Social Welfare History Project jhansan Page 43

Educational Alliance

“Educational Alliance: A History of a Lower East Side Settlement House,” by EJ Sampson. “The Educational Alliance…balanced the growing professionalization of settlement house work by becoming community-based, and kept its emphasis on encouraging public civic culture even as in other ways it aligned with a social service “agency” model. And it kept it eyes on its Jewish origins not only in its neighborhood work, but in negotiating its internal ethos. “

Long, Huey

As the Great Depression worsened, Long made impassioned speeches in the Senate charging a few powerful families with hoarding the nation’s wealth. He urged Congress to address the inequality that he believed to be the source of the mass suffering. How was a recovery possible when twelve men owned more wealth than 120 million people?….In 1934 Long unveiled a program of reforms he labeled “Share Our Wealth” designed to redistribute the nation’s wealth more fairly by capping personal fortunes at $50 million (later lowered to $5 – $8 million) and distributing the rest through government programs aimed at providing opportunity and a decent standard of living to all Americans. Long believed the programs he initiated in Louisiana were effective in lifting people out of poverty, and he wanted to implement this philosophy nationally.

The New Deal: Part II

The public’s acceptance of New Deal programs and services initiated by President Roosevelt in his first term was to a large extent a result of the pain and fear caused by the Great Depression. How bad the conditions were is worth remembering, since this is a means of gauging the enormous pressure for significant changes in government policy. One of the worst thing about the 1929 depression was its length of time. Men who had been sturdy and self-respecting workers can take unemployment without flinching for a few weeks, a few months, even if they have to see their families suffer; but it is quite different after a year, two years, three years. Among the miserable creatures curled up on park benches, selling apples on the street corner or standing in dreary lines before soup kitchens in 1932 were white men who had been jobless since the end of 1929. This traumatic experience marked millions of people for the rest of their lives, and made them security conscious.

Corrections: Part IV – Reformation As An End In Prison Discipline

“Reformation as an End in Prison Discipline: Report of The Standing Committee,” by F. H. Wines, Chairman. ,A presentation at the Fifteenth Annual Session of The National Conference Of Charities And Correction, 1888. “We assert, therefore, that there can be no recognition of reformation as an end in prison discipline in any prison where the warden or superintendent is not, by his education, habits of thought, personal character, and conviction of duty, qualified to administer to convicts the moral treatment which they require.”

Corrections: Part II – Background and Jails 1878

Presentations and reports of standing committees at the annual meetings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction during the late 19th century reveal that social welfare leaders and progressives were actively involved in efforts to reform the nation’s criminal justice system.

Corrections: Part VI – The Treatment of The Criminal: 1904

By F. H. Wines, LL. D., Chairman of Committee on Treatment of Criminals. “The subject assigned to this committee is the treatment of the criminal, a subordinate phase of the larger problem of the treatment of crime. The criminal is the concrete embodiment of the abstract conception of crime. Crime is an act, while the criminal is the agent of the act; but there can be no act without an actor, and it is through the criminal that the law strikes at crime, which it is the aim of the law to prevent or to suppress, caring little for the criminal actor, but much for the victim of his deed.”

Corrections: Part III — A Model Prison System 1878

Prison Discipline In General: The Elmira System – A letter From Z. B. Brockway of Elmira, N.Y., To F. B. Sanborn of Concord, Mass. Presented at the Fifth Annual Conference of Charities, 1878. “Labor for prisoners lies at the very foundation of their reformation; and I hope to see, before I die, the great army of idle prisoners, congregated in the common jails of our land, brought together in workhouses, where they shall be wisely and profitably employed, and held in such custody as shall protect society from their crimes, or the burden of their support as paupers, — held until they give evidence to experts of cure or reformation.”

Corrections: Part V – Progress: 1873-1893

“The Prison Question: Progress Over Twenty Years, 1873-93,” by General R. Brinkerhoff, Chairman, Committee on the History of Prisons. “In a resume of progress for twenty years in so large a country as the United States, of course only a brief outline…”