Self-Reliance Before the Welfare State: Evidence from the Charity Organization Movement in the United States

If charity could hurry the self-reliance of America's able-bodied "worthy" poor it would likely have happened in Indianapolis at the height of the charity organization movement.

Mary MacKinnon examined a movement in Britain to shrink the systems of "public outdoor relief"--the tax-financed benefits in cash and in-kind that had been assisting the poor since the first Elizabeth. MacKinnon asked in particular if poor law unions, under the influence of charity organization societies, stood to gain in the 1860s by endorsing the substitution of outdoor relief with an expanded workhouse system. Likewise, in a book-length study, Robert Humphreys emphasized the finance and administration of organized charity rather more than the relief and labor-market experiences of the poor who took it. Still, Humphreys argued from aggregated, municipal-level evidence that organized charity "failed miserably" in its main concern: to build the self-reliance of the poor. To date, economic historians have not examined the charity organization movement of the United States. And any household-level evidence on the time-path of dependency and self-support has been lacking. This article examines evidence from late-nineteenth-century Indianapolis, the site, historians of welfare agree, of the nation's purest experiment with privatization. The article uses 25 years of household-level duration data to test whether the self-reliance of the able-bodied worthy poor was in fact advanced when a conventional system of public relief was replaced with charity organization and its society of "friendly visitors."

WHAT WAS THE CHARITY ORGANIZATION MOVEMENT?

The charity organization movement began auspiciously in 1869 when the Society for Organizing Charitable Relief and Repressing Mendicity was established in London. The founders of the new society--which was soon renamed "the Charity Organization Society" (COS)--were inspired by the reformer Octavia Hill. Hill was working in London's East End to improve the deplorable conditions of housing. She was a student and friend of a future COS councilman, John Ruskin, the famous moralist and critic. To Octavia Hill and the COS, poverty--poor people--should be studied the way Ruskin studied architecture in The Stones of Venice . Ricardian and certainly Benthamite constructions of "economic man" were too abstract to illuminate the facts. To understand poverty you had to get up close to it. To understand poor people you had to "befriend" them individually, studying each "case." And to improve