Civil War Aftermath to Scientific Charity

1
Civil War Aftermath to Scientific Charity
2

• Post-war destitution in north and south
• States appropriated funds to help disabled
  soldiers, widows and orphans
• Feds provided funds for veterans and families
  (even elderly)

3
U.S. Sanitary Commission

• Positive result of war
• First national public health group (private)
• Laid groundwork for state boards of health and
  national efforts in public health

4
Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands

• Freedmans Bureau 1865-1872
• General Oliver O. Howard was director
• Rations, jobs, contracts, leasing lands, health
  care, helped found schools, legal agency
• No permanent impact on federal involvement in
  social welfare

5
Conditions of African Americans

• Segregation became the norm
• Rise of Black Codes (prohibitions on types of
  work, living in towns and cities, voting, bearing
  arms)
• End of Reconstruction occupation 1877
• Sharecropping emerged as dominant economic form
  (debt bondage)
• Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

6
Public Social Welfare

• Institutions multiplied
• Coordination through state boards of charities
• Herbert Spencer and social Darwinism
• Public relief an opportunity for graft and
  corruption
• Private help developed altruism and bonded rich
  to poor

7
Rise of Private Agencies in Cities

• Public outdoor relief abandoned
• Embarrassing number of private agencies in large
  cities, especially during depression of 1870s
• 1877 first Charity Organization Society
  (Buffalo)
• 138 had emerged by 1900

8
Charity Organization Society

• Eliminate fraud, inefficiency and duplication of
  effort (scientific)
• Friendly visitors (mainly) as friends and
  supporters of poor to improve morals
• Lower class will not exert itself if given aid
• Investigation of claims for help

9
What the visitors found

• Poverty associated with ill health, premature
  death, low wages, involuntary unemployment and
  other structural factors
• Investigations provided rich data on causes of
  poverty
• Poverty 1904 Poverty was bred of miserable and
  unjust social conditions.

10
Devine (NYC COS)1907

• We may quite safely throw overboard, once and
  for all, the idea that the dependent poor are our
  moral inferiors, that there is any necessary
  connection between wealth and virtue, or between
  poverty and guilt.

11
Casework

• Profession of social work had its origins in
  casework
• Paid workers shifted to those in the field
• Volunteers worked behind the scenes on boards and
  in offices
• Private charities involved in training workers
  and seeking social reform