but build no science of their own. Nor does it build any systematically
cumulative body of principles exclusively for its own use, as does
the law. This is no disgrace to social work, which may be equally
respectable with the well established professions and yet quite _sui
generis_. But it operates in indirect ways as a handicap.
It is a familiar observation that any new science, any new departure
in human knowledge must use the vocabulary already available and so
can only receive its first formulation in terms of things that have
gone before. The failure of social work to produce any compact body of
doctrine pertaining to its range of undertakings has kept it long in
the stage of analogy and tutelage. It evidently feels a temptation to
shape itself after the fashion of the best respected types of human
activity instead of simply envisaging its own objects as clearly as
possible and enlisting every available means to attain them.
Its essential inability to develop any compact body of doctrine may
also be handicapping it in a more fundamental way. It is said that
social work does not get its proportionate share of the best students
taking professional training. May not this be because a course which
offers an acquaintance with the high lights of half a dozen subjects
and mastery of none is not likely to recommend itself to able students
as promising to lead to dignified and responsible work? Social work
can only hope that when more time and more ability have gone into the
development of its separate fields such discipline may be developed
along special lines as will give it better intellectual status and
the power to attract and hold recruits by something beside that
appeal to their imagination or their humanity exerted by its general
possibilities. “I treat philanthropy seriously,” wrote one of its
historians, “because of what it implies; its professors have commonly
not been very efficacious.”[79] But scientific social work is something
more than philanthropy and its history is yet to be made.
Whatever is in store for social work it is pre-ordained that its
functions can only persist by adaptive variation of its practices,
that it will never be perfected, never be satisfied, never even, in
any final and completed sense, successful. Its object is to correct
the mistakes of nature and man in the making of human lives and its
undertakings grow with our hopes for life. Such presumption can never
succeed, but its mere instalments of success would be triumphs in a
lesser enterprise. For social work each new triumph opens only a new
range of possibilities. It might well take as its motto the proud words
of Masefield, “Success is the brand on the forehead for having aimed
too low.”[80]
FOOTNOTES:
[61] Philanthropy and the State, p. 303.
[62] John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, p. 577.
[63] Ibid., p. 575.
[64] William McDougal, An Introduction to Social Psychology, p. 14, et
seq.
[65] Porter R. Lee, at the National Conference of Social Work, 1920, p.
468.
[66] Charities Review, 1898, p. 9.
[67] Hamlet, Act III, Sc. 2, line 379.
[68] Emil Muensterberg, Impressions of American Charity, in Charity and
the Commons, 1907, p. 268.
[69] H. G. Wells, The Outline of History, Vol. II, p. 339.
[70] John Boyle O’Reilly, In Bohemia, quoted in The Cry for Justice, p.
497.
[71] S. A. Queen, Social Work in the Light of History, Chap. II.
[72] Sidney and Beatrice Webb, The Prevention of Destitution, p. 281.
[73] Arthur J. Todd, at the National Conference, 1920, p. 271.
[74] Charles A. Ellwood, at the National Conference, 1920, p. 271.
[75] Count Leo Tolstoy, quoted in The Cry for Justice, p. 88.
[76] Arthur Hugh Clough, “Say not the struggle nought availeth,” in
Poems.
[77] Frank Parsons, Legal Doctrine and Social Progress, p. 212.
[78] John Masefield, A Consecration, in Poems.
[79] Philanthropy and the State, p. 20.
[80] John Masefield, Multitude and Solitude.
APPENDIX I
=Edward T. Devine in “Social Work”= says (p. 21): “Social work, then
is the sum of all the efforts made by society to ‘take up its own
slack’ to provide for individuals when its established institutions
fail them, to supplement those established institutions and to
modify them at those points at which they have proved to be badly
adapted to social needs. * * * It may be well done or badly done;
according to the most enlightened system which intelligence and
experience and sympathy and vision can devise or according to the
archaic methods of careless and lazy emotion. * * * It includes
everything which is done by society for the benefit of those who
are not in position to compete on fair terms with their fellows
from whatever motive it may be done, by whatever agency or whatever
means and with whatever results.”
=Edward T. Devine and Lilian Brant in “American Social Work in the
Twentieth Century”= say (the first words of the book): “In the
United States of America ‘social work’ has come into use in recent
years as a comprehensive term, including charity and philanthropy,
public relief, punishment and reformation and all other conscious
efforts, whether by the state or on private initiative, to provide
for the dependent, the sick, and the criminal, to diminish the
amount of poverty, disease, and crime, and to improve general
living and working conditions.”
These statements obviously are not trying to distinguish between
“social work” and the more primitive forms of “charity” and
“philanthropy.”
The pamphlet “=Social Work=,” issued by the American Association
of Social Workers in 1922 disclaims any intention “to give an
authoritative definition of these terms (i.e., charity,
philanthropy, and social service) or of ‘social work,’” but it
does authoritatively indicate that “social work as a profession”
may have occasion to differentiate itself from charity and
philanthropy (pp. 3 and 4). “In discussing social work as a
profession it is necessary to clarify certain conceptions which are
popularly confused with it. As is the case with any activity that
has emerged into professional status and differentiated itself from
the kind of activity in which any one of ordinary intelligence
might participate, social work must live down a variety of names
and conceptions which were common to it in its early and
unprofessional forms.” “So we come to the term ‘social work’ for
a connotation which at least has implicit implications of a process
requiring specialized knowledge and skill sufficient to be called
professional.” “It is well also to point out here that emphasis
must be placed on ‘process’ as an aid to keeping in mind the fact
that not what is done, but how it is done, is what constitutes the
test of professional activity.”
=“Education for Social Work,” by Jesse Frederick Steiner= (University
of Chicago Press, 1921) gives, as its first chapter, a five-page
statement of “The Nature of Social Work” which does not lend itself
to quotation otherwise than _in toto_. It reports about the same
conclusions as this thesis, which was prepared before Mr. Steiner’s
study.
=Porter R. Lee= speaking to the National Conference of Social Work
in 1915 (see Report p. 597) described three conceptions of the
social worker. First, “Any person is a social worker if his work
has conscious social purpose, although his vocation may be any one
of the historic forms of human activity. The second conception
includes as social workers those who are engaged in so-called
preventive work, that is to say, those whose efforts are directed
towards social legislation, toward the development of the social
point of view in the general public and toward readjustments in
social institutions and social habits. * * * social work in this
sense is not concerned with those who are disabled by adverse
conditions of life but with the adverse conditions. The third
conception of the social worker on the other hand identifies him
primarily with efforts on behalf of the subnormal. To one holding
this conception the social worker is one who endeavors through case
work to reestablish disabled families and individuals in a routine
of normal life. This does not preclude interest in social
legislation and other forms of preventive work, but these are not
the first task of the social worker. When social work as a generic
term first came into general use leaders in the work for dependent
families, neglected children, the defective, the delinquent and the
destitute sick comprised almost the entire group to which it was
applied.” In the 1920 Conference (see Report p. 466) Mr. Lee said:
“The subject matter of social work is the adjustment of men to
their environment. * * * The necessity for social work arises
because of the difficulties faced by men in making this adjustment.
These difficulties are sometimes in the man and sometimes in the
environment. Some factors in the environment bear too heavily upon
all men, some bear too heavily upon a smaller number. * * * A large
part of social work is conducted with the purpose of softening the
effect of environmental factors which bear with undue severity upon
all men. Another large part of social work aims at the development
of greater resourcefulness in all men in meeting environmental
demands. The greater part of social work, however, is at present
devoted to the development of a higher adjusting power in those
persons who are most handicapped by environment or a modification
of those particular environmental factors which handicap them.”
=Miss Mary E. Richmond in “What is Social Case Work?”= (Russell Sage
Foundation, N.Y., 1922) breaks up what Mr. Lee calls “preventive
work” into three parts (pp. 223, 224). “The other forms of social
work all of which interplay with case work, are three--group work,
social reform, and social research. Case work seeks to effect
better social relations by dealing with individuals one by one or
within the intimate group of the family. But social work also
achieves the same general ends in these other ways. It includes a
wide variety of group activities--settlement work, recreational
work, club, neighborhood and local community work--in which the
individual, though still met face to face, becomes one of a number.
By a method different from that employed in either case or group
work, though with the same end in view, social reform seeks to
improve conditions in the mass, chiefly through social propaganda
and social legislation. Whether the immediate object be better
housing, better working conditions, better use of leisure, or a
long list of other objectives, the main purpose in these different
social reforms still is to advance the development of our human
kind by improving social relations. Finally, social research with
its precious freight of original discovery in all the fields
covered by social work, has also the secondary task of assembling
known facts in order to reinterpret them for use in social reform,
in group work and in case work.”
A fair amount of searching has failed to reveal many statements which
do as much as the above toward defining social work in succinct
and specific terms. One finds instead descriptions which, while
satisfactory enough for the purposes for which each was intended,
ascribe to it no really distinctive character but rather present it
in generalizations equally true of other disinterested undertakings,
or by making it synonymous with applied sociology or applied religion
simply throw the burden of definition onto those other terms leaving
the matter as indefinite as before.
APPENDIX II
A
A list of the schools belonging (in 1921) to the “Association of
Training Schools for Professional Social Workers,” organized 1919,
President. Prof. J. E. Cutler, Western Reserve University.
Boston School of Social Work, Boston.
Carola Woerishoffer Graduate Department of Social Economy and Social
Research, Bryn Mawr College.
College of Commerce and Journalism, Ohio State University.
Department of Social Work, Carnegie Institute of Technology.
Department of Social Work, University of Toronto.
Missouri School of Social Economy, St. Louis (part of the University
of Missouri).
New York School of Social Work, New York.
Pennsylvania School of Social and Health Work, Philadelphia.
Philanthropic Service Division, School of Commerce and Administration,
University of Chicago.
School of Applied Social Science, Western Reserve University.
School of Public Welfare, University of North Carolina.
School of Social Work and Public Health, Richmond, Va.
Smith College Training School for Social Work, Smith College.
Training Course in Civics and Social Work, University of Pittsburgh.
Training Course for Social and Civic Work, University of Minnesota.
B
The number of schools which make a separate department of each of the
seventeen subjects referred to in the text (not the number of courses
in these subjects) is as follows. The list is somewhat misleading in
appearance as it gives prominence to the subjects most often treated
_separately_ rather than to those most often or most fully treated. As
a matter of fact separate treatment sometimes means the somewhat casual
addition of a subject after the central interests of the program have
been pretty well integrated.
Industrial work, including industrial supervision and
employment; personnel work, service departments and nursing 10
Community work or service, or organization 9
Medical social work 8
Child welfare 8
Social research and investigation 7
Social case work, social relief and social guardianship 5
Family welfare work 5
Mental hygiene and psychiatric social work 5
Community organization and recreation, physical education and
recreation 4
Penology or delinquency or criminality 4
Settlement work, educational and vocational guidance.
Public health work 2
C
A list of forty subjects taught in the training schools as preparation
for work in specific fields. The figures accompanying the following
list of subjects do not indicate the number of courses in the subject
but the number of schools in which the subject is taught.
Public health 12
Psychiatric social work 7
Mental testing 6
Medical social work 6
Abnormal psychology 4
Personal hygiene and first aid 1
Social hygiene 1
Community organization 13
Recreation and special means of recreation 10
Municipal problems 7
Rural social problems 5
Municipal government 2
Neighborhood work 1
Community art 1
Case work 13
Family welfare 4
Industry 14
Child welfare 10
Vocational guidance 2
Education 2
Immigration 6
Race problems 6
Social legislation 6
Elements or special features of law 4
Dependents, defectives and delinquents 4
Penology or criminology 4
Probation 1
Organization and administration of various sorts 8
Political science 2
Social and political philosophy 2
Socialism and social reform 1
The social institution of religion 1
Food and diet 4
Home economics 2
Housing 4
Record keeping and methods of presentation 4
Biology 2
Standard of living, etc. 1
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* * * * *
Transcriber’s note
Minor punctuation errors have been changed and standardized without
notice. The following Printer errors have been changed:
=CHANGED= =FROM= =TO=
Page 8: “their dependants” “their dependents”
Page 9: “eleomosynary purpose” “eleemosynary purpose”
Page 9: “School of _Philanthrophy_” “School of _Philanthropy_”
Page 10: “milleniums of Christianity” “millenniums of Christianity”
Page 12: “examine the public attittude” “examine the public attitude”
Page 14: “found to differ form” “found to differ from”
Page 19: “practicaly all departments” “practically all departments”
Page 19: “the ruin of adolescense” “the ruin of adolescence”
Page 21: “worker has reponsibilities” “worker has responsibilities”
Page 23: “his reptuation and honor” “his reputation and honor”
Page 25: “individually unpredicable” “individually unpredictable”
Page 36: “recognizes an interpendence” “recognizes an
interdependence”
Page 47: “should direct and stimluate” “should direct and stimulate”
Page 50: “can develope in” “can develop in”
Page 50: “which developes only” “which develops only”
Page 53: “of sweeping judgements” “of sweeping judgments”
Page 57: “sheer dependance” “sheer dependence”
Page 57: “form of dependance” “form of dependence”
Page 59: “degree of interdependance” “degree of interdependence”
Page 59: “inclinations corrollary” “inclinations corollary”
Page 63: “dependant have been” “dependent have been”
Page 65: “flieth by noon-day” “flieth by noonday”
Page 70: “caution in proceedure” “caution in procedure”
Page 74: “Tolstoi’s indictment” “Tolstoy’s indictment”
Page 75: “with a good con-conscience” “with a good conscience”
Page 80: “not this be becasue” “not this be because”
Page 89: “Historie de la Charité” “Histoire de la Charité”
Page 89: “fils. Paris” “Fils. Paris”
All other inconsistencies are as in the original.