The Altruistic Imagination: A History of Social Work and Social Policy in the United States

By John Ehrenreich

Social work and social policy in the United States have always had a complex and troubled relationship. In The Altruistic Imagination, John H. Ehrenreich offers a critical interpretation of their intertwined histories, seeking to understand the problems that face these two vital institutions in American society.

Ehrenreich demonstrates that the emphasis of social work has always vacillated between individual treatment and social reform. Tracing this ever-changing focus from the Progressive Era, through the development of the welfare state, the New Deal, and the affluent 1950s and 1960s, into the administration of Ronald Reagan, he places the evolution of social work in the context of political, cultural, and ideological trends, noting the paradoxes inherent in the attempt to provide essential services and reflect at the same time the intentions of the state. He concludes by examining the turning point faced by the social work profession in the 1980s, indicated by a return to casework and a withdrawal from social policy concerns.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Jun 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9780801471223

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Preface

Social policy and social work are central to the functioning of modern American society. Merely to list the concerns of social policy is to underscore its importance: poverty, economic insecurity, and their consequences; inequality and discrimination (by race and sex but also by age, physical handicap, and other conditions); education, both in the broad sense of socialization of the young into the dominant social values and in the narrower sense of transmission of specific ideas, skills, and facts; deviance, ranging from crime and delinquency to individual mental illness, maladjustment, difficulty in coping with stress; health and health care; family structure, norms of behavior within the family, and sexual mores; and more.

Social work’s importance, most obviously, is as the occupation that administers or delivers many of these services or policies. But such a formulation minimizes the significance of social work. Social work serves as a key mediator between virtually all other professions and their clients and between a wide variety of bureaucratic institutions and the people they serve. It is a major transmitter of ideology, with respect to such concerns as child rearing, sexual behavior, and deviance. As mediators, humanizers, administrators, advocates, watchdogs, and therapists, social workers intrude into the central life concerns of all social classes.

Social work and social policy are, of course, intimately associated. To mention Jane Addams is to evoke the social reforms of the Progressive Era; to name Harry Hopkins is to enter upon a discussion of the New Deal and the creation of the modern welfare state. Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, whatever its impact on the poor, was virtually a jobs program for social workers; and a large fraction of contemporary social work jobs are directly or indirectly created, or financed, by government action.

But the relation between social work and social policy is neither clear nor untroubled. In the early years of this century, prominent caseworkers such as Mary Richmond and prominent social reformers such as Simon Patten debated the relative merits of what Richmond called the retail and wholesale methods of social reform (i.e., casework and social policy).¹ In the thirties, with millions out of work and the demand for massive governmental relief policies growing, Miriam Van Waters, president of the National Conference of Social Work, wrote: A program cannot make men moral, religious, or happy. The springs of action are in the internal nature of man. Hence the uselessness of programs, especially those that depend upon state action or force.² And in 1978, George Gilder, the guru of Reaganite social and economic policy, wrote: To get a grip on the problems of poverty, one should also forget the idea of overcoming inequality by redistribution…. The only dependable route from poverty is always work, family, and faith.³ Again and again the tension between social policy and social work, between social reform and individual change, between explaining human misery in terms of the social environment and explaining it in terms of individual character flaws, has reappeared.

Browsing in almost any recent issue of the major social work and social policy journals reveals some contemporary forms of this tension. From the perspective of the social worker, for instance, consider the editorial, written by Anne Minahan, in the May 1980 issue of Social Work, the journal of the National Association of Social Workers.⁴ Minahan asks, What is clinical work when it is performed by a clinical social worker? To some social workers, the answer to that question may be obvious, and its relevance to broader issues of social policy may seem nonexistent. But Minahan herself goes on to note that there are practically as many answers to her question as there are clinical social workers. Raising a series of issues on which she sees clinical social workers as sharply divided, Minahan asks: Is the environment merely a backdrop or stage set that affects individual emotions, cognition, and behavior, and thus should be understood by the social worker but not viewed as a legitimate target for change?…Should the social worker always focus on unconscious drives and fantasies of the client? [Or] should a social worker focus on the conscious coping behavior of people and their aspirations and life choices? In partial answer to her own questions, Minahan lists a number of environmental concerns impinging on the individual that make a simple, individual-change-oriented response untenable: inflation, reduction in spending for social programs, unemployment of youth, huge service bureaucracies, energy crises, high interest, loss of money for the aged and people on public assistance, anxiety about the draft, fear of war, and uncertainty about the future. All this, I might add, was what Minahan suggested clinical social workers had to worry about in their work with individual clients eight months before Ronald Reagan took office.

In another article in the same issue of Social Work, Eda Goldstein raises what appears superficially to be a very different question.⁵ What, Goldstein asks, is the knowledge base of clinical social work? But she quickly acknowledges:

Historically the social work profession has reflected a dual commitment. Efforts have on one hand been directed toward enhancing the functioning of individuals and on the other have been focused on promoting a better society and environments that are more responsive to human needs…. The behavioral sciences in general, psychodynamic theories in particular, and strategies for individual change constituted one pole, while the social sciences, theories of social change, and strategies for social action represented the second. A worker’s familiarity with one knowledge base signaled ignorance of the relevant facts and theories of the other.

Quoting social work administrator Max Silverstein, she suggests that this tension can be resolved by understanding that the locus of social work practice is neither in the ‘inner psychological’ nor in the ‘outer reality’ but in the crucial life space where inner and outer confront each other.

This book is concerned with the struggle of social workers and social policy planners to locate that space where inner and outer confront each other. How have social workers and social policy makers understood (or not understood) that space, and why? What constitutes the conflicts and linkages between inner psychological space and outer social reality, between the historic domains of casework and those of social policy? Why have the various approaches to this problem created so much controversy, generated such unbridgeable gaps within social work and between caseworkers and policy planners? Why has it been so hard to find middle positions, to design social programs or modes of individual intervention that speak to that point of inner and outer confrontation?

My starting point is in the observation that this problem is as old as social work and social policy themselves. The history of social work and of social policy is one long account of pendulum swings between the two poles—between a focus on individual treatment and a focus on social reform. Very crudely, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the 1920s, the 1940s and 1950s, and the present time, the more individual orientation has predominated (and along with it, despair as to the possibility of reform and disdain for social action). Conversely, in the years before World War I, the 1930s, and the 1960s, community action and social reform dominated the attention of social workers and planners, and casework fell into a degree of disrepute.

This sequence of alternation has several major implications for our understanding of social work and social policy. First, clearly, there is no one right answer. One generation’s certainty has been the next generation’s foolishness and blindness. And in the following generation, positions again reverse. The question we must ask, then, is not Which position is right? but rather Why does each position appear so persuasive at different historical moments?

Second, the alternation between dominant perspectives suggests that the problem of the relationship between individual and social-environmental etiologies and solutions is not simply an objectively existing problem, out there in the world for social analysts to ponder and investigate. Rather, I would suggest that the conflict is built into the nature of social policy and social work practice; it is built into the act of trying to change individual or social realities rather than into the structure of reality itself. The clinician, focusing on the individual, is forced to identify real-world problems that are causally related to the client’s intrapsychic problems, problems that must be solved to effect change in the individual. Conversely, the most optimistic policy maker and reformer is quickly forced to confront the difficulties and complexities of mobilizing people for change—even for changes that, viewed objectively, are in their own individual best interests. And so even the practitioner most oriented to change is forced to recognize the need for social reform, and the most energetic activist or policy planner is forced to deal with individuals, the imperfect human material on which reforms rest. The oscillations in social work attitudes that create the individual-change-social-change pendulum can be analyzed only in terms of this practical tension.

Third, the crude timetable suggested earlier for the alternation of positions parallels, of course, broader political, social, and ideological currents. The Progressive Era, the 1930s, and the 1960s were all periods of massive social unrest, in which broad-based movements for social change accelerated large-scale expansions of the role of government. Conversely, the interim periods have been characterized by the repression and decline of social movements, retreat into political apathy and acquiescence, and, to a degree, the rolling back of earlier reforms. The history of social work and social policy is in a sense overdetermined. We can explain its oscillations within a framework of a history of social work and social policy alone, but at the same time, we can explain them as nothing more than one reflection of a larger history. And still again, the larger history, in significant measure, was influenced by the development of social work and social policy.

Bertha Reynolds, associate director of the Smith College School for Social Work in the late twenties and thirties, a leading psychiatric social worker of the period but also a radical political activist, wrote: The philosophy of social work cannot be separated from the prevailing philosophy of a nation, as to how it values people and what importance it sets upon their welfare…. Practice is always shaped by the needs of the times, the problems they present, the fears they generate, the solutions that appeal, and the knowledge and skill available.⁶ I would suggest that it is the character of social work and social policy—endeavors focused on the intersection between the individual and the social, and constantly pulled between these two poles—that makes them sensitive to the broader social currents.

In the following chapters the history of social policy and social work is organized more or less chronologically, but threaded through the chronological account are a series of continuing themes.

First, social work and social policy function within a specific political, social, and cultural context. Their history has been shaped by three interacting variables: the rise and fall of massive social movements, creating fluctuating pressures for social reform; the ongoing concern of social workers to enhance their professional status and power in the face of changing economic, political, and institutional circumstances; and finally, the changing needs of American business to rationalize and regulate its markets, work force, and political environment.

Second, the nature of social reform bears investigation. Throughout its history, social reform has had multiple motives. Ostensibly aimed at the amelioration of social need, it has often served the needs of businesses and professional groups more effectively than it has those groups for whom it was supposedly designed. True, amelioration has been granted, but grudgingly and only under intense pressure.

Third, social work, too, has had multiple faces. Engaged in providing desperately needed services to individuals, families, groups, and communities, social workers are, at the same time, agents of social control. This dual role intrudes into the most intimate recesses of the social worker-client relationship, itself a close alliance threatened with tensions and confounded by class, race, ethnic, and gender issues.

Fourth, social work, perhaps more than any other major profession, has been obsessed with professional status. What, it has asked, is the appropriate knowledge base for professional social workers? What is the proper division of labor and authority among social work, psychiatry, psychology, and other helping professions? What are the proper boundaries between social worker and client? How can social work increase its prestige and its material conditions of work? Behind these questions lurk more basic issues about the nature of professions in modern industrial societies.

Fifth, the relationship between individual change and social change demands attention. Social workers and social reformers have at different times embraced different theories. Some have focused on the deviant individual, others on the defective culture (for example, the culture of poverty), and yet others on the larger economic, political, and social structure, the social environment. Correspondingly, some have focused their energies on changing individuals, others on changing society. Only rarely have social workers and social reformers thought systematically about the relation between the two forms of change.

Finally, although the orientation of this book is historical, its ultimate aim is to illuminate the central issues facing social work and social policy today. In the mid-eighties, both social work and social policy appear to be at a crossroads in their history. Social work appears less unified as a profession, less certain of its direction than at any time since the 1920s. The social policy initiatives of the last half century face a vigorous and, for the moment at least, successful counterattack; the traditional forces for reform are in disarray. American political coalitions are in flux; the international economy is in crisis; and personal and cultural norms and behaviors are in transition.

Thirty years ago, in the early days of McCarthyism, Bertha Reynolds wrote that social workers were faced with a choice between contradictory forces in our society: those which are moving toward the welfare of the people, as the people’s own concern and responsibility, and those which destroy human life in preventable misery and war, and relieve poverty only grudgingly to keep the privileged position they hold.⁷

Her words continue to resonate.

This book grew out of a course in the history of American social work and social policy which I have taught at the Smith College School for Social Work since 1980. To my students in that course I owe an enormous debt. They have inspired, encouraged, criticized, probed, and contributed their own rich experience. Thanks also are due Cathy Riessman (who brought me to Smith in the first place) and Margaret Cerullo, both of whom provided insightful feedback on the lectures in the course, and Jill Kerr Conway, who delivered a regular and insightful guest lecture in the course.

I also have incurred a number of specific intellectual debts. The history of American social policy and of social work cannot be understood outside the context of the social forces and movements for social justice that have shaped modern American history. My understanding of those forces and movements has been heavily influenced by my colleagues in the American Studies Program at the College at Old Westbury (New York). I am especially grateful to my fellow teachers in the team-taught American history course The American People: over the years these have included Ros Baxan-dall, Liz Ewen, Eddy Gouraige, Paul Lauter, John McDermott, Naomi Rosenthal, Laura Schwartz, Elaine Scott, and Steve Talbot. Laura Schwartz and my father, Joseph Ehrenreich, read chapters and provided useful substantive and editorial advice.

Much of the central thesis of Chapter 1, on the Progressive Era, was worked out several years ago in collaboration with Barbara Ehrenreich, who has kindly permitted me to reprint, in somewhat modified form, portions of our joint work. For my understanding of the mental hygiene movement of the teens and twenties, I am indebted to Christine Shea’s masterful doctoral dissertation, The Ideology of Mental Health and the Emergence of the Therapeutic Liberal State, and to a number of valuable discussions with her about it. I have also been heavily influenced by the ideas of Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven on social movements and the function of the welfare system.

Karen Kuester Rossler and Melanie Fletcher-Howell expertly typed the manuscript.

In writing a book, one also incurs debts that are less easily specified. To my parents, Joseph Ehrenreich and the late Freda Ehrenreich, and to their extraordinary, close, and enduring circle of teacher and social worker friends, I owe the understanding, far deeper than I could have obtained from intellectual effort alone, that a passion for social justice and involvement in social action can coexist with and inform human service work directed at individuals. I owe them an intellectual, emotional, and moral debt too deep and complex to express in words.

My children, Rosa and Benjy Ehrenreich, were patient, good-humored, and encouraging, despite my frequent immersion in the pains and hassles of producing a book. I owe them thanks, as well, for keeping before me a vivid and personal vision of the kind of just and humane society that I dream of for them, a society that social work at its best has dared to advocate.

Finally, Sharon McQuaide read and reread every chapter, offering me a wealth of insights as well as editorial comments. She has provided a model of a humane, socially informed social work practice. More personally, her steadfast enthusiasm and support and love made it possible for me to write this book.

JOHN H. EHRENREICH

Northampton, Massachusetts

1

The Origins of American Social Policy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For those who had work, conditions were harsh. The twelve-hour day remained common; holidays were few, and vacations for blue-collar workers were almost nonexistent. American industry was among the world’s most dangerous. On-the-job accidents killed 25,000 workers each year, and 700,000 were disabled, unable to work for four or more weeks. In 1901 alone, one of every 137 engineers, conductors, brakemen, and trainmen on American railroads was killed, along with one