Social work

The field of social work emerged at the turn of the 20th century as a major new profession in the United States. The first use of the term “social work” was at a National Conference of Charities and Corrections meeting in 1897. From that time on, the term encompassed a broad range of activities, including the traditional work of charities, increasingly known as philanthropy; the care of poor, disabled, and orphaned individuals through private institutions; industrial social work, sometimes called welfare work; hospital or medical social work; settlement house work; and the social services of public relief agencies. During these years, charitable institutions and universities created the new field of social work education, some of which emphasized supervision of clients through the casework method. There were as well growing differences between social workers, which put progressive social reformers at odds with those dedicated to the profession of social work alone.

By 1900, many private charitable organizations, which had been among the first to respond to the urban poor, lacked sufficient resources to address the multiplying social ills of the industrial age. Work accidents, high infant and maternal mortality, family violence, delinquency and

Social worker talking with young girl in her home in New York City, 1913. Photograph by Lewis W. Hine (Library of Congress)

Crime, and public health crises all seemed on the increase. A new generation of social reformers, many involved in the Settlement House Movement, emerged that combined concern about social disorder with a philosophy of political empowerment. According to Jane Addams, founder of Hull-House, there was a social necessity for settlements, both in addressing the needs of urban immigrants and in providing an almost religious calling for the young. In industry, new calls for efficiency in factories and greater control were often accompanied by programs to provide health care at the workplace, create recreational programs, offer education, especially in citizenship skills, and even to supervise workers’ home lives. Collectively, welfare capitalism demanded more personnel workers and the hiring of industrial social workers to attend to workers’ needs.

Even as the need for social workers grew, so too did questions about what held them together as a profession. In 1915 at the National Conference of Social Work meeting, Abraham Flexner, assistant secretary of the General Education Board and the man responsible for reforming medical education, addressed a gathering of social workers. At that meeting, he raised the question of whether social work was a profession. He frankly told his listeners that it was not. It lacked a common method, approach, or technique that could be taught, and the variety of tasks assigned to social workers made it impossible to define its boundaries. Moreover, the task of distributing relief to the poor was a task almost anyone could do. In response to Flexner’s challenge, social work leaders looked toward professional associations to create a collective identity and advertise the value of their work to society as a whole. Casework, in the end, was the collective answer to Flexner’s implicit question.

Early professional organization began as social workers started professional clubs in cities across the country. The Monday Club of Boston was the first such organization; it was quickly followed in the 1910s by clubs in New York, Detroit, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and other cities. Meeting to discuss their work and the problems they faced, the clubs were the first step toward national organization and would form the basis for local chapters of a national organization. In 1921, members of social work organizations from across the country met to form the American Association of Social Workers, which became the National Association of Social Workers in 1955. The organization provided a forum in which to discuss professional standards, present findings of social research and exchange information, encourage professional training, and recruit new members.

More importantly, the move to create social work training and degree programs enhanced the status of social work as a profession. Responding to a call for better training of social workers, the New York Charity Organization Society created first a summer training program for social workers in 1898. Later established as the New York School of Social Work (later affiliated with Columbia University), it became an academic program that combined internships with social study. Soon after, in 1904, Boston Associated Charities, Simmons College, and Harvard University established the Boston School of Social Work. In 1907, Graham Taylor of Chicago Commons Settlement and Julia Lathrop of Hull-House helped found the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy (later the University of Chicago School of Social Work). In keeping with its settlement house origins, the school curriculum combined social science research, social policy, and public administration. By 1910, there were five major schools of social work providing some form of graduate training. In 1915 Bryn Mawr developed a postbaccalaureate program, and Ohio State University, Indiana University, and the University of Minnesota established the first undergraduate degrees in social work. The trend toward greater education continued throughout the 1920s.

Central to a number of programs was the new method of casework. As many social workers argued, social work had to become scientific. First articulated in Mary Richmond’s 1917 book, Social Diagnosis, casework combined the traditional approach of friendly visiting with social scientific method. Occasional notes, intuition, and talk with peers were replaced with systematic case record, theories of scientific philanthropy, casebook studies, and professional guidance through journals, conferences, and consultation with experts. Above all, there was an emphasis on diagnosis and cure of individual ills. By 1918, a new tool became available to social workers, as Freudian psychology became more influential in social work education. In 1918, Smith College established a School of Psychiatric Social Work to train students in working with mental patients. Probing the personality and emotional history of clients promised to aid social workers in performing their duties and to provide relief tailored to individual need. Psychiatric casework also had the possibility of completely severing the profession of social work from its unscientific past. In opposition to this approach stood those social workers who continued to believe that environment, not heredity or individual pathology, was the key to understanding the poor and to solving their problems. Change the environment, and you change the person. The tension between the two schools of thought continued to dog social work and social policy throughout the 20th century.

Despite debates over how to solve the problems of poverty, the state’s expanding role in providing assistance and relief enhanced the reputation of and demand for social workers. Apart from the growth of city relief boards, there was as well a need for social workers in the new juvenile justice system, in schools and through city recreation programs, and in supervising new social programs. The most important relief program created in these years was MOTHERS’ PENSIONS. By 1911, the states of Illinois and Missouri began to provide so-called mothers’ aid, or “mothers’ pensions,” to supplement the wages of widowed mothers and to enable them to keep their children in the home. By 1920, 40 states and hundreds of counties had implemented some version of the program. Overall, it was believed that this program protected mothers faced with poverty in retaining their financial independence and improving their family lives. The rule of the program, and the prejudices of its administrators, limited mothers’ pensions to white, largely native-born, widowed mothers. The standards for eligibility were strict, and no divorced or deserted wives were thought to have the same claim as widows to state supplemental income. Moreover, when mothers were granted a pension, they agreed to moral supervision and random investigation demanded by the state with any relief allowance. The mothers’ pension program thus required states to hire a new corps of workers to supervise the program. While mothers’ pensions were never adequately funded, the simple existence of the new bureaucratic agency called for even greater numbers of social work professionals.

The period between 1900 and 1930 saw major new policy initiatives at the state and local levels that increased the need for trained social workers. So, too, did new programs for social work in private industry, public education, and PUBLIC HEALTH. For young men and women committed to a progressive social vision, and those who simply wanted employment that had meaning, the social work profession offered engagement with the public, a moral and even religious mission, and the possibility of helping to change American society. Along with these ideals there was the concrete reality of poverty, chronic disease, the need for education and for hope among the urban immigrant working class and in African-American communities. Taking a role in addressing these problems ennobled some and made others dispirited. Social work became a profession by combining these challenges with the individual desire for prestige and status. By the end of the 1920s, social workers faced the coming crisis of unemployment during the Great Depression with a range of tactics from investigation and casework to unionization and social protest; but they did so with renewed belief in the ability of their profession to solve the social ills.

See also criminal justice; youth.

Further reading: John Ehrenreich, The Altruistic Imagination; A History of Social Work and Social Policy in the United States (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press 1985); Roy Lubove, The Professional Altruist; The Emergence of Social Work as a Career, 1880-1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965); Daniel Walkowitz, Working with Class: Social Workers and the Politics of Middle-Class Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

Soldiers' Bonus (Soldiers' Adjusted Compensation Act) (1924)

Following the end of World War I, there were significant pressures to increase soldiers’ compensation, especially given the abysmal pay of soldiers and the institution of military conscription. In response, Congress passed an act to grant soldiers a $60 bonus on their discharge from the army. When the newly organized and powerful American Legion began to assess the value or damage of wartime service, its leadership suggested a program for further compensation based on the idea of renegotiating “the soldier’s contract for service” with the government. The argument was simple. Soldiers had been disadvantaged in not benefiting from the war boom and lost real wages in the bargain. Railroads and industries had received government largess and bonuses during the war. Industrial workers earned high wages for their labor and, according to bonus advocates, now wore “silk shirts.” The American public was saved for democracy and incidentally became rich. These forces had their reward. It was only “just due” that a government that scrimped on soldiers’ wages, failed to help them adjust to civilian life, and did not guarantee jobs should be forced to ante up.

Veterans’ advocates both independently and in the American Legion arrived at a scheme for the government to adjust its payments to veterans to include wages they lost during their wartime service. Based on length of service and time abroad, the proposed Soldiers’ Bonus was determined by deducting military pay from the wages that soldiers would have earned as civilians. The government would pay its obligation to veterans as a lump sum payment with interest, due in 1945. Bonus advocates hoped that the long period of time between the Adjusted Compensation Act and the payment of the Bonus would make it more politically palatable. Between 1920 and 1924, however, the plan for additional compensation provoked opposition from across the political spectrum.

Attempts to pass veterans’ legislation for the Bonus failed in 1920, 1921, and again in 1922, when President Warren G. Harding, not opposed to the bill in principle, still vetoed it as an economy measure. In his veto message, he argued “It is as inevitable as that the years will pass that provision for World War veterans will be made, as it has been made for those who served in previous wars.” Financial considerations, however, forced the government to postpone its obligation. “In a personal as well as public manner,” Harding said, “I have commended the policy of generous treatment of the nation’s defenders, not as a part of any contract, not as the payment of a debt which is owing, but as a mark of the nation’s gratitude.” In essence Harding chose to voice his own support but let his advisers have their way. As Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon argued, “the country is staggering under the existing burden of taxation and debt, and is clamoring for gradual relief from war taxation.” The last thing that was needed was a new financial burden. Further, military service was an obligation of citizenship and should not be rewarded. In a decade given to the scaling back of government machinery, the Bonus was seen as contrary to the will and interests of the people. Neither Mellon nor Harding mentioned the escalating cost of creating and sustaining the Veterans Bureau and its hospitals.

After much debate and amendment, Congress in 1924 passed the Soldiers’ Adjusted Compensation Act (nicknamed the Soldiers’ Bonus) over a presidential veto. Designed to compensate individual soldiers for income lost during the war, it was funded by 20-year insurance certificates (25 percent increase plus 4 percent annually compounded interest) payable in 1945. Its success was due in large part to the power of organized veterans in the American Legion. The legion, which was modeled on the Civil War veterans’ organization, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), improved on the basic idea of military pensions. As one American Legion leader wrote, “We extracted more from Congress in one year than the GAR did in its whole existence.” The legion excelled in pragmatic politics. Its original plan for the Bonus postponed payment for 20 years; no immediate provision for empowering tax revenues was included in the bill, and there was that common-sense “rational” calculus of lost wages. For these reasons, they were able to overcome objections about the need for a balanced budget. In the years ahead, they and other veterans’ groups pushed for the early payment of the Soldiers’ Bonus, a drive that sparked the Bonus March of 1932 and the final, early payment of the Bonus during the Great Depression.

Further reading: Jennifer Keene, Doughboys, the Great War and the Remaking of America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).