Joel Schwartz's Fighting Poverty With Virtue

...These reformers came to understand something that Schwartz mentions but fails to appreciate, yet it is a constant feature of charity reformers' accounts of this tumultuous era: employment was often seasonal, and most of those who sought relief from these reform societies, even those ultimately deemed "undeserving," worked for part of each year...

...Dependence comes in many forms, and many women BOOKS on AFDC chose to be dependent upon the state rather than dependent upon a man or a labor market that accorded them little value...

...They did not lack diligence, they lacked work...

...I I T IS TRUE that since 1994 we have cut relief rolls in half while reducing child poverty rates, even among African-American children, who have suffered particularly "stubborn" poverty...

...As one reformer said about the harsh depression winter of 1873-1874, "Labor was in a struggle with capital against the lowering of prices...

...These "friendly visitors" went to poor people's homes to teach them the virtues that Schwartz espouses as the solution to poverty (and to decide if they were worthy of relief...

...Victorian reformers sought, they said, to reduce the cost of relief, too: private charity could offer better support (providing moral uplift in lieu of cash) and do it more cheaply and efficiently than public agencies...

...Diligence has not enriched them materially, and there is no reason to believe that they have been enriched morally, though Mead and Kaus and others would surely disagree...

...But if we concede to Schwartz this much, he and the other Victorian revivalists could at least then concede that it is also absurd to propose that by imposing these virtues upon poor people (who he has not even demonstrated lack them) poverty would somehow disappear or even decline...

...Schwartz recommends that we look to the charity reformers of the nineteenth century for responses to contemporary urban poverty...

...In the wake of what some have called welfare repeal in the 1990s, reform in our time has been expensive, too...

...Finally, and most important, they wanted to ensure that poor relief remained charity, not a right, and that cash would be offered only as a last resort...

...Or, as Schwartz would have it, move to where it is cheaper and work is more plentiful or get credit, borrow money, move in with family or friends—do anything but seek pauperizing relief...

...Charity assisted labor in the combat...

...Some block grant money is simply being spent by states on 146 n DISSENT / Fall 2001 budget items that have nothing to do with TANF...

...It is all there, from the insistence that public relief is corrupt and inefficient, while private (especially religious) agencies are more effective and less costly, to the warning that welfare itself breeds poverty, profligacy, and dependence...

...Besides, they argued, public relief inhibits the private spirit of giving...

...By 2002, more will be spent nationwide in the name of welfare on contracts and services than on cash relief, says the Center for Law and Social Policy...

...Although more poor women are working, between 40 percent and 60 percent of those who leave (or are pushed off) the welfare rolls are not at any given time...

...Set aside the fact that the American welfare state is hardly elaborate...

...With cash relief rarely available, but cities still afraid to completely abandon the growing ranks of the "dangerous classes," they resorted to offering aid in the workhouse or the poorhouse...

...I require sobriety in a taxi driver...

...For a while, reformers throughout the nation proclaimed their efforts a success...

...To suggest that all people, poor ones included, given the world in which we live, might profit from working harder, saving more, and drinking less is on its face reasonable enough...

...It is absurd," he writes by way of castigating settlement house leader Jane Addams and Piven and Cloward, "to suppose that rec ommending the virtues of diligence, sobriety, thrift and familial responsibility to the poor is somehow an attack upon them...

...Why this is moral or virtuous is unclear...

...Almsgiving and dole giving are hurtful," wrote Lowell, a founder of the New York Charity Organization Society (COS) and one of Schwartz's central characters, "therefore they are not charitable...

...Economist Stephen Ziliak studied nineteenth-century charity reformers in Indianapolis...

...But the reformers of the nineteenth century ultimately failed, as they themselves admitted and Schwartz concedes...

...In one sense, this could be a fair criticism—after all, I myself have been known to be diligent...

...In fact, by century's end, the New York COS formally ceased distinguishing between the "deserving" and the "undeserving," giving the distinction up as meaningless...

...Relief was abolished or turned over to private agencies, and the poor, reformers claimed, suffered no ill effects...

...This, one story goes, is why Irish immigrants achieved gains that similarly situated blacks did not...

...It failed," he writes, because "perhaps it was not education in the virtues but structural reforms—coupled with, and made possible by, the tremendous expansion of the economy—that were most important in lifting millions of Americans out of poverty in this century...

...Relief should be given sparely, if at all, and administered only by private agencies to reduce political patronage and indiscriminate giving to the "unworthy" poor...

...We have not cut welfare spending: we have shifted money from poor families to "service providers...

...Both, historically, are always more expensive than mere relief...

...Schwartz assumes that all work, any work, is better than relief, but even Lowell would eventually concede that "work could, under certain conditions, degrade the poor as well as elevate them...

...In the thirteenth century, for instance, Humbert of Romans latest voice in this chorus, which includes cited the "habitual idleness, debauchery and Gertrude Himmelfarb, Marvin Olasky, drunkenness" of the poor as their chief failing...

...Abolishing relief in the nineteenth century proved to be expensive and ineffective, and instead of urging moral reform (though this theme was, to be sure, rarely far from the surface) many charity reformers began to turn their attention to housing reforms, workplace, health and safety legislation, and in Lowell's case, even helping workers unionize...

...Although late-nineteenth-century reformers initially helped achieve cuts in local relief rolls, by the dawn of the twentieth century most had established their own relief funds and "sunk into a sea of almsgiving," while urging that the government intervene to do what private charity alone simply could not...

...If moral education wasn't what was most required in the late nineteenth century, and it was economic growth and government intervention in the market that reduced poverty throughout most of the twentieth century, why would moralizing be effective now...

...Many of those who do find work earn wages at or below the official poverty line in jobs without benefits, and many are materially poorer than they were while receiving relief...

...Rather, we should be re-establishing those social protections we have cut in the name of efficiency, cost savings, international competitiveness, reducing dependency, and, yes, compassionate conservatism...

...Even if it once were, we have been chipping away at those protections since the 1970s (we do well to remember that social service cutbacks began under Jimmy Carter, not Ronald Reagan...

...this is hardly an achievement of the reform legislation...

...Reformer Charles Henderson could write by 1894 that the first duty of charity is to secure higher wages, shorter hours, [and] better physical and moral conditions of labor...

...A lower percentage of poor children are receiving food stamps, fewer eligible families are receiving Medicaid, and 400,000 more poor children lived in deep poverty in 1997 than in 1995...

...M M ORAL REFORM movements may, then, obscure an economic campaign whose aim is to compel labor at any price...

...Schwartz and the New Victorians argue that the moral response to the dilemma of poverty is to demonstrate to an employer a willingness to work harder and longer for less pay than any other prospective employee...

...But we need not devote too much energy to disputing these assertions, for Schwartz himself admits that the moral reform movement of the late nineteenth century was largely a failure...

...STEPHEN PIMPARE IS a doctoral candidate at the City Univerity of New York Graduate Center...

...And we too, by some measures, have failed...

...By those measures—fewer "dependent" women and fewer poor children—we might call the reforms of 1996 a success and argue that we have bested our nineteenth-century counterparts...

...The attempt at remoralization that Schwartz recommends was omnipresent in the debate over welfare reform and will surely be back with us soon when the welfare block grant, child care block grant and the food stamp program are up for re-authorization in 2002...

...As ex-White House faithbased director John Dilulio's former colleague Bryon Johnson told the New York Times, "We've created an office out of anecdotes...

...For some women, and some of those few men who could even get relief, public assistance offered them more security for, say, child rearing, than any other practicable option available to them...

...The number of children in foster care climbed to 547,000 in 1999 from 483,000 in 1995...

...Well, he argues, because the presence today of an elaborate welfare state ameliorates most structurally induced poverty, leaving us, finally, a world in which the poverty that remains can only be from moral failure...

...But in the absence of evidence that moral suasion or cutting relief works, why have we repeated this one-hundred-year-old formula...

...Many women, formerly on relief, are now working, and some are earning more than they were as welfare recipients...

...The whole settlement of the labor question was postponed by the over-generous charity of the city...

...As one reformer observed in 1874, "there is not a State nor a city wherein the cost of public out-door relief [cash aid] exceeds that of in-door relief [the poorhouse or workhouse...

...They disDISSENT / Fall 2001 •I4 5 BOOKS covered, after regular contact with many poor people, that relief wasn't a cause of their poverty, and that, in fact, relief could better their lives...

...And besides, women have historically cycled on and off the rolls, moving in and out of the workforce...

...Four billion dollars more is being spent under Temporary Aid to Needy Families than was projected under Aid to Families with Dependent Children, notes Lawrence Mead, although less is actually going to poor people and more is going to not-for-profit training or service providers or to private corporations such as welfareto-work specialist Maximus...

...This is a very old argument...

...This will not surprise those who have operated work-readiness or life skills courses for people on welfare to help make them more "employable...

...Relief has economic effects, too, and so does the relief reform that often comes in the wake of these morality plays, as Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward long argued...

...After studying reformers' case files, which tracked individuals and families over the course of many years, Ziliak found that visiting the poor and educating them to the virtues had no measurable impact on their success in finding employment...

...And this was in a "booming" economy...

...This should all sound oddly familiar to anyone acquainted with contemporary debates about welfare reform or with the rationale behind the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives...

...Homelessness in New York City has reached an all-time high, exceeding even the "crisis" years of the 1980s...

...The COS motto was "not alms, but a friend...

...What troubles so many about poor relief, then and now, is that it makes it possible to decline this bargain...

...Yet, as Eyal Press observed in the American Prospect, there is virtually no scholarly evidence to support the claim that private and religious organizations do more for less...

...There is truth to the claim made by Victorians old and new that welfare fosters "dependence" and discourages work...

...The soup-kitchens and relief associations of various names became thronged with mechanics [who had refused to accept a reduction in their wages...

...Some were especially proud of their successful efforts to end "street-begging...

...The result is a DISSENT / Fall 2001 n 147 BOOKS familiar litany: increased poverty and inequality, decreasing family wages and unionization, and so on...

...There is no contemporary evidence that such efforts achieve more than, at best, short-term, temporary employment successes...

...Some Head Start providers have reported increased signs of abuse and neglect among children of workfare participants...

...But the story is more complicated...

...and I admire thrift, especially when I lack it...

...Because there is more to the assault on poor relief than the celebration of diligence and temperance (or marriage and chastity, for that matter...

...It is not money, the poor need, but morality...

...As we look forward, we might look back, too, as Schwartz urges, and remind our friends who are nostalgic for another era that we have tried their prescription, and the result was the welfare state they so loathe...

...Part of the return to poor relief after this experiment with abolition was practical...

...Yet here we are again...

...As noted above, many women who now work instead of living "on the dole" are poorer than before...

...Lawrence Mead, Mickey Kaus, and Charles Charity reformers of the nineteenth cen 144 n DISSENT / Fall 2001 BOOKS tury believed that cash aid to poor people was dangerous, even cruel: it fostered dependency, reduced incentives to work (and thereby caused poverty), and offered false hope for a better future...

...These Victorian-era reformers often measured their success not by reductions in poverty but by reductions in pauperism—charting with pride from year to year in their annual reports how many fewer poor they served than the year before, boasting when they could claim responsibility for a city reducing or completely abolishing all public cash relief to poor people, as many did late in the century...

...Nor is there any evidence, for that matter, that moral reform is effective...

...Perhaps this is why Schwartz fails to offer us any evidence—beyond what he terms the "commonsensical"—that these cardinal virtues are even relevant to a discussion of poverty...

...That is, we should teach the poor to work harder, drink less, and save more...

...FIGHTING POVERTY WITH VIRTUE: MORAL REFORM AND AMERICA'S URBAN POOR 1825-2000 by Joel Schwartz Indiana University Press, 2000 480 pp $39.95 ONSERVATIVES for some time now have been urging a return to virtue and mo rality as a key to resolving social ills...

...Using Schwartz's own logic, to remedy this new post-1970s poverty we should not be cutting benefits, pushing people into the low-wage labor market (and as Nobel economist Robert Solow tells us, depressing wages even among higher earners), and proselytizing about upright behavior...

...As Josephine Shaw Lowell or Charles Loring Brace did then, we might now try to reduce poverty by "remoralizing" the unemployed to the "three cardinal virtues" of "diligence, sobriety and thrift...

...We, too, now boast of our reforms' success by noting that relief rolls nationwide have been cut in half...

...in some ways, that's the point...

...Relief is some small measure of power, of freedom even...

...The number of people seeking food at soup kitchens and food pantries rose some 17 percent last year alone, while demand for emergency shelter increased by 15 percent...

...Relief, especially if sufficiently generous, has effects upon work effort...

...We have privatized much of welfare...

...Without cash relief, however, which many cities contracted then much as we have recently done, the choice is more limited: work or starve...

...The Murray, is Joel Schwartz, who brings us Fighting Poverty with Virtue...