Search Results for: child labor

Youth Finds Its Own Answers: 1939

The student movements of the Great Depression era were arguably the most significant mobilizations of youth-based political activity in American history prior to the late 1960s. As time passed, many local youth organizations became more organized in their pursuit of progressive government, and in 1934 the American Youth Congress (AYC) came together as the national federation and lobbying arm of the movement as a whole.

Harvest and Relief: 1935

“No work, no eat” has been the slogan in many communities as fruit and grain ripened for harvest and relief clients held back from farm jobs. In other areas, shortage of domestic help has been reported. What is the workers’ side of the story? The taxpayers’? What is the policy of federal and state relief officials? Here an informed Washington writer goes behind the headlines to kind the facts and what they mean.

The Social Implications of the Roosevelt Administration: 1934

A “Year of Roosevelt” would be a crisper title for the address made at the twenty-first annual meeting of Survey Associates by Secretary of the Interior Ickes. As federal public works’ administrator he is steward of “the greatest sum of money ever appropriated by any government for such a purpose in the history of the world.” But it was as a fighting citizen of Chicago, a long-time member of Survey Associates, that we turned to him to interpret the social stakes in the Recovery Program

President Roosevelt’s Fireside Chat, June 28, 1934

And, finally, the third principle is to use the agencies of government to assist in the establishment of means to provide sound and adequate protection against the vicissitudes of modern life — in other words, social insurance.

Later in the year I hope to talk with you more fully about these plans. A few timid people, who fear progress, will try to give you new and strange names for what we are doing. Sometimes they will call it “Fascism”, sometimes “Communism”, sometimes “Regimentation”, sometimes “Socialism”. But, in so doing, they are trying to make very complex and theoretical something that is really very simple and very practical.

Women and Nineteenth-Century Reform

The problem for Dix and other women reformers of the nineteenth century was how to engage in social causes without losing their femininity. Opponents of women’s suffrage argued that political engagement would make women “mannish” and thereby undermine the social order. Even Catharine Beecher argued that women should not receive the right to vote because it would destroy their feminine virtues. Instead, Beecher believed that women could best exert their moral influence through their roles in the Christian home and neighborhood.

Social Darwinism and the Poor

Extrapolations from Darwinism, with its emphasis on evolutionary progress, offered reason for hope that a new and better social order could emerge from the turbulence. At the same time, by highlighting competition and the survival of the fittest as the drivers of evolution, it seemed to explain both the emergence of the fittest — fabulously wealthy elites and giant corporations, as well as the unfit — the masses of poor in the teeming city slums.

Settlement Movement: 1886-1986

This booklet was published for the 1986 Centennial of the U.S. Settlement Movement by United Neighborhood Centers of America (UNCA). In addition to being a history of the settlement movement over a period of one hundred years, it includes valuable references and sources of additional information about settlements. The author, Margaret E. Berry, was a former director of the National Federation of Settlements and Neighborhood Centers, the predecessor of UNCA

Hunter, Robert

Hunter, (Wiles) Robert (April 10, 1874 – May 15, 1942), Social Worker, Author and Socialist Editor’s Note: The career of Robert Hunter is a complicated journey through social work, social activism, research, field studies, politics, golf course design and academia. Over the years he moved from being a prominent Progressive to a dedicated Socialist…