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Just Poor Enough: Gilded Age Charity Applicants Respond to Charity Investigators1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2011

Brent Ruswick
Brent Ruswick*
Affiliation:
University of Central Arkansas
*
bjruswick@gmail.com
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Abstract

This article examines the strategies used by charity applicants of the 1880s to present themselves in ways most likely to win relief from the Indianapolis Charity Organization Society (COS), while also preserving autonomy from an organization willing to use threats of starvation or institutionalization to force compliance from the poor. Investigators treated charity applicants as objects to be scientifically observed and categorized and then molded to conform to middle-class mores, but the applicants’ responses ranged from accommodation to complete defiance. Successful applications to the COS ultimately depended more on the vagaries of the investigator than on the strategies chosen by the applicant. Those applications often led to decisions that illustrate the draconian, punitive tendencies suggested by the leading theoretical treatises in the scientific charity movement. However, they also reveal instances where charity applicants guided investigators toward more generous decisions.

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Type
Essays
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , July 2011 , pp. 265 - 287
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2011

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Footnotes

1

The author would like to thank the staff of the Indiana Historical Society, Addie Bailey and Alicia Suitt at the University of Central Arkansas's Torreyson Library, and Dave Daves at the UCA Department of History for their assistance in the researching of this article and the UCA Department of History for its financial assistance. The article benefited greatly from the insightful comments of two anonymous reviewers, whose efforts are much appreciated. I am also grateful to friends, family, and colleagues, who contributed more intellectual and moral support than I can adequately acknowledge here.

References

2 At the request of the Family Service Association of Central Indianapolis, last names and other identifying characteristics of charity recipients have been abbreviated to protect their anonymity.

3 Charity Organization Casebook, 1880, BV 1198, Family Service Association of Indianapolis Records 1879–1971, Collection # M 0102, Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis [hereafter “COS 1880”], Case Record 132. Because Charity Organization Society volunteers regularly updated entries to the casebooks, an application filed in 1880 might include updates, like this one for Mary D, extending well into the decade. On the history of begging letters, see Crocker, Ruth, “‘I Only Ask You Kindly to Divide Some of Your Fortune With Me’: Begging Letters and the Transformation of Charity in Late Nineteenth-Century America,” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State, and Society 6 (Summer 1999): 131–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Frederick Doyle Kershner Jr., “A Social and Cultural History of Indianapolis, 1860–1914” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1950), 19.

5 Ibid., 19–20.

6 U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930: Population (Washington, 1931), 18–19Google Scholar; Kershner, “Social and Cultural History of Indianapolis,” 19, 39, 54, 95.

7 Kershner, “Social and Cultural History of Indianapolis,” 39, 54, 95; Thornbrough, Emma Lou, Indiana in the Civil War Era, 1850–1880 (Indianapolis, 1965), 274–78Google Scholar, 559; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Tenth Census of the United States, 1880: Wages (Washington, 1886)Google Scholar, 42, 62, 76, 142, 385–86, 414–15, 442, 465. James H. Madison notes that while the city experienced great population growth, its residents were much more likely than other city dwellers to settle permanently. Madison, James H., The Indiana Way: A State History (Bloomington, IN, 1986), 177–78Google Scholar; Phillips, Clifton J., Indiana in Transition: The Emergence of an Industrial Commonwealth, 1880–1920 (Indianapolis, 1968), 469–70Google Scholar.

8 Stanley, Amy Dru, “Beggars Can't Be Choosers: Compulsion and Contract in Postbellum America,” Journal of American History 78 (Mar. 1992): 1265–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 For instance, Olivia Sage of the Russell Sage Foundation used the New York Charity Organization Society to evaluate the merit of each of the thousands of individual letters she received each year asking for charitable assistance. Crocker, Ruth, Mrs. Russell Sage: Women's Activism and Philanthropy in Gilded Age and Progressive Era America (Bloomington, IN, 2006), 203–07Google Scholar.

10 COS 1880, Case Record 14.

11 Katz, Michael, Poverty and Policy in American History (New York, 1983), 51Google Scholar; also Dawn Greeley, “Beyond Benevolence: Gender, Class and the Development of Scientific Charity in New York City, 1882–1935,” (PhD diss., SUNY Stony Brook, 1995), 13–21.

12 For instance, see Agnew, Elizabeth, From Charity to Social Work: Mary E. Richmond and the Creation of an American Profession (Urbana, 2004)Google Scholar; Deutsch, Nathaniel, Inventing America's “Worst” Family: Eugenics, Islam, and the Fall and Rise of the Tribe of Ishmael (Berkeley, 2009)Google Scholar; Fitzpatrick, Ellen, Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform (New York, 1990)Google Scholar; Tice, Karen, Tales of Wayward Girls and Immoral Women: Case Records and the Professionalization of Social Work (Urbana, 1998)Google Scholar; Kusmer, Kenneth L., “The Functions of Organized Charity in the Progressive Era: Chicago as a Case Study,” Journal of American History 60 (Dec. 1973): 657–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lane, James B., “Jacob A. Riis and Scientific Philanthropy during the Progressive Era,” Social Service Review 47 (Mar. 1973): 32–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Waugh, Joan, “‘Give This Man Work!’ Josephine Shaw Lowell, the Charity Organization Society of the City of New York, and the Depression of 1893,” Social Science History 25 (Summer 2001): 217–46Google Scholar; Abel, Emily K., “Medicine and Morality: The Health Care Program of the New York Charity Organization Society,” Social Service Review 71 (Dec. 1997): 634–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Leiby, James, “Charity Organization Reconsidered,” Social Service Review 58 (Dec. 1984): 523–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Weeks, Genevieve, “Religion and Social Work as Exemplified in the Life of Oscar C. McCulloch,” Social Service Review 39 (Mar. 1965): 38–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ziliak, Stephen Thomas, “Self–Reliance before the Welfare State: Evidence from the Charity Organization Movement in the United States,” Journal of Economic History 64 (June 2004): 433–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 See esp. Agnew, From Charity to Social Work; Waugh, Joan, Unsentimental Reformer: The Life of Josephine Shaw Lowell (Cambridge, MA, 1997), 93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ruswick, Brent, “The Measure of Worthiness: The Rev. Oscar McCulloch and the Pauper Problem, 1877–1891,” Indiana Magazine of History 104 (Mar. 2008): 3–35Google Scholar; Greeley, “Beyond Benevolence.”

14 COS 1880, Case Record 132.

15 “The Poor Farm,” Indianapolis Sentinel, July 13, 1881.

16 “Grinding Away,” Indianapolis News, July 8, 1881.

17 COS 1880, Case Record 191.

18 Ibid. Charity reformers saw issues of economic dependence and mental disabilities as closely related phenomena, and the historical evolution of reformers’ understanding and treatment of each demonstrate their intertwined history. See Trent, James W. Jr., Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States (Berkeley, 1994)Google Scholar.

19 For instance, see Frederickson, George M., The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York, 1965)Google Scholar; Trattner, Walter I., From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America (New York, 1974), ch. 4, 75–95Google Scholar; Boyer, Paul, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA, 1978), ch. 10, 143–62Google Scholar; Katz, Michael, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York, 1986), 83–86Google Scholar, 113; and Katz, Poverty and Policy in American History, 90–92; Gettleman, Marvin E., “Philanthropy as Social Control in Late Nineteenth-Century America: Some Hypotheses and Data on the Rise of Social Work,” Societas 5 (Winter 1975): 49–59Google Scholar; Abel, “Medicine and Morality.”

20 COS 1880, Case Record 73.

21 McCulloch, Oscar, “Associated Charities” in Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction, ed. Sanborn, Frank (Boston, 1880), 122–35Google Scholar; “The Tribe of Ishmael: A Study in Social Degradation” in Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction, ed. Barrows, Isabel C. (Boston, 1888), 155–59Google Scholar; Deutsch, Inventing America's “Worst” Family; Ruswick, “The Measure of Worthiness”; Weeks, Genevieve, “Oscar C. McCulloch: Leader in Organized Charity,” Social Science Review 39 (June 1965): 209–21Google Scholar; Rafter, Nicole Hahn, ed., White Trash: The Eugenic Family Studies, 1877–1919 (Boston, 1988)Google Scholar.

22 McCulloch, “Associated Charities,” 124, 125. See Hilts, Victor, “Obeying the Laws of Hereditary Descent: Phrenological Views on Inheritance and Eugenics,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 18 (Jan. 1982): 62–773.0.CO;2-S>CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

23 COS 1880, Case Record 79.

24 Ibid., Case Record 198.

25 Ibid., Case Record 103.

26 Ibid., Case Record 62.

27 Ibid., Case Record 63.

28 Ibid., Case Record 105.

29 Ibid., Case Record 179.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid., Case Record 80.

33 For instance, ibid., Case Records 95, 113, 123, 193.

34 Ibid., Case Record 80.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid., Case Record No. 160. See also Hacsi, Timothy A., Second Home: Orphan Asylums and Poor Families in America (Cambridge, MA, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 COS 1880, Case Record 127.

38 Ibid, Case Record 170.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid, Case Record 18.

41 Ibid, Case Record 42.

42 Ibid, Case Record 14.

43 Ziliak, “Self-Reliance before the Welfare State,” 438.

44 Gurteen, S. Humphreys, “Beginning of Charity Organization in America,” Lend a Hand 15 (Nov. 1894): 353–67Google Scholar. Also see Lewis, Verl S., “Stephen Humphreys Gurteen and the American Origins of Charity Organization,” Social Service Review 40 (June 1966): 190–201CrossRefGoogle Scholar; to the contrary, Alvin Kogut has argued that African Americans were beyond the purview of charity organization societies. Kogut, Alvin B., “The Negro and the Charity Organization Society in the Progressive Era,” Social Service Review 44 (Mar. 1970): 11–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 “Mr. M'Culloch and the Anarchists,” Indianapolis Journal, undated clipping found in Oscar McCulloch Diary, Nov. 30, 1886, folder 2, box 4, Oscar C. McCulloch Papers, Indiana State Library; also entry for May 7, 1886; Ruswick, “The Measure of Worthiness,” 25–28.

46 Oscar McCulloch Diary, Dec. 24, 1885, folder 1, box 4, McCulloch Papers; Stephen Ray Hall, “Oscar McCulloch and Indiana Eugenics” (PhD diss., Virginia Commonwealth University, 1993), 228.

47 COS 1880, Case Record 89.

48 Ibid, Case Record 99.

49 “The Public's Poor,” Indianapolis News, Jan. 25, 1886.

50 COS 1880, Case Record 127.

51 COS 1880, Case Record 181.

52 Ibid, Case Record 31.