Public Assistance and Social Welfare

Child Saving
As the nineteenth century came to a close, scientific charity and family break up were believed to have failed miserably. By the turn of the century, most public and private relief agencies and organizations had come to believe that institutions were bad for children, who should instead be placed as soon as possible in foster homes. As a result of the child-saving movement, government gained unprecedented powers to intervene in and regulate relations between parents and their children. Nonetheless, despite the augmented role of the government, almost no one defended the disruption of families anymore. Instead, the preservation of the family was invoked by almost every commentator on family issues, and in 1909, resolutions embodying these principles were adopted unanimously by the delegates to the first White House Conference on Children.1

New concepts of childhood underpinned the fragile consensus on social policy. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the influence of Darwinism and evolutionary biology reshaped the way in which informed people thought about childhood. Instead of viewing children as miniature adults, childhood became understood as a distinct phase in the life course. In addition, children were becoming less valued economically during the early 20th century--less as contributors to family income. Children became seen as "priceless"--invested with religious, social, and sentimental meaning. One explanation the historian Michael Katz offers, is the increasing concern among middle-class families during this time period that family stability was disintegrating because of increasing divorce rates, participation of women in the workforce, participation of more women in higher education, and the influx of large numbers of southern and Eastern European immigrants. Katz writes, "Some way had to be found to shore up families, promote the value of children, and civilize the new immigrants. For many reformers, reeling from the failure of scientific charity, poorhouses and prisons, the temperance movement, or evangelical Protestantism to reshape adult character and reduce the great moral and social problems of the age, the child became the agent herself, whose role flipped from victim to redeemer."2

Institutions offended advocates of the priceless child. They shuddered at the fate of precious children denied a home and worried about the impact of early institutionalization on their adult lives. According to Katz, most critics of institutions made the same points: "the regimented monotony of institutional life dulled children's personalities and destroyed their capacity for independence; institutionalized children, unable to make a gradual transition from dependence to independence, were hurled abruptly and without preparation into the world; once on their own, ex-inmates know nothing of money or worldly skills acquired by most children only result from policies that respected the unique personality and circumstances of every individual." Institutions had failed because they applied uniform standards to individual cases.3

By the early 1890s, child-saving strategies had changed radically. Not only did most reformers reject large institutions and advocate placing children with foster parents, they also rejected the notion that children should be taken from their families simply on account of poverty. In fact, in 1909, the preservation of families ranked first among the recommendations of the White House Conference on Children. This emphasis on family preservation reflected a major shift in reform thought. Recall that only a couple of decades earlier, the same sorts of people advocated family breakup not just when parents drank, stole, or seemed otherwise immoral and neglectful but, even more, when they were so poor that they had to ask for relief. Extreme poverty itself, many of the leading authorities of the time had argued, was reason enough to break up a family; Within less than two decades, family breakup had virtually disappeared as the strategy of first resort.4

If children were to remain with their parents, then someone would have to support poor families. Once family breakup was rejected, the campaign against outdoor relief, which already had run out of steam, was doomed. Some sort of mother's pensions had to follow. More than strategy, family preservation became the mainspring of child-saving activity in the Progressive era. Most advocates at the time were not very precise about their reasons. They simply asserted that families were the natural setting for childhood, that no foster parent could replace a natural parent, and that the family was the fundamental unit of social organization. Recent developments in child psychology, the newly sentimentalized ideal of the economically useless child, and the fear of family disintegration, played an important role in the new strategy of family preservation.5

By the 1930s and the onset of the Great Depression, family preservation had long eclipsed family breakup as a strategy for redeeming both destitute families and their children. The advent of large-scale, systematic public assistance in the form of Home Relief and later the New Deal seem on some level to have incorporated the philosophy of family preservation into relief programs. Families like the Baldizzi's were able and encouraged to stay together as Home Relief sought to adequately address the basic needs of the entire family, not just its working members. According to the guidelines established by the State of New York under the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration, children as well as their parents were to receive proper, nutritional food; durable clothing; and fuel to heat the home. Indeed, by adequately providing for the needs of this family, programs such as Home Relief intended to keep families together, rather than tear them apart.6