Social Welfare History Project Civil War, Reconstruction, and Progressivism Page 5

Tammanyizing of a Civilization (1909)

The oldest and most infamous organization in America for exploiting this population is Tammany Hall of New York, which the great classic historian, Professor Guglielmo Ferrero, recently compared to the very similar organizations that were formed for exploiting the city of Rome during its decadence. For fifty years and more this body has perverted civilization in New York, using the great politically untrained population for this purpose. Its political saloon-keepers have killed unnumbered multitudes of these people through excessive drinking; its political procurers have sold the bodies of their daughters; its contractors and street-railway magnates have crowded them into the deadly tenement districts by defrauding them of their rights of cheap and decent transportation; and its sanitary officials have continuously murdered a high percentage of the poor by their sale of the right to continue fatal and filthy conditions in these tenement districts, contrary to law. Meantime they have kept control of the population they have exploited by their cunning distribution of wages and charity.

Livingston, Edward

Edward Livingston (May 28, 1764 – May 23, 1836) — Jurist, statesman, elected official and prison reformer

Catt, Carrie Chapman

A dynamic speaker and tenacious organizer, Carrie Chapman Catt was a powerful force in the woman suffrage movement. Her relentless campaigning won President Woodrow Wilson’s respect and support, and ultimately led to passage of the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote.

Flint Faces Civil War: 1937

Article by Charles R. Walker, The Nation, 1937. “‘We’ll stay in till they carry us out on stretchers,’ is the message sent out by the sitdowners in Fisher 2. ‘We’d rather die than give up.'”

Carver, George Washington

At Tuskegee, Carver launched a campaign aimed at lifting black farmers out of the desperate poverty in which most of them lived. Though his campaign ultimately failed in its aim, Carver adapted what he had learned in Ames in such a way as to put the application of its principles within reach of impoverished tenant farmers. In so doing, he anticipated the rise of organic farming and the push for the application of “appropriate technology.”

Ovington, Mary White

Mary White Ovington (1865–1951), was a social worker and writer. A white socialist, she was a principal NAACP founder and officer for almost forty years.

Niagara Movement (1905-1909)

The Niagara Movement was a civil rights group organized by W.E.B. DuBois and William Monroe Trotter in 1905. After being denied admittance to hotels in Buffalo, New York, the group of 29 business owners, teachers, and clergy who comprised the initial meeting gathered at Niagara Falls, from which the group’s name derives.

The First Step Toward Fitness

When America began to recover from the Great Depression, it began to take stock of its human resources. We found that a large minority of our population did not get enough to eat. These people who did not get enough to at were below par in health. They were below par in initiative and alertness.

Our Jobless Youth: a Warning (1939)

By John Chamberlain, October, 1935. “We have seen in our time the revolution of dispossessed youth in Europe, where anything seemed better—to live, and march, and die for—than existence without meaning. Can we give our young people a real stake in life before it is too late? This grave question is put to educators, and all responsible leaders in American life, by one of our best informed and most sympathetic younger writers.”

Southern Farm Tenancy: 1936

When an Alabama town erected a monument “in profound appreciation of the boll weevil and what it has done as the herald of prosperity” a moral was pointed which this author drives home with recent researches in the South. Cotton still enslaves 8 million people; emancipation can come only by diversified farming, a long range program for which is here given