Transcriber’s note

  On Page 87 the line: “Settlement work, educational and
  vocational guidance.” is missing a corresponding number.




  UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA


  A DEFINITION OF
  SOCIAL WORK


  ALICE S. CHEYNEY


  A THESIS

  IN SOCIOLOGY

  PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN
  PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR
  THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY


  PHILADELPHIA
  1923




  COPYRIGHT 1923
  BY
  ALICE S. CHEYNEY




CONTENTS


  Chapter                                           Page

    I. WHY THIS DEFINITION IS ATTEMPTED                5

   II. THE CHARITABLE ELEMENT IN SOCIAL WORK           8

  III. THE SCIENTIFIC ELEMENT IN SOCIAL WORK          16

   IV. THE TESTIMONY OF THE NATIONAL CONFERENCE
        OF SOCIAL WORK                                27

    V. THE TESTIMONY OF THE TRAINING SCHOOLS FOR
        PROFESSIONAL SOCIAL WORKERS                   47

   VI. THE ANSWER TO ITS CRITICS                      55

  APPENDIX                                            81

  BIBLIOGRAPHY                                        89




CHAPTER I

WHY THIS DEFINITION IS ATTEMPTED


What social worker has not been asked to define social work and found
himself at a loss? It is easy to describe his own particular tasks but
it is not easy to characterize the profession as a whole or to say why
its very diverse phases are identified with one another. Why should we
apply the term “social work” to hospital social service and probation,
but not to nursing and interpreting, services which seem to stand in a
similar relation to medicine and the courts?

Definitions of social work are not yet to be found in dictionaries
or encyclopedias. A certain amount of characterization appears in
current literature, by implication or by mention of one feature here
and another there. Some general descriptions say of it things which,
though true, do not distinguish it.[1] Probably no strict definition
is possible. The field of social work is constantly extending; its
functions are multiplying by geometric progression; its means are
undergoing continuous adaptation and in all its phases it shades off
into other kinds of work or attracts allied work to its own likeness.
The inconvenience of this state of affairs is a constant subject of
complaint and for at least three reasons we badly need some sort of
definition.

In the first place whenever we talk without first agreeing on
the meaning of terms we are wasting time and giving unnecessary
opportunity for bad blood. The term “social work” is now used in
several entirely different senses. One man, in using it, is referring
to a characteristic technique, which to him is its distinguishing
feature, such, for instance, as social case work; another is thinking
of a certain function in social economy, for instance, the relief
of distress; a third is designating a policy in social reform, a
temporizing policy, for example. So long as this latitude of use
continues we will talk at cross purposes whether in discussion of
specific ways and means or in the evaluation of social work as a factor
in human affairs. Any definition would make it easier for us to agree
or explicitly disagree on what we mean by social work.

In the second place while the nature and purpose of a calling are
perceived cloudily or not at all it does not manifest the coherence
and momentum which inspire constructive work. Its followers are in
danger of floundering among isolated tasks or finding their sense of
continuity and purpose in the mere observation of correct procedure.
Social work while feeling an implicit affinity in its many forms,
often seems to suffer from lack of any essential principles or any
demonstrable obligation or responsibility, other than those incumbent
on the community as a whole. The process of definition offers a means
of bringing to light any principles or responsibilities especially
pertaining to it.

Thirdly social work now suffers unnecessarily in reputation and support
(even among its own practitioners) for disappointing demands which
would never have been made were its nature better understood. Every
undertaking has its limitations and when known and understood they
constitute no reproach. But the preoccupations and aspirations of
social work are such as to tempt its proponents to enlarge on infinite
possibilities, forgetting in their enthusiasm to state that these
possibilities can only be realized if the ministrations and advices of
social work are accepted in many places where it has no enforceable
influence. The limits set to any single line of human endeavor working
by itself are very narrow, and for social work, as for other things,
they are in practice promptly reached. Social work when it stands
thus at the end of its powers seems to have betrayed the confidence
placed in it. A limiting definition would show that the fault lies not
in social work but in unreasonable expectations. Such a definition
would be its best defense from antagonistic critics and disappointed
followers.

Yet “social work” in spite of all uncertainty does stand for something
real. Annually there meets a National Conference of Social Work with
2637 individual and group memberships representing 46 States, the
District of Columbia, Cuba, Hawaii, the Philippines and Canada and
6 foreign countries.[2] There has lately been formed an American
Association of Social Workers[3] composed of master workmen in its
several lines, who must qualify in terms of preparation or experience
and who are associated for the purpose of maintaining a high standard
of work. All this indicates that there is a general concept of social
work, and if there is such a thing it must be amenable to some sort of
description or analysis. Though water-tight definition seems impossible
it is frequently not necessary. If any characteristics can be found
which appear in all the forms of social work and not in activities
unrelated to it they will at least serve the three practical purposes
for which definition is so urgently needed.

Materials for analysis are not wanting. Social work has had its
national conference for fifty years, its magazine for thirty-six[4]
and its schools for twenty-five[5] and the conference reports,
the magazines and the school curricula constitute a competent
body of evidence that can be consulted either in cross section
or in chronological perspective. If we forego expectation of a
precise and all-mentioning definition and adjust our demands to the
practicabilities of the case we may hopefully challenge these compact
sources of information, together with the dispersed literature of the
subject, with observation and experience to stand and deliver a working
definition.


FOOTNOTES:

[1] For examples see Appendix I.

[2] Conference Bulletin, published by the National Conference of Social
Work, Nov., 1922, Vol. 26, No. 1, 25 E. 9th St., Cincinnati, Ohio.

[3] 130 E. 22nd Street, New York.

[4] “Charities,” which has since become the “Survey,” was first
published in 1887.

[5] The New York School of Philanthropy opened its full term winter
course in 1904; a summer school had been opened in 1898.




CHAPTER II

THE CHARITABLE ELEMENT IN SOCIAL WORK


The “charities directories” of New York[6] and Philadelphia[7] offer
the most inclusive available lists of the various types of social work.
For present purposes it will be sufficient to review them by groups.
Duplications, omissions, and extraneous inclusions (all legitimate for
the purposes of the directories) make the figures of agencies of each
type inaccurate but they serve to show the multiplicity as well as the
range of social work undertakings.

                                                         New  Philadelphia
                                                         York
  Agencies having to do with health                      412       224
  Child welfare agencies                                 233       147
  Settlements, social centers and housekeeping centers   227       608
  Relief societies                                       180       102
  Societies for civic and economic betterment by means
      of surveys, investigations, education of the
      public, etc.                                       157       369
  Adult homes                                            136       112
  Agencies for obtaining or providing employment         123        46
  Special educational opportunities, agricultural,
      musical, etc.                                      118        71
  Philanthropic agencies with a predominantly
      religious                                           96       191
  Agencies interested in naturalization, colonization,
      and work for immigrants                             91        28
  Correctional and protective agencies                    81        54
  Societies serving special groups                        81        60
      Negroes                                   29  36
      Soldiers, sailors, or their dependents    25  10
      Clergymen                                  8
      Medical men                                7
      Indians                                    5
      Artists                                    4
      Firemen                                    3
  Recreational facilities                                 63        88
  Banking, loan and saving societies                      23        10
      Of which burial societies are             10   4
  Milk stations, diet kitchens and lunch rooms            20        23
  Conferences and federations which include
      social work agencies                                12        20
  Legal aid societies                                     11         2
  Societies for the protection of animals                  9        14

In cross section no obvious, no easily discernible bond appears among
these diverse agencies. An eleemosynary purpose, the first suggestion
of most laymen, is indignantly repudiated by the modern social worker
and can be, in many cases, categorically disproved. All are benevolent,
but so also are educational, religious, artistic and other undertakings
not commonly considered social work.

It is a standing rule of science that if you can see nothing crosswise
you must try squinting lengthwise. If a present form will not
answer your questions look back along its history and consider its
origin--study its evolution and genetics. Such a policy with respect to
social work brings us promptly to a strong clue.

The interests of social work have wandered far from those of
old-fashioned charity and “mere charity” has now a bad name, but we
of this generation knew social work before it came of age and when we
hear it repudiating charity we recognize the act of a thankless child
denying an unfashionable parent. The oldest of the schools was called
until 1919 the “New York School of _Philanthropy_” and the same word
appeared in the names of the Chicago school and others. The “Survey,”
the accepted general organ of the profession (if it is a profession),
was until 1905 published as “Charities” and for three years more as
“Charities and the Commons.” What is now the “National Conference
of Social Work” was organized as the “Conference of Charities and
Corrections” and kept that title right down to 1917.

We may therefore push our investigation back a step farther and for the
question “what is social work?” substitute the less difficult inquiries
“what was charity and by what modifications did social work develop
from it?” However far apart these two may at present seem it is a
patent fact that social work developed from charity and along the route
of that development there is hope of enlightenment as to the essential
nature of social work.

Charity in one sense is the name of a human quality--that which
“suffereth long and is kind.” With this sense of the word the present
inquiry is not concerned but with a more completely objective meaning.
The dictionaries give it as “benevolence, liberality in relieving
the wants of others, philanthropy,”[8] or “liberality to the poor,
to benevolent institutions or worthy causes.”[9] The wording varies
little. Philanthropy where it is described any differently from charity
is merely a broader term not confined to the succor of the especially
unfortunate, as “love of mankind especially as evinced in deeds of
practical beneficence.”[10]

If we look at this “charity” in action we find its performance to be
directed to the same ends even though we follow it back through two
millenniums of Christianity and Paganism.[11] Motive and policy vary,
but the tasks of charity are recrudescent and impose themselves on each
successive generation in terms of the contemporary conscience. We seem,
for example, to have forgotten the question which haunted sixteenth
century motivation--whether faith without works avails for salvation,
but we might still subscribe to a contemporaneous plan of action
which demanded “the suppression of vagrant beggars, the punishment of
impostors” and “a rational organization of benefits under the control
of the municipal authorities.”[12] The _task_ is still with us.

This so adaptable and so perdurable “charity,” while constantly
changing its terms remains always in essence a free will offering made
to those who are in some fashion especially in need. It may consist
of material benefits or of services. An authoritative historian of
English philanthropy says in his nearest approach to a definition
that “Philanthropy, in common with other terms in general use, is
difficult, or more probably incapable of strict definition. We may
perhaps safely say that it proceeds from the free will of the agent,
and not in response to any claim of legal right on the part of the
recipient.” “The greater part of philanthropy may be said to consist in
contributions of money, service or thought, such as the recipient has
no strict claim to demand and the donor is not compelled to render.”[13]

Does this characterization hold good in our own country and time?
First, must the gift be free? Where a service is exacted by law do we
ever consider it charity? Free education while supported by voluntary
contribution was considered a form of charity but when it came to
be supported by taxes its connection with charity lapsed and was
forgotten.[14] The upkeep of highways and bridges has been an object
of charitable bequest--a benefit which the fortunate might out of his
abundance bestow upon his neighbors.[15] The establishment of public
responsibility for the highways has lifted this sort of benevolence
from the category of charity. Prisoners whose support was not provided
for by their own means or the concern of friends were for long
dependent upon charity.[16] A nicer sense of corporate responsibility
now requiring them to be fed at the public charge we see no charity
in their support but when private interest carries into the prisons
influences presumably improving and meets friendless prisoners at the
jail gate we recognize the unforced ministrations of charity removed
to another field. We still stand near the turn of the road in the
matter of caring for workmen injured during their work. A little while
ago any provision by the employer for the injured man or his family
was regarded as an act of charity. Latterly we have come to consider
it no more than right that an industrial establishment should share
the burden, as it does the fault, of such accidents, and state after
state has enacted laws compelling “compensation.” And as relief of
the injured man and his family has thus been made compulsory on the
establishment in which he works it has ceased to be charitable. The
act remains the same but with the loss of spontaneity its charitable
quality has disappeared.[17]

It is true that we have a very considerable development of so-called
“public charities.” But are not the services they render offered
through the body politic merely to secure a certainty and inclusiveness
of relief for which we dare not rely on private benevolence? And do we
not continue to call them “charity” precisely because we still regard
them as a free gift rather than as a routine purveyance which the
state is essentially committed to provide? Some of them are plainly
in process of transition and here and there we find the almshouse
becoming the “county hospital,” or the department of public charities
the “welfare department,” the nomenclature following a change in the
conception of function.

If, furthermore, we examine the public attitude toward those
undertakings which we have cited as having graduated from charity into
public purveyance, we will recognize that these are considered public
responsibilities in a different sense from any which so far attaches
to what we still call public charities. Public education is held to
be a natural prerequisite of democracy; the making of roads a thing
contributing impartially to the universal convenience; the feeding of
prisoners the inescapable responsibility of those who have cut them off
from the means of making a livelihood.

Moreover we make certain doles which we explicitly insist are not to
be counted “charity”--pensions given after military or government
service or to widows rearing children for the commonwealth--and in
disassociating them from charity it is the custom to point out that
they are not concessions but just deserts, something that can be
claimed as a right.

Charity then is a free gift. It need not be given in love, as its
etymology would assume, indeed it may be given in a mood of revulsion,
in the hope of expiating a sin or in mere fear of the indignation of
the deprived. The recording angel probably keeps a record of the motive
and the spirit, but charity, in its simple objective meaning on men’s
lips, inheres in the act of relief.

The brief characterization of philanthropy which we are testing was
two-fold. It declared philanthropy to be a free gift and a gift to
need. Just as the one qualification of the act was that it must be in
no way exacted so the one qualification of the recipient was that his
candidacy must consist only in need. Does this also hold true in our
own country and our own time? Surely it is plain beyond any call for
proof that only that is charity which is bestowed where need appoints
the recipient. Free gifts are made to the prosperous, there is mutual
helpfulness among equals, there are services prompted by loyalty and
personal affection, but these, though unforced, are not called charity.
But it will not do to dwell too much on the negative implications
of “need,” on deprivation or suffering. We might almost avoid that
rather misleading word and say that a gift is charity only when the
outstanding circumstance is occasion for it. But it is a familiar
observation that ardors or privations which are accepted as the order
of life while we see no prospect of remedy become conscious hardships
at the mere rumor of succor and so it necessarily happens that the
very act of service or relief prompted only by its own fitness is the
creator of an ex-post-facto need even where the situation previously
scarcely merited so strong a name.

Charity is not, however, preoccupied with material need only or with
physical suffering or any other one phase of life. Moral redemption,
intellectual opportunity, artistic realization--these also have come
within its purview. It may follow mortal man into his every predicament
and minister to his hungers of whatever sort. Only if we keep this
well in mind will we be justified in associating it with so negative
a term as need. It is the unconscious champion of the perfectibility
of man. “The normal life,” “our common inheritance,” “humanity in
whatever form,” “the rights of the humblest individual”--these are
its commonplaces that have lost significance from frequent and often
perfunctory repetition. But the fact that they are the commonplaces of
the subject is in itself significant. The commonplaces of all subjects
are not of that sort.

These then are the essentials of charity “a free gift and a gift to
need.” May we go on to inquire what additions or alterations have
developed these into social work, or is social work a thing so far
transmuted from charity that it no longer shows the very elements of
its original? A reperusal of our digest of the charities directories
shows the many forms of social work all of them still to include the
qualities of charity. In the first place the services of social work
are still a gift. Sometimes they are provided by the state in close
association with the obligatory work of some routine state department,
but in such cases the tasks of social workers will be found to differ
from those of the other employees in the department in being not only
highly extensible and almost infinitely variable but in some degree
supererogatory--as in the case of the follow-up work of the workmen’s
compensation office.

In the second place the presence of a need, though less evident among
the forms of social work than in the case of primitive charity, is
always discernible. Social work often seems to aspire to knowledge
rather than accomplishment, as when making investigations or surveys or
when any form of ministration is accompanied by so much solicitation
of information as to raise the question of which is product and which
by-product. But its activities will always on inspection be found to
claim connection with the discovery and removal of some form of human
ill. Social work itself naturally points to immediate purposes, small
definitive tasks like the formulation of a standard distribution of
expenses in the budget of a family at subsistence level. To conclude
that these are its ultimate objects would be as serious a mistake as
to imagine that the medical profession would rest satisfied with a
set of dependable prognoses. And these investigations do not exploit
the fields of prosperity. They consistently maintain a preoccupation
with untoward conditions and a sense of stewardship. Before all social
work, as surely as before charity, a Samaritan purpose floats like a
will-o-the-wisp, an inconstant and shifting but ever discernible guide,
sometimes at several removes from the work in hand but always its
ultimate sanction.

Social work then, incorporates, while it modifies, charity, and we find
ourselves ready to discuss the second part of our question--what is the
nature of these modifications which have produced social work?


FOOTNOTES:

[6] New York Charities Directory, A Reference Book of Social Service,
published by the Charity Organization Society of New York, 28th
edition, 1919.

[7] Social Service Directory of Philadelphia, 1919, corrected for 1920.
Pub. by Municipal Court.

[8] New Century Dictionary.

[9] Webster’s New International.

[10] New Century Dictionary.

[11] See Lallemand, Léon Histoire de la Charité. 4 Vols. Alphonse
Picard et Fils, Paris. Vol. I, 1902; Vol. II. 1903; Vol. III, 1906;
Vol. IV, 1910, and Queen, Stuart Alfred; Social Work in the Light of
History, J. B. Lippincott & Co., Philadelphia and London.

[12] Lallemand, Vol. IV, p. 21.

[13] B. Kirkman Gray, A History of English Philanthropy. Preface, pp. 8
and 9.

[14] Ibid., p. 103 e. s., and Philanthropy and the State, p. 222.

[15] History of English Philanthropy, p. 20.

[16] Ibid., p. 70.

[17] See also Charities for Feb., 1898. Report of the Association for
Improving the Condition of the Poor, housing inspection, vacation
schools, public baths and vacant lot farming begun by the Association
and continued by the city.




CHAPTER III

THE SCIENTIFIC ELEMENT IN SOCIAL WORK


The historical perspective which shows social work to have developed
out of charity shows also that there is a close relation between that
development and contemporaneous developments in other lines. We know
that in every field of production, trade and business, enterprising
men have lately developed practical sciences to replace the old rules
of thumb, and that even in such a field as teaching there has lately
appeared a derived science of pedagogy which levies on psychology and
other direct sciences for its material. The stewards of charity, like
other people, saw the light of science full on their path. The result
was a new hope. Again and again in statements like the following we
have been told that the grosser disabilities which charity relieved
could be done away with for good if we would systematically search
out and treat their causes. “Poverty, vice and crime are no more
impossible to stamp out from human society than small-pox and measles.
To do the one requires the same intelligence on the part of man,
though perhaps in a higher degree, that the other does. The social
sciences and arts should have the same expansion as all the other
sciences and arts combined in that the relations of men to each other
are equally important if not more important than the relations of
man to nature.”[18] Or again, “The most formidable obstacle to the
adoption of the policy of prevention and treatment is not resistance
to the necessary public expenditure, still less inability to raise the
money, but the lack of administrative science and the shortcomings of
our administrative machinery. Merely to relieve destitution has been
nearly as easy as to do nothing. But successfully to intervene in order
to prevent--whether to prevent sickness, to prevent the neglect of
children, to prevent the multiplication of the mentally unfit, or to
prevent unemployment--involves the discovery of causes, the formation
of large schemes of policy, the purposeful planning of collective
action in modifying the environment of the poorer classes, together
with scientifically diversified treatment of those individuals who fall
below the recognized standards of civilized life.”[19]

When charity had thus accepted the necessity of using scientific
methods there ensued immediate and far-reaching results. Chief of
these have been the three developments which transformed charity into
social work. It is possible to trace them in performance and to trace
a parallel development of philosophy in the literature of the subject.
These developments can be simply indicated as (1) a systematization of
service; (2) an interest in causes of disaster, and (3) an extension of
charitable interest into new fields.[20]


THE SYSTEMATIZATION OF SERVICE

The converts to a scientific method undertook to work within the
traditional field of charity with a new thoroughness and system.[21]
Fired with the belief of their times in a tenable norm of prosperity
and a continuous progress dependent only on scientific control of our
environment they naturally hoped that the most stubborn situation could
be harmonized with the general melioration by the use of appropriate
methods and they were no longer content to offer only relief, work,
care for the helpless and such simple services as were once all that
was thought of. They constantly challenged the applicability of old
palliative expedients and looked for reconstructive measures. “For
every one thing,” writes Miss Richmond, “that could then (1832) be
done about a man’s attitude toward his life and his social relations,
about his health, housing, work and recreation, there are now (1917)
a dozen things to do. The power to analyze a human situation closely
as distinguished from the old method of falling back upon a few
general classifications, grows with the consciousness of the power to
get things done.”[22] This change in expectation may be seen in the
nomenclature of the tasks which social work has set itself. At first
“relief” was the objective, then “_adequate_ relief” and now it is
“rehabilitation.” The methods were, first the alternatives “relief” or
“corrective treatment,” for there were sheep and goats in those days,
then “preventive treatment” and now “adjustment.”

Rehabilitation and adjustment are far more delicate and responsible
matters than mere relief or even “preventive treatment” and we find
social workers warning each other that “life cannot be administered by
definite rules and regulations and that wisdom to deal with a man’s
difficulties comes only through some knowledge of his life and habits
as a whole and that to treat a separate episode is almost sure to
invite blundering.”[23] The excuse for quoting so obvious a statement
is that former practice actually required it to be made. Philanthropy
took little cognizance of its supposed beneficiaries’ “life and habits
as a whole.” Such a feat of synthetic judgment cannot of course be
more than roughly approximated. It has, however, proved possible to
develop a technique of inquiry, analysis, interpretation and direct
or indirect remedial action which is known as social case work and
can be made the subject of systematic instruction in the schools for
training social workers. And within the last six years has come Miss
Richmond’s book with the suggestive title, “Social Diagnosis,” to give
a description of simple charity availing itself of the means suggested
by an age of scientific experiment and so justifying the expression,
“scientific charity,” which, unexplained, sounds so incongruous. The
method of social case work is sometimes claimed to be the essential
and distinguishing feature of social work but if we study the classic
expositions of case work we find that they are describing on their own
showing a _method_[24] and a method which though applicable to many
types of social work is not applicable to all and which is, moreover,
by no means confined to social work. Case work, in any connection,
is the systematic study of all considerable effects and causes in a
particular situation and the development and application of special
means to alter that situation in some preferred direction. Social case
work is simply case work in the form it takes when applied in social
work. There are some fully accepted forms of social work which have
no occasion to use it. Important as it is we must recognize it as an
expedient and not social work per se.


THE INTEREST IN CAUSES

An interest in the causes of disaster is responsible for the
development of those forms of social work which do not retain the
immediate serviceableness of charity proper. It has developed as
part of the already described attempt to systematize philanthropic
service and also on an independent line of its own. “In practically
all departments of the work of prevention” write the Webbs, “in the
campaign against degeneration and in favor of promotion of better
breeding; in the campaign against the ruin of adolescence, the creation
of unemployment and the demoralization of the unemployed--we are
always being stopped by the need for further experience and additional
research. We know enough now to know how extremely important it is to
increase our knowledge.”[25]

This need of more knowledge after every step before the next can
be taken, this constant challenge offered by our uncharted social
life has caused the development of an interest in observation and
investigation independent of any direct errands of mercy. Many
known abuses exist which are sure to claim their victims from time
to time and a certain amount of social work takes the form of an
independent crusade against such abuses. This type of social work often
embarks on a search for causes of trouble which proves endless and
indistinguishable from the search for knowledge. A great deal of social
work is now of this sort--the studies of the Russell Sage Foundation
and the lesser local foundations for research and prevention, the
original “Pittsburgh Survey” and all those that have followed it,
the careful neighborhood studies of the settlements from the “Hull
House Maps and Papers” on and the intensive group studies, studies,
comparative statistics and stock takings of uncounted miscellaneous
agencies. Inquiry bids fair to be as common in social work as ever alms
was in charity.[26]


THE EXTENSION OF THE PHILANTHROPIC INTEREST

The extension of a philanthropic interest into new fields, the third
result of scientific thoroughness and system has, bewildered us and
occasioned most of the inquiry as to what social work may be. Today in
the administrative departments of Federal and State governments, in the
churches, the courts, the schools, the hospitals there is work being
done which has a double allegiance. On the one hand it is responsible
to government, religion, law, education or public health, as the case
may be, and on the other it is all alike responsible to social work.

The persons who engage in this work are as much social workers as those
in any traditionally philanthropic field and have simply followed
persons whom they are trying to help into situations which philanthropy
did not formerly consider to be its business. Philanthropy has long
taken an interest in jails and reform schools, it has only quite
recently followed into court anyone still unconvicted. This it does
in the case of children and is beginning to do for some classes of
adults. The social worker of the adult court is the probation officer,
a representative of voluntary chivalry toward the defendant, standing
in the very stronghold of implacable justice. The contrast between the
points of view of criminal law and social work is clearly put by a
judge in describing the function of the juvenile court. “The inquiry
(in the juvenile court) is not to determine whether the child is a
criminal or not, but to determine its status in relationship to its
need of the care and protection of the state. Being adjudged in need
of such special care the state assumes its guardianship and oversight,
always for the welfare of the child. The aims and methods of the courts
which administer our criminal laws proceed upon an entirely different
theory. Our penal laws are enacted for the purpose of promoting the
happiness and well-being of society at large, and any who violate
them are termed criminals and outlawed as unfit units of society. The
penalty provided for under these laws is imposed with the end in view
of deterring the offender from again violating his obligation to the
body politic and also of deterring others who might be like-minded.”[27]

In some other fields the introduction of the social worker simply adds
a new sort of service to what is already given. The obligations of both
the doctor and the medical social worker are to the welfare of the
patient, but their work is complementary. Often the social worker has
responsibilities no less than the doctor’s but her diagnosis is of a
situation and its possible interference with the curative process the
doctor prescribes. She must discover and change working conditions or
personal habits that tend to defeat the doctor’s efforts. It is not
a mere accident that this became the task of a social worker. It is
not because it was no medical job and the charitably inclined were
available for it. It is because of a certain characteristic of social
work which is a direct result of the single minded address to the
service of need--namely, a tendency to look upon people from no point
of view but that of interest in their needs, of whatever sort those
needs may be. This habit of taking a _synthetic_ view of their lives,
if such an expression is permissible, gives exactly what was needed to
complement the special and limited services of the doctor.

The same is true in the case of the social worker in the schools.[28]
It is not because there is no other obvious title to give her that the
school visitor is called a social worker but because her responsibility
is not to the standards demanded by the school system nor to any
subject of instruction but to the child himself and the need of the
child in any capacity in which that need may occur. She must satisfy
the need or put him in contact with others who will. The same is
true of social workers employed to give suitable distribution to the
benevolence of churches or who investigate for government departments
or administer government services. There is abundant evidence that
this concern for the individual as such is what is everywhere expected
of the social worker. It is a paradox of this modern development
of philanthropy that scientific method should have led away from
generalization and formula and to a separation of the individual from
the category and the predicament. One can pick up a “Survey” of any
date and read of the social workers reviewing all sorts of data for
light on the nature of individual lives. They study official records
of vagrancy and extract from them information about vagrants.[29] They
attempt to give relevance to Americanization work by studying the
specific backgrounds of diverse foreign groups.[30]

Miss Addams writes of the settlement that “the social injury of the
meanest man not only becomes its concern, but by virtue of its very
locality, it has put itself into a position to see, as no one but a
neighbor can see, the stress and need of those who bear the brunt of
the social injury.” This is in a certain sense true of other forms of
social work as well. Because of their interest in individual lives, and
their constant response to the challenge in every sort of insufficiency
and adversity they transcend the ordinary barriers of social
provincialism and come to know everywhere those who bear the brunt of
the social injury. The social worker seems always to be speaking for
someone who has not managed as well as possible for himself, or for
whom life has arranged badly, or who is not old enough or strong enough
to be his own guardian. He often looks like a fool rushing in where
angels might well fear to tread, but we must concede that he is doing
for someone in an apparently untenable position things that only the
self-sufficing can do for themselves. This synthesis of the interest
of all social work in “personal” predicaments is indicated in the word
“social,” for our social relations are simply our relations as persons.
But it seems to need further exposition because the word social has
been used loosely and no longer carries clear-cut implications. A
lawyer speaking to the 1919 convention defines “individual” interests
as “the claims which the human being makes simply because he is a human
being. For example, the claims to be secure in his reputation and
honor, in his social existence, to be secure in his belief and opinion,
his spiritual existence, to be secure in his domestic relations, in
his expanded individual existence and to be secure in his substance,
his economic existence.”[31] It will be noted that, in the attempt to
define these individual interests even a superlatively able lawyer
could come no nearer to legal precision than to say “for example.” The
concept is one which social work itself continues to alter, fill out
and expand with every breath it draws and is not the less significant
because it is elusive. As social work becomes more systematic with an
almost technical practice, more dissociated from the specific act of
relief and more widely and variously allied with the practices of other
callings this personal, this “social” interest, becomes increasingly
important as one of its distinguishing features.

We may recapitulate the effects of the extension of a charitable
interest into new fields. The charitable interest working along
scientific lines has produced what we know as social work and social
work continues to manifest that interest as its characteristic feature
in all the widely scattered fields to which human needs have called
it. It is, first, everywhere engaged in the gratuitous extension of
benefits. That is to say, it performs services which, while they may be
officially sanctioned, are discretionary and adjustable, and are not
considered established rights in any but the most broadly construed
humanitarian sense. Secondly, it is concerned with negative conditions;
not the successes but the failures interest it, not the promising
people but the difficult people, not the leaders but the under-dogs.
And thirdly, as social work begins to operate in close association
with many other services, we see, what was always implicit in charity
but now first stands out in sharp relief, a prime interest in the
personal needs of individual beneficiaries. This puts social work in
a new relation to public affairs for it not only stands by to gather
up the human wreckage of bad management but it brings to formalized
administration a constant and well-posted challenge to meet individual
requirements.


THE PROPOSED DEFINITION

Diversity in social work may today be more conspicuous than likeness
but under the diversity essential likeness can still be traced. Despite
all appearances to the contrary it has its own department of human
affairs and its universal common interest inherited from charity and
to this department of human affairs, to the service of this interest,
it brings a method adopted from science.

The _department of human affairs_ in which social work operates is
that indicated by the word “social”; men’s relations to each other
rather than their relations to nature. The _interest_ inherited from
charity is an interest in untoward situations; social work, like
charity turns like a compass to the magnet of need; opportunity,
success, superiority do not attract it unless they are beset with some
difficulty which it can remove; handicap, deprivation, insufficiency
offer the challenge to which it responds. The _method_ adopted from
science is that of observation and generalization; social work has
established the fact that just as man cannot live without a certain
food supply, so he cannot thrive as a conscious being without a modicum
of interest, incentive, and leeway of freedom, so that matters long
considered intimate and implicit have now become the objects of close
and deliberate observation. And just as men, endlessly varied in
physical appearance are to the physiologist of one general pattern and
as, far more strangely, the infinite variety of mind is known by the
psychologist to have its common laws of operation, so, strangest and
most illusive of all, men individually unpredictable, do yet, in the
main, follow laws of social behaviour which it is in the power of an
observer to detect. We can say that the main act and final object of
social work are those of charity. The means and methods are those of
science moving in the fields of charitable concern. Social work seems
to comprise a group of allied activities called by a common name and
considered to be but various phases of a single undertaking because
they are all engaged in spontaneous efforts to extend benefits in
response to the evidence of need; they all show a major interest in
improving the social relationship of their beneficiaries and all avail
themselves of scientific knowledge and employ scientific methods.

We may propose as a tentative definition, to be tested and carried
further in the chapters which follow, that social work includes all
voluntary attempts to extend benefits in response to need which are
concerned with social relationships and which avail themselves of
scientific knowledge and employ scientific methods.


FOOTNOTES:

[18] Professor C. A. Ellwell, in Charities and the Commons for 1907, p.
187.

[19] Beatrice and Sidney Webb, The Prevention of Destitution, p. 330.

[20] Owen R. Lovejoy, Proceedings of National Conference of Social
Work, 1919, pp. 666-7.

[21] Mary E. Richmond, Ibid. 1920, p. 254.

[22] Mary E. Richmond, Social Diagnosis, p. 29.

[23] Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House, p. 162.

[24] See especially Mary E. Richmond, What Is Social Case Work?

[25] Beatrice and Sidney Webb, The Prevention of Destitution, p. 333.

[26] When such inquiries have been undertaken by the government they
have often been proposed and prepared for by social work. See for
example: Lillian D. Wald, The House on Henry Street, on the U. S.
Investigation of the Condition of Women and Child Wage Earners, p. 137,
N.Y. Child Labor Committee, p. 144.

[27] Proceedings of National Conference of Social Work, 1920, p. 171.

[28] Ibid., 1919, p. 613.

[29] Charities and the Commons, April, 1907, p. 577.

[30] American Year Book, 1919, p. 402.

[31] Roscoe Pound, at National Conference, 1919, p. 105.




CHAPTER IV

THE TESTIMONY OF THE CONFERENCE


We have now propounded a tentative definition of social work based upon
an interpretation of its development and present practices. We will not
be sure of the correctness of that interpretation until we have tested
the applicability of the result to the whole range of social work. Nor
can we do this fairly by making our own presentation of social work.
For such a test we must find some ready-made presentation which will
marshal social work in all its diversity. The reports of the national
conference do this and, indirectly, the courses offered by the school
for training social workers. This chapter will test and, if possible,
expand the definition by the testimony of the conference and the
succeeding chapter by the testimony of the schools.

The conference is divided into ten sections:

  1. Children.
  2. Delinquents.
  3. Health.
  4. Public agencies and institutions.
  5. The family.
  6. Industrial and economic problems.
  7. The local community.
  8. Mental hygiene.
  9. Organization of social forces.
 10. Uniting of native and foreign-born.

At the annual convention each of these ten sections holds its own group
meetings at which papers are presented and discussions conducted on the
subjects appropriate to the section. It will be seen that the division
into sections is on a basis of administrative fields rather than
technique or function. The fields however are not mutually exclusive
but overlapping. Children although giving their name to the whole first
section appear among “delinquents” in the second, candidates for health
in the third and so on. Indeed, all of the ten section names might
serve as subheads under most or all of the other topics.

More significant in the search for a definition is the fact that
these several fields are not exclusively possessed by social workers.
“Children” are also the special concern of elementary teachers,
“delinquency” is primarily referred to the courts, “health” is the
conceded bailiwick of the medical profession and so forth. Even at
the conference many papers are presented by persons other than social
workers.[32]

These two types of overlapping make the masses of material with which
we have to deal both indeterminate and confusing. But representing as
they do the mutual interpenetration of social work and other callings,
they give a fresh opportunity to distinguish the nature of social
work. We may inquire what is the special interest of social work in
“children,” in “delinquents,” in “health,” and in what ways does it
differ from the respective interests of teaching, law, medicine and so
forth.

It is obviously impossible to review in readable compass the fifty
years in which the conference has met and, as there have been great
changes in social work during that time, it would be profitless for
a contemporary definition. A new arrangement of sections was made in
1918, and therefore the reports of the years 1918, 1919, and 1920
(the last in print when this study was made) were chosen for detailed
analysis.

That analysis can be most simply presented to the reader by sections,
putting before him an itemized statement of the subjects covered in
the reports of each section (treating the three years as a unit)
and then following this sectional review with such considerations
as have recommended themselves cumulatively and can only be offered
on the basis of the material as a whole. We are looking for the
characteristics of social work as a whole and can therefore consider
only such features as continue to show themselves throughout the
sections. In the following itemized lists for each section the figures
represent the number of papers in which the subject indicated was the
principle topic.


 I. CHILDREN.

 The forty-five papers presented in this section dealt with the
 following subjects:

  Plans for removing the handicaps of the illegitimate without
      increasing illegitimacy                                       8
  Recreational needs of children                                    7
  General protective schemes, plans for extending a sheltering
      arm over children isolated in the country and for
      establishing state-wide vigilance                             5
  Standards for child care                                          4
  Reports on the practices of particular localities                 4
  The working of children’s courts                                  4
  Nature and causes of that chronic and excessive
      troublesomeness which is called juvenile delinquency          3
  Special psychology of children                                    3
  Best ways of providing for children dependent on the public       2
  The responsibilities of the public to its neglected children      2
  Problems of day nurseries                                         2
  Health needs of children                                          1

It requires but a glance at the above list to see how much wider is
its range than that of a teachers’ or medical men’s convention. There
is nothing to connect the topics--except children. This synthesis of
social work in personality which has been already indicated as the
“social” element in social work becomes increasingly evident in any
review of the conference. As it has proved difficult of definition it
will be well to keep it in mind in order that it may take shape during
the following review:


 II. DELINQUENTS AND CORRECTION.

  Probation and parole                                              4
  Protective work for young people                                  4
  Special value of policewomen in protective work for girls         2
  Juvenile delinquency                                              2
  Runaway and neglected girls                                       1
  Papers not devoted to a single subject                           17
     Including such considerations as the influence of war
     on criminality, municipal detention for women, the function
     of a truancy officer, the desirability of creating a public
     defender and the moral education of training school
     inmates.


 III. HEALTH.

  Standard of living                                               19
  Coordination of health services                                   5
  Special problems of health in war time                            4
  Housing                                                           3
  Health work among the foreign-born                                3
  Health problems of the Red Cross                                  2


 IV. PUBLIC AGENCIES AND INSTITUTIONS.

  Administrative questions                                         15
  Effects of prohibition                                            3
  State pensions for mothers                                        3
  Pauperism                                                         2
  Control of leprosy, by colonization or otherwise                  2
  Such standardization of record keeping as to make the
      records kept by the several states comparable                 2
  Education of the public in their responsibility to public
      charges, public care for negroes, care of crippled
      children, care of defectives and delinquents--one paper
      each                                                          4


 V. THE FAMILY.

  Questions of administration                                       1
  Registration of all appeals in a social workers’ exchange         3
  Advantages of an orderly approach to social case analysis         3
  Examples of case work treatment                                   3
  The family                                                        2
  Marriage laws                                                     2
  Tasks growing out of war                                         10
      Maintenance of family solidarity during absence of
      men, reinstatement of returned soldiers, Red Cross
      programs and functions of “home service.”

  Papers not devoted to a single topic included such subjects as:

     Case work as a source of information for sociology.
     Case work as contributing to democracy.
     Case work as interpreting industrial problems.
     Case work as serving those above the poverty line,
     cooperating, interpreting social work to the public,
     organizing the community, family budgets, thrift and
     pensions for widowed mothers.

 VI. INDUSTRIAL AND ECONOMIC PROBLEMS.

  Cooperation, health insurance, British labor party program,
  minimum wage, soldiers’ and sailors’ insurance, state care of
  mothers and infants, inheritance, land monopoly, the position
  of the negro in industry, trade unions in the public service,
  social work and the revolution demanded by radicals, causes
  for the existence of the I. W. W. and economic justice.


 VII. THE LOCAL COMMUNITY.

  Special needs of rural communities                               11
  Recreational facilities of all grades                             6
  Americanization on a neighborhood basis                           3
  Effects of war on a neighborhood                                  1
  Other papers not easily classified deal with various expedients
  for focussing local interest, settlements, the community store
  and community kitchen, the social unit plan, enlistment of the
  business men’s interest in community progress and councils of
  national defence.


 VIII. MENTAL HYGIENE.

  State departments or societies and other organized agencies
      for mental hygiene                                            8
  Training of social workers for the new task                       4
  Experience of the war in the care of neuroses                     3
  Care for the feeble-minded                                        3
  Mental hygiene in industry                                        3
  Mental hygiene and delinquency                                    2
  Mental hygiene and education                                      1
  One paper each on--
      Stimulation of public interest in care for the insane, the
      psychiatric element in all case work, the individual versus
      the family as the unit of social work, social problems as
      the reaction of mental types, the court’s dealings with the
      mentally afflicted, and the relation of social work to the
      state’s program, to hospitals, physicians, and the community
      in fostering mental hygiene. A few other papers present
      the actual lore of the new subject.


 IX. THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIAL FORCES.

  Publicity for social work activities and education of
     the community in appreciating them                       6
  Impetus of the war to large scale organization for common
     purposes and the desirability of integrating social
     service                                                  6
  “War chest”                                                 3
  Registration of cases                                       3
  Other papers treat of--
      Endorsement and standardization of social work agencies,
      salary standards for social workers and their labor
      turnover and teaching materials for learners.


 X. 1918--GENERAL PROBLEMS OF WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION.

       Ten papers no different in import from those in other
       sections which have been cited as discussing conditions
       created by the war.


    1919 and 1920--UNITING OF NATIVE AND FOREIGN-BORN IN AMERICA.

       State immigrant commission, labor organizations and public
       education as Americanizers, the foreign language worker
       and foreign language press, foreign organizations and
       family welfare, democracy and immigration, neighborhood
       life, and the treatment of immigrant heritages.

Such, in briefest possible outline is the scope of the annual
conference on social work. What have its papers contributed to the
correction or expansion of a definition?

The first proposition of the tentative definition was that all forms of
social work originated in a spontaneous effort to extend benefits. How
is this affected by the testimony of the conference? In the first place
it is abundantly confirmed. The conference papers deal pre-eminently
with pioneering in the extension of benefits and opportunities. The
phraseology does not always suggest this but one has only to look
beyond the phraseology to the action in order to find it. If we look
at the first section we see it to be in effect proposing that the
whole community shall deliberately and without delay rearrange not
only schools and home life but industry and general living conditions
so as to give to all its children opportunity and encouragement such
as are now given only to the most fortunate. We find it advocating a
scheme of child welfare on a county basis which shall seek out “all
children in need of care for any reason” and demanding enforcement of
proper health precautions for the children of unenlightened parents
and a real chance in life for the illegitimate child. Among the titles
of this one section at one conference appear “Progress Toward Better
Laws,” “Planks in a 1920 Platform,” “Lessons from North Carolina,”
“A Community Program, etc.”[33] But these platforms and programs
are not to be ascribed to the community in any sense except that of
being proposed for the community as a whole by social workers. At the
same conference they are discussing “Social Workers as Interpreters”
of social conditions and methods of getting “publicity” for their
aims.[34] The same sort of title takes up the tale in the next section,
a “Program” again, “Aims and Methods” twice, “A Plan,” and so on
throughout the conference. Although other professions, education and
medicine for example, are constantly busy jacking up standards, their
general undertakings are fully accepted. For all regular purveyances
of education and medicine the community has given a blanket order and
expects to pay “within reason.” Social work is in a different case
for it is constantly trying to put over something which is still but
tentatively and experimentally accepted and depends root and branch on
the willingness of some people to do, out of hand, for others.[35]

The president of the conference in 1920 referred to a “belief in human
improvableness and a willingness to tackle the job.”[36] That is as far
as the conference usually philosophises in this direction. And this
is the sort of phraseology that makes one forget that social work is
extending benefits--this casual reference to tackling the job. It is
another of the paradoxes in the development of social work (we have
already noted science rescuing personality), that when charity offered
only a minimum of rough food, uniform raiment and herded shelter to the
utterly destitute there was much made of the generosity of the donor,
but now when social work has been carried to a point where it often
provides for the handicapped a great deal better than the rank and file
manage to provide for themselves it is taken to be a case of noblesse
oblige.

We may read in the “Observations of a Philanthropist” penned a century
ago that “It’s greatly for the interests of charity that the objects of
it should be respectful and grateful. We think our kindness in a manner
repaid when it is thankfully received; it’s a pleasure then to have
done it and an incitement to do more,”[37] or in a “hospital” report
that “the number of proper objects are amply sufficient to employ the
bounty of the rich.”[38]

The difference here indicated is not accounted for by the fact that
these were the observations of philanthropists while the conference is
composed of professional social workers for whom benefaction is all in
the day’s work. As has been already indicated, the papers read at the
conference are not all by social workers. Furthermore, the “incitement”
now employed to get from all manner of men financial support for the
undertakings of social work is of a very different order. Let any
one consider the appeals which come to his desk. They contain little
to rouse his vanity and the offer of an opportunity to acquire merit
is almost as uncommon. The degree of need and the certainty of
accomplishment are the things never omitted.

This suggests the cause for change. A century ago need might equally
well have been urged, but what could then have been promised of
accomplishment? All that was then expected was surcease of the
hour’s suffering. That is a fit subject of congratulation as when
a complaisant philanthropist wrote of the London of his time there
“is not a disease that can afflict human nature nor a want which the
varying conditions of man can require but finds an open asylum, a
resort ready prepared with the needful accommodation for reception,
comfort, instruction and cure, and with the exception of a few cases
entirely free of expense.”[39]

But what is that compared with the great modern adventure of
eliminating poverty and holding disease at bay? Science has brought
to charity faith and hope in terrestrial terms. The historian who
unearthed the above statement remarks, “In theory, society consists of
a large number of charitable people; in fact the number of those who
can be properly so described is a small one. The few who are really
in earnest in their desire to alleviate distress even at the cost
of considerable expenditure of time and money, are surrounded by a
multitude of persons who are willing to assist but only provided they
can do so at no great inconvenience to themselves. This lower power of
sympathy passes gradually through the stages of languid interest to
complete indifference.”[40]

Modern social work is no longer dependent on the appeal to “sympathy”
alone. It has a wide range of interest and through its practical
application of the various social sciences it associates itself with
all our hopes of progress. Expectation not only to mitigate the effects
of calamity but to prevent its recurrence gives social work a claim on
public attention which charity never had.

Along with this change in expectation goes naturally a change in
attitude toward the beneficiaries of social work. “There can be no
line of cleavage in the advancement of public sentiment between
the development of the general social agencies such as church and
school and the more intensive forms which we have come to know as
social work.”[41] The old view of society saw many staunch persons
standing on their own feet and a few weak brethren or victimized who
needed support. But the view implied in this quotation recognizes an
interdependence among all the members of society, an interdependence of
which the particular predicament of those who happen to be in need of
social work is merely an incident.

But the speakers at the conference go still further. “So long as there
are human frailties there will be need of social workers. But let us
not forget that the larger vision of social work contemplates not
charity alone but justice, and all social ills arising from environment
are man-made and therefore changeable.”[42] If the beneficiaries of
social work are thus counted scapegoats for us all, being victims of
social injustice, then every act of prevention (and we have said that
all social work is now at some remove preventive) is for the general
safety and no more than a proper self-defence. Social work now resents
the smugness that can represent as especially disinterested any service
to those who have been paying the penalty of blunders or iniquities for
which the prosperous may be equally responsible. It is only justice to
them or less and it is sound policy for all. No wonder social work will
not stand to be considered charity! It considers its preoccupation with
the backwaters of race progress to show no gracious condescension on
its part--merely an appreciation of the extent and importance of the
backwaters.

But all this shows social work more than ever spontaneous and
gratuitous, for it does not work for even a heavenly reward; and it
must, unadmonished, stir the community to support the work it sets
itself to perform. It is only the old condescension that has gone. The
extension of benefits remains, but has become something constructive
and collectivistic.

Such a change in attitude toward benefaction would necessarily
affect the second criterion of social work proposed in our tentative
definition--its incidence in response to need. What is the testimony of
the conference on this second criterion? The analysis of subjects dealt
with in the first section reads “plans for removing _handicaps_,”
“recreational _needs_,” “_protective_ schemes,” “standards for child
_care_,” “nature and causes of _delinquency_,” “providing for
children _dependent_ on the public,” “responsibilities to _neglected_
children,” “health _needs_.” Two subjects, which as given, do not
commit themselves on the question of need complete the list. In the
second section the persons under consideration are by definition
subject to some sort of provision and control. They are delinquents.
But that the interest of the social workers is especially in fostering
and guarding them is shown by the fact that young people’s need of
protection is the subject of six papers, juvenile delinquency of
two, runaway and neglected girls of one more, while the rest deal
with adjustment of treatment to the needs of older offenders, with
probation, parole, education and the form of detention desirable in a
given case. The third section deals entirely with standards of living
in relation to disease conditions, and with means of extending medical
service. The remaining seven sections continue to show need as the
occasion of social work, but it is a sublimated sort of need which
would be much misrepresented by any classification of the beneficiaries
as “needy.” The whole level of interest has passed above and beyond
that.

As has been already indicated discussion turns on “programs,” “plans,”
“standards,” and it is in a positive and anticipatory vein as by
people embarked on a constructive undertaking. The note of initial
accomplishment is most clearly struck in the “local community”
division with such titles as “The Boy Scout and Community Building,”
“Organization of Games and Athletics in Rural Communities,” “Signs
of Rural Hope,” etc. But turn to the context and you will read, “The
Scout program recognizes the need of the boy for a recreational program
for his unused time which at the same time is educational. Scouting
also recognizes the need that the man has, etc.”[43] The neglected
rural situation, the poverty of interest in some neighborhoods--these
are what have drawn social work to undertakings that carry no hint of
remedy in the expression given their objects.

In a dynamically conceived society it is hard to say where remedy
shades into prevention and prevention into construction. Prevention
of disaster not only involves the maintenance of continuously good
conditions but the anticipation of wants. If we are not to have
juvenile delinquency boys must have some chance for wholesome
recreation. If we would avoid bad housing we must arrange betimes a
good city plan preserving open spaces where they will be wanted later
and developing each type of building in a neighborhood where it need
not be soon perverted to a use for which it was not intended and will
not be well adapted.

Dr. Simon Patten contended that the present productivity of the world
was such as to free mankind from any fear of general dearth and cause
all our prospects to be potentially in terms of abundance and not of
want, to rescue us from the old “pain economy” of insufficiency and
give us a “pleasure economy” on a safe margin of sufficiency. Under
these circumstances, he said, “world riches may replace the living
sacrifice and become the social contrivance that lowers human costs
and we must cease to think that the anguish of the sentient creature
is compensated by the development of moral qualities which merely
reconcile man to repeating the experience of suffering.”[44] Social
work has already ceased to think in that fashion and is working in
the spirit of a pleasure economy so that the terminology of need is
no longer pre-eminent. “There are times when self-sacrificing zeal is
demanded and all honor to those who then devote or lose themselves in
service. That is only one side of it. The need of sacrifice is always a
reflection on the men or circumstances calling for it.”[45] That is the
view of modern social work, the frame of mind in which it sets about
its work. It talks about what has to be done as a matter of course and
is chiefly concerned with the best way of doing it. It is beginning
to outgrow “sob stories” even in asking support from an indifferent
public--they set too low a standard of toleration and there are some
modern social workers who turn from them abashed, as from dallying with
an outrage beneath endurance. The battle ground of reform must be on
another plain where the initiated see danger but the complaisant still
need convincing.

“When once the worst is gone the second best becomes intolerable.”
Gray, the historian of English philanthropy, describes the effective
philanthropist as the ideal agitator, “It is his to discover
those larger ends of common welfare which reach beyond the moral
perceptiveness of ordinary men in their ordinary moods. He is, as it
were, an explorer in the unmapped world of the ideal life from whence
he brings back news of an unreached good, such tidings as sound like
travelers’ tales in our ears, but which haunt the mind of men until
they seek to verify the story by a practical policy calculated to
transform the actual. Only it must be observed that the most daring
speculator cannot move very far from his base and the wildest Utopia is
determined by the conditions of its year of publication.”[46]

“I hold,” said Dr. Southard to the 1919 conference, “whatever
the ideal order, the practical order of work called social work
begins with the eradication of evil. It may sound better to sow
goodness or to transplant goodness, or even to graft goodness in
the eager social world, and beautiful little gardens of Eden or
smaller cases of goodness can be shown here and there to the social
visitor--nevertheless, I hold, with the prejudice of a physician
perhaps, the eradications of evil are more in the first order of our
work than disseminations, transplantations, and grafts of goodness.
At any rate, if there be anything at all in the millennial hopes and
ingrained optimisms of Spencerian evolution, it is plain that by and
large we are putting evil behind us and arriving at goodness by a
clever technique of successful destruction.”[47] This “eradication of
evil” may, as one side of the “technique” of evolution, operate in the
terms of any developing organization; but in terms of eradication of
evil, not in its own functioning or its subject, but in the conditions
of its object it is not common outside of social work. It is not to be
found in the business world where all purveyance shuns the applicant
most in need of its wares and seeks the one best able to pay. It is
not to be found in the law, which tries to hold the scales even to all
comers. It is only slightly and intermittently in state-craft which
while it is coming more and more to inhibit abuse of the helpless
does still, from an age-old sense of security in the alliance with
wealth and power, bend its constructive energies to encouragement of
the prosperous. It is not even in education, which constantly tends
to provide in each school grade teaching suitable for those who will
have longest to study and is only importuned by demands from _outside_
to cater in the lower grades to those who must get in them all the
education they are ever to have. Social work stands alone in its
purely personal championship of the less secure in prosperity. It is in
its enormous demands for them that it seems to have turned to purely
constructive things.

It is indeed possible that along the lines of prevention social work is
developing a function which is positive in the same sense as hygiene is
positive in the field of medicine and that social work will, to that
extent, independently “plant good” as well as “eradicate evil.” But it
is also possible, and in the light of past developments more probable,
that any constructive phase of social work which proves permanent
should come to be looked on as a routine purveyance and no longer
considered social work. This we have already seen to have happened in
the case of free education and many other things.

The conference has thus confirmed and filled out the elementary
features of social work which it inherits from charity, voluntary
benefaction and response to need. What does it have to say of the
qualifying features that have transformed charity into social work--the
emergence of the individual as the only and sufficient nexus for its
services and the adoption of scientific guidance?

The first of these has already been touched on in relation to the
first section. Throughout the second the discussion all bears on the
prevention of delinquency or the care of delinquents. There is not
much discussion of pure justice, the burden of the argument is all
that we should “approach every individual prisoner with conscientious
determination to give him the best service of which we are capable,
realizing that his future is largely in our hands.”[48] A public
defender is asked for “in order that every person accused, no matter
how poor, may have a full and fair trial.”[49] And for sentenced
prisoners social work asks something more than mere detention, “we
used to look upon them, in the stage of repression, en masse. * *
* Instead of committing a man to a particular institution he is now
committed to the custody of a board of control * * * to be examined *
* * to determine just where he will fit into school or industry. The
man will be assigned by his board, to the particular prison to which he
is best suited for mental and physical treatment.”[50] “If a child who
is mentally sound comes into court with a mind bent on the commission
of some offence he should be sent to a special school having for its
purpose the education of such children. Let the great departments
of psychology and sociology of our colleges and universities devise
a course of instruction and education that will reclaim a juvenile
delinquent who is mentally and physically sound”[51] and “we should
extend the methods developed in the Children’s Courts to apply to all
ages, wiping out our arbitrary age line by improving the treatment of
the older groups.”[52]

It is in this section that there appears at its plainest the paradox
that the questions purely dependent on what we call personality are
questions of social relationship and all genuinely social questions are
questions of personal life. A public policy is justified in terms of
personal benefit but interest is claimed for personal difficulties on
the ground that they illuminate public issues.

The third division is one that speaks quite unequivocally concerning
the nature of social work, for there is an old and kindly profession
already established in this field and social work must justify its
own entrance there. All of the subjects in this health section are of
interest to the doctor as well as the social worker, but for the doctor
they throw light on the causes and cures of disease, for the social
worker they are a point of departure for active work to establish
better standards of living. Nineteen of the papers presented deal
specifically with that subject. Five more deal with the co-ordination
of various health agencies--a task in social engineering. One speaker,
himself a physician, reports no less than ten agencies united in
efforts to improve a city’s health. Only four of these (the board
of health, the hospital, the tuberculosis society and the medical
profession) were permanently concerned with health. The other six,
the schools, the park department, the city statistics department, the
industries, insurance companies and churches were enlisted, as the
context shows, as so many agents establishing connections with the
individual beneficiaries of the campaign. The work of choosing them
and enlisting their co-operation demanded a knowledge of social not of
physiological conditions.

In the next section, that devoted to public agencies and institutions,
the conspicuous fact is that social work does not forget that public
care is for private people. It hardly seems necessary to quote
from all the sections even in pursuit of this most elusive of the
characteristics of social work. One more citation will be enough.
“We social workers have our contribution to make to that ultimate
attainment of democracy which must be wrought out, not in uniformity
but in diversity, not only in the right of man to individual freedom
but in his ability to enter into that right.”[53]

The extension of the sense of public responsibility, the realization
that reform must come in all the interlocking activities of a highly
organized business, political and social life has tempted some people
to think that the days of social work are numbered or to seek out for
it some highly specialized or recondite function. But if we are right
in ascribing to it this function of challenging all forms of service
to reach and satisfy individual needs it may be more important in the
future than in the past. Wholesale and collectivist methods call for
constant adaptation of general means to particular cases and the more
we give of government service the more we may need of social work.
The more varied our health service, the more flexible and extensible
our educational opportunities, the more occasions there will be for
adjustment. Such follow-up work as is done by hospitals and by the
workmen’s compensation office, the work of the mothers’ assistance
fund, of the voluntary experiments in special nutrition classes,
vocational guidance, and scholarships for trade school attendance, are
only a few examples of the kind of thing social work branches into as
established agencies extend their own responsibilities.

The fact that social work rescues people who fall through the meshes
of the school system, people dismissed from clinical treatment only to
return to a regimen bound to revive their troubles, that it discovers
the round pegs in square holes and the neglected groups and anomalous
cases has caused other people to see it as all converging in a liaison
work which shall ultimately be all there is left for it to perform
and which shall be in essence social case work. From what has already
been said it will be evident that there is no reason to think that
social work which has been so prolific of criticism of our established
institutions and a pioneer in experiment should cease to exercise this
function, which is as infinite in possibilities as the life of man
itself, or even that it will cease to work along lines of inquiry or
of group work. That little word “social” opens up the possibilities
of all the permutations and combinations in human consciousness. The
conference at least hints that social work knows it.

And what of the method by which social work is to be conducted. Is it,
as the tentative definition said, suggested by the social sciences?
There is not a great deal of explicit reference to social science,
but the concepts of economics, social psychology and sociology are
constantly in evidence and even political science has its say in an
“engineering” conception of the state, in definitions of democracy
and in criteria of progress. The almost complete disappearance of
the question of relative responsibility of the individual and society
which morality and philosophy have debated in so many forms testifies
to assimilation of the sociological concept of social life as an
integration of individual lives rather than an aggregation and of the
individual life as no digit but an incident “* * * time moves swiftly
in the social field and the special knowledge of today easily becomes
the common knowledge of tomorrow.”[54] And after all that has been said
in the preceding pages of the obvious effects of a scientific method
and scientific attitude in making social work what the conference shows
it to be it scarcely remains to prove or even argue the confirmation,
the reinforcement, the expansion of the last qualification of social
work.

Nine round-table conferences and five committee reports, in addition
to the papers presenting concrete programs and reports of local
experiments testify to the careful checking up of method. The constant
references to programs, standards and experience, to records and
the search for causes, the emphasis on prevention and the patient,
objective, therapeutic attitude of the social worker all testify to the
conquest of the field by science. But the completeness and significance
of that conquest are plainest in the ever-present, implicit but
unmistakable assumption that all the undertakings discussed are
parts of a systematically coordinated campaign based upon continuing
observation of cause and effect.

Thus have the reports of the conference confirmed and filled out the
tentative definition. But the analysis did not cull from them any
fresh characteristics of social work. Their mass of commentary, aimed,
as it seemed, in all possible directions, would suggest no testimony
except in answer to leading questions and we will have to be satisfied
with such expansion of the definition as, while adding no new terms,
commits the already proposed items to more significant implications.
The definition so expanded must be passed on, for challenge or
alteration by the evidence of the training schools.


FOOTNOTES:

[32] The 1920 conference heard from four judges (three of them of
juvenile courts), three college professors and one college president,
a bishop, a rabbi, a governor, and a state commander of the American
Legion, as well as from doctors and other professional people who
occupied positions ranking as social work.

[33] Conference, 1919, pp. 111, 123, 133, 136.

[34] Ibid. 1920, pp. 271 and 278.

[35] Ibid. pp. 188, 111, 129, 135 and 298.

[36] Ibid. p. 4.

[37] History of English Philanthropy, p. 269.

[38] Ibid., p. 273.

[39] Ibid., p. 271, referring to the opening of the 18th century.

[40] Ibid., p. 266.

[41] Conference, 1920, p. 74.

[42] Ibid., p. 77.

[43] Ibid., p. 267.

[44] The New Basis of Civilization, p. 55.

[45] Philanthropy and the State, p. 235.

[46] Ibid., p. 302.

[47] Conference, 1919, p. 583.

[48] Ibid., 1918, p. 147.

[49] Ibid., p. 171.

[50] Ibid., 1919, p. 100.

[51] Ibid., 1918, p. 126.

[52] Ibid., p. 136.

[53] Conference, 1918, p. 287.

[54] R. W. Kelso, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 22, No. 1.




CHAPTER V

THE TESTIMONY OF THE SCHOOLS


There are some fifteen schools for the training of social workers,[55]
independent institutions or university departments. The younger among
them have not followed at all closely the organization or practices of
the older[56] and all work in close co-operation with local social work
agencies, farming their students out with these for practice work and
drawing lecturers from the agency staffs. The varied curricula of the
schools seem therefore to offer direct evidence of what is considered
in their respective regions, the most necessary equipment for social
workers.

Only three school catalogues venture any characterization of the tasks
for which their courses equip. Toronto gives the most inclusive. “The
sense of social obligation and interdependence has grown greater as
our social life has grown more complex. The more social conditions
have been studied, the more apparent has it become that many of our
worst evils are due to the lack of the science which should direct and
stimulate the sense of our solidarity. In recent years governments,
municipal and other authorities, industrial corporations and voluntary
associations of all kinds have been compelled to make ever-extending
provisions for industrial protection, social insurance, public health
service, housing improvement, recreation and various other forms of
organized social effort. All these activities have created the sphere
of a new profession, that of the trained social worker.” Here are the
familiar “sense of social obligation,” the reference to a “science
which should direct and stimulate this sense,” the “_ever-extending_
provisions” prompted by it and, unmentioned but obviously implicit, a
constant concern with things subject to amelioration: “protection,”
“insurance,” “service,” “improvement,” “recreation”--these are the
substantives in its main statement. The Ohio catalogue itemizes the
demands of social service on a training school[57] but the only
generalization to be deduced from the list is that they all imply
a purpose of rescue or amelioration. The Simmons characterization
confines itself entirely to emphasizing the implications of the word
“social”[58] and the Missouri school opens its catalogue with the
discouraging statement that “it is impossible at the present time to
construct a satisfactory definition of social work.”

This exhausts the slender sheaf of direct comment. For further
enlightenment we must analyse the offered equipment itself. The nature
of the training given will predict the nature of the work expected to
follow. There are a great many courses offered and the variety not of
nomenclature only but of apparent content is enough for bewilderment.
Classification of the courses according to the type of preparation they
seem to offer does however sort them into three main groups.

 A. Courses which introduce the student to the social sciences and the
      methods and concepts on which these rest.

 B. Courses which offer information on the field of social work both
      past and present.

 C. Courses which equip specifically for certain social work tasks.

In the first group, that of courses introducing the student to the
social sciences, their methods and concepts, fall sociology courses of
various sorts, courses in (1) general sociology, (2) the history of
institutions, (3) theories of social progress, (4) the value of norms
of income and opportunity for a given level of civilization, (5) the
means of “social control.” Here also belong courses in (6) general
psychology, (7) social psychology, (8) statistics and (9) economics.

In the second group, that of courses offering information on the
general field of social work, fall courses on (1) the nature and mutual
relations of contemporary social work undertakings, (2) the history of
philanthropy and (3) current social problems. Here ought also to be
put (4) the courses offered by five schools in the causes of poverty,
because poverty has been an age-long challenge to philanthropy and is
still the proximate occasion for a great part of social work.

For the third group are left courses in about forty subjects pertaining
to special fields or special methods. These subjects overlap and
interchange material but yield to classification as preparatory for
work in eight or nine fairly distinguishable fields.

 1. Work in the interest of the public health, mental or physical.

 2. Organization of community groups on various scales in both urban
      and rural areas.

 3. Work in connection with industry.

 4. Work in the interest of children.

 5. Work with people socially handicapped because of race or recent
      immigration.

 6. Work in connection with the enactment or administration of social
      legislation.

 7. Work with defectives.

 8. Housing.

A ninth field may be made of social case work, as when it appears
under such titles as “family rehabilitation,” but it must also be
recognized as a technique more or less utilized in six of the eight
other fields. There remain a few other technical courses such as those
in record keeping.

The schools, all but four,[59] arrange their courses in departments
varying in number from two to ten. Altogether seventeen different
fields are indicated by the several schools and under them are
variously grouped the forty subjects taught.[60] These very involved
curricula dealing, as they do, in such staggering propositions as the
nature of progress and the causes of poverty, and seeming in their
explicit statements unanimous in nothing which might serve the cause of
definition do give certain collective testimony.

In the first place they are agreed that social work comprises a variety
of separate callings demanding differential training. The differential
training is not the result of specialization after receiving a common
training. Most schools while requiring a certain amount of common
background for all students recognize no general course and require
every student to enroll in one or another department.

Secondly, in making a great deal of elective work interchangeable among
the special courses and requiring certain prerequisites for all courses
alike they all recognize a close relation between the various branches
of social work.

Thirdly, they show that the work they prepare for is not “social”
in the merely vague sense of having a public interest. It is social
in the specific sense of dealing with people in their relations to
other people. Its prerequisite is not physiology, the science of
that part of man which can develop in isolation, but psychology, the
science of intelligence which develops only in contact with other
intelligences. We can see this in the contrast between the training
given in a medical school and that given in a school for social
workers. The former teaches a great deal about man’s physical make-up
and its hazards but very little about his mental make-up: while the
latter may teach enough of sanitary practice to understand a doctor’s
directions, almost always teaches something of mental life and always a
great deal about social settings and the available means of improving
them. This “social” interest is constant throughout the schools. The
courses in industry, for example, do not teach efficiency engineering
or price fixing but personnel management and other matters presumably
ministering directly to the well being of the workers. These schools
do not equip for the advancement of any particular science. Philosophy
and art of any sort enter them only as casual visitors. They teach in
the name of no single creed and formulate no specific purpose. Despite
their enormous array of topics their interest remains essentially
personal.

Fourthly, the schools are more or less consciously training crusaders.
The word “problem” is in frequent use. It is freely applied to
difficulties not outstandingly problematical and its use in place
of any harsher or less hopeful word indicates the notion of arming
rescuers with a solution. The word “standard” with its implication of
something attainable but not always attained, “prevention,” “service,”
“welfare,” “relief,” “correction,” “treatment,” appear thickly
scattered among the subject titles and one is surely justified in
inferring that to make changes for the better is not to be for the
social worker as for most men a rare bright spot in the routine of
labor, but his very stock-in-trade and justification for existence.

Lastly, the requirement of a certain amount of study of the social
sciences followed by methodical training in special lines, together
with supervised practice work after the manner of a technical school,
testifies to the important parts played in the preparation of social
workers by both scientific method and the lore of the social sciences.

Beyond this it does not seem safe to generalise. These five conclusions
about social work indicated by the school catalogues suggest that it
is an alliance of distinct but closely related callings furthering
“social” welfare in a quite specific sense. Secondly, they imply that
the social worker is a rescuer and champion equipped for his tilt
from the armory of the social sciences. Does not this come to about
the same thing as is described in our tentative definition, a group
of activities looked upon as so many phases of a single undertaking
because they all attempt to extend benefits in response to a need; are
all concerned with social relationships; and all avail themselves of
scientific knowledge and employ scientific methods.

The schools then, like the conference, confirm the tentative definition
but do not expand it by the addition of any new terms. It is possible
that social work as a whole has no more common features. But it is,
of course, also possible that other features could be found if we had
some fresh clue to them. The present study, having put all its leading
questions must again content itself with adding to the already accepted
terms of the definition such further implications as the curricula
suggest--and again we find these implications to come from the use of
science for philanthropic purposes.

The courses most commonly “required” for all students in the schools
are those treating the social sciences. What do these offer to
the incipient social worker? The courses in sociology--especially
those which thirteen of the schools offer in the history of certain
institutions or in race comparisons--give perspective. They show
institutions changing in form and function. They show ideas of
right changing as the institutions change, temporary institutions
conditioning our lives even in the matters a layman supposes
instinctive. They force a student to look outside the setting of
custom and creed into which, like every other man, he has been born.
They show him the provincialism of sweeping judgments pronounced on
the basis of sectional, sectarian or class standards. They teach him
in a professional capacity (if in no other) to recognize varieties
of good. Yet all the while they are making possible a simpler and
more objectified conception of individuality than it is easy for the
uninstructed to entertain. We look with something very like amusement
on the animistic and anthropomorphic views of natural phenomena
entertained by primitive men and yet we are only just beginning to
realize that the subjective interpretations and moral judgments with
which we have so long been satisfied in respect to humanity are equally
arbitrary and deductive and that man also is, up to a certain point a
natural phenomenon to be inductively considered. In such perspective
praise and blame become to many issues irrelevant and we begin soberly
to reckon the possibilities of education in the compass of individual
lifetimes.

Psychology, after sociology the science most frequently taught in the
schools, pushes further the process sociology began. It shows that our
most intimate convictions are not axiomatic. It shows the thought that
is our very selves to be half the creation of others, and makes the
question of individual blameworthiness a merely practical one of what
forces are to be reckoned with in a given situation.

The third of the general sciences taught is statistics, the language of
collective fact. By discovering norms it shows danger lines. It tells
what food and what air and what income are necessary to support life
in an average individual and what degree of development is usual in a
child of a given age and what degree of intelligence suffices to keep
people out of trouble without the protection of a guardian. It gives
the charitably inclined hard facts with which to face the indifferent
and firm ground to stand on in demanding reform. At first sight it
looks like a means to intolerable regimentation but rightly used it
is a charter of freedom. Given a knowledge of the margin of safety we
can make a concerted attack on substandard conditions while allowing
indefinite variation above the danger line and the mere nonconformist
need not be dreaded or attacked for simple nonconformity.

Thus may courses in social science give to many a raw recruit of
social work grounds for acting with the tolerance, the respect for
individuals, the single and unaccusing eye on present and future
possibilities which their elders and maybe betters had (when they
had them at all) as the rare and not to be commanded gifts of sheer
humanity and wisdom.

Here is the contribution of science to social work which touches its
vital center, refines the very impulse that animates it, as it animated
its predecessors and keeps it true to form among the distractions
of technical formality. No study can produce imagination, sympathy,
generosity or good taste any more than it can give a student a better
brain, but what it can do is to give to persons of only average
perspicacity and humanity the understanding to act with some degree of
intelligence and consideration where the untrained average person would
make cruel and disastrous blunders.

The tentative definition of social work which we sought to test and
add to by the testimony of conference and school curricula has gained
no fresh terms but it has gained in significance and, taken together
with all its implications, makes of social work something thoroughly
definitive and characteristic. But the definition was wanted for
practical purposes and before dropping the subject it will be necessary
to inquire whether it can in any degree serve them.


FOOTNOTES:

[55] For a list of schools see the Appendix. The list comprises the
membership of the “Association of Training Schools for Professional
Social Workers,” organized 1919.

[56] All information in this chapter is from the school catalogues for
the years 1920-21 or 1921-22 (the latest available when this study was
begun) or from correspondence with the schools.

[57] Social service “calls for a knowledge of the principles of
social organization, the conditions which cause poverty and may lead
to dependency, the social and psychological factors involved in the
training of youth, the methods of promoting thrift and independence
among the laboring classes, the many experiments which have been made
in the field of social legislation and the relations between these
various theories and activities.”

[58] “The purpose of the School of Social Work is to give professional
training in the art of adjusting personal relations. Social workers
also have to do with food, clothing, shelter, and medical attention,
but these are incidental to their main work of adjusting differences
which arise in the relations between people, e.g., between school
authorities and parents and parents and pupils, between family and
community.”

[59] Four schools which are integral parts of universities with many of
the courses their students are expected to take organized as parts of
other departments are not divided as are the independently organized
schools and those whose college connection is not so involved.

[60] For list see Appendix II, C.




CHAPTER VI

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.