CHARITY

Prior to the Great Depression, private charity played a critical, if supplemental, role in the nation's patchwork relief system. Although public and private charities grew considerably between 1910 and 1929, private charity constituted barely one quarter of all aid in 1929. But because private agencies administered most relief funds, their values shaped virtually all public programs that emerged before and during the 1930s.

Between 1929 and 1931 most politicians and professionals believed that the expansion of private charity would help the nation overcome its devastating economic problems. Through emergency appeals, private charity quadrupled to $170 million in two years—34 percent of all relief funds. As its primary funders, the community chests remained strong proponents of private charity, as did the Herbert Hoover administration, which extolled its virtues despite clear evidence that private charities lacked adequate resources to cope with rising unemployment.

The economic crisis quickly exhausted even the best efforts of private charities. For example, the number of families on relief in Detroit increased from four thousand to forty-five thousand between October 1930 and January 1931. In Cleveland, nearly ten times as many families received charity in mid-1932 than had received it in 1929.

In 1930, the community chests raised $84.8 million in 386 cities. This was only an $8 million increase over the 1929 total and it had to be distributed among 33 more cities. Even a model city such as Philadelphia, which was spending about __BODY__ million each month on private charity, could not cope with the increasing need. Funds were stretched so thin that 57,000 families received between __BODY__.50 and $2 per person per week, plus a little coal, some food, and used clothing. By November 1931, Philadelphia had exhausted its charitable funds.

Although private charities feared that an expanded public welfare system would hurt their ability to raise funds, by late 1931 they recognized that existing networks of relief could not adequately respond to increased demands for assistance, especially in major cities. Conflicts emerged, however, between city officials, who faced growing pressure to act, and business leaders, who argued that such actions would stifle economic recovery.

Private charities also could not raise new resources because their primary donors—working and middle-class people—lacked the income to contribute. By late 1931 their national organizations reluctantly conceded that federal intervention was imperative. The 1932 Republican platform, however, affirmed the party's position that relief was primarily a private responsibility.

As relief programs expanded during the Depression, traditional distinctions between the "worthy" and "unworthy" poor persisted. In New York, private charities classified the newly unemployed separately and assigned their cases to unpaid junior staff. Throughout the 1930s, racial discrimination continued to create barriers for the receipt of charity among African Americans, although they were twice as likely as whites to be certified as eligible.

The policies of the Franklin Roosevelt administration continued such practices even as they dramatically expanded public relief. In January 1935 Roosevelt spoke of the differences between the "productive" and "unproductive" poor, and, at the height of the New Deal, the government continued to assume that private charity was best suited to address the needs of the "old poor." Public relief programs maintained a central feature of private charities—their emphasis on investigation, which persisted long after the Depression.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Axinn, June, and Mark Stern. Social Welfare: A History of the American Response to Need, 5th edition. 2001.

Katz, Michael B. The Price of Citizenship: Redefining the American Welfare State. 2001.

Margolin, Leslie. Under the Cover of Kindness: The Invention of Social Work. 1997.

Patterson, James. America's Struggle against Poverty in the Twentieth Century. 2000.

Watkins, T. H. The Great Depression: America in the 1930s. 1993.

Wenocur, Stanley, and Michael Reisch. From Charity to Enterprise: The Development of American Social Work in a Market Economy. 1989.