The Old Compassionate Conservatism

...Simply assuming its irrelevance, they held entirely to the teachings of Addams and Rauschenbusch that poverty is a societal problem requiring societal solutions...

...Thus, the reformers also strove to help the poor by finding them work, improving their housing, providing medical assistance and child care, and even creating savings banks...

...By the 1960s and early 1970s, when the welfare state reached its most ambitious phases, the idea of asking the poor to help themselves was routinely dismissed...

...Charles Loring Brace (1826-1890), a Methodist who in 1854 founded New York's Children's Aid Society (aimed at helping vagrant children living in the streets...

...In the early years of the twentieth century, however, these reformers' insistence on helping the poor help themselves was consciously rejected by critics of market capitalism...

...The latter is a morality that—as we learned by bitter experience, in the context of poverty as elsewhere—final-ly does not work...

...BY TERRY EASTLAND Our attitude toward the fight against urban poverty has changed over the past thirty years...

...Today those rolls have been cut in half—thanks to various reforms, including the major federal overhaul enacted in 1996, which generally embrace the moral reformers' view that virtuous behavior is necessary for exiting poverty...

...But, as Schwartz recognizes, there is some small but non-trivial portion of the poor that won't respond to moral reform...

...My goal," Schwartz writes, "is to explain what moral reform was and what it did and did not accomplish...

...A political scientist who has worked in both government and the university, and a former editor at the Public Interest, Schwartz has assembled an academic history that will fascinate students of American welfare...

...Or so Joel Schwartz claims in his study Fighting Poverty with Virtue: Moral Reform and America's Urban Poor, 1825-2000...

...why it was rejected and whether it should have been...

...In fact, Schwartz identifies "a unified tradition of moral reform" that runs from 1825 into the first years of the twentieth century...

...Robert M. Hartley (1796-1881), an evangelical Protestant who in 1843 established New York's Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor...

...And poverty today, far more than nineteenth-century poverty, is characterized and explained by the breakdown of the family—for which we seem to have no solution...

...Where the "bourgeois life" was once disdained by society's elites, now politicians and policymakers are "much more respectful" of the role certain virtues can play than they were a generation ago...

...Today, he adds, most efforts to fight poverty assume this "reasonable middle ground," which denies both that the poor are in the grip of factors beyond their control and that the poor can improve their condition completely on their own...

...Of course, there still remains open the question of what effect this new attempt at moral reform will have...

...Both held that the poor were poor primarily for social reasons—and thus could be helped only by the transformation of the society, through policies addressing unemployment, overwork, industrial accidents, and the like...

...focuses on four largely forgotten figures: Joseph Tuckerman (1778-1840), a Unitarian minister who served the poor in Boston in the 1820s and 1830s...

...Even while they insisted the poor could be less poor by acting virtuously, they also saw that, as one of them put it, there is a level of material condition "below which character has no opportunity to assert itself...

...In other words, the poor should earn pay, avoid drinking, live within their means, work for the sake of their families, and even save...

...In an insightful chapter, Schwartz points out how the most influential anti-poverty figures of those years—William Ryan, who wrote Blaming the Victim, and Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, who together wrote Regulating the Poor—did not even bother to argue against moral reform...

...It would be hard to imagine anyone seriously contending today, as Piven and Cloward did in 1971, that "the expansion of welfare rolls is the true relief reform...

...It is significant that this book is entitled Fighting Poverty with Virtue, rather than Fighting Poverty with Values...

...Indeed, it was exactly the failure of expanded welfare rolls (which peaked in 1994) that helped motivate the search for new policy...

...It is this tradition, rejected not so many years ago, that has now been revived...

...The result, Schwartz argues, is that the moral reformers found a "third way" long before that term was applied—a way that takes into account both moral and material factors in understanding and attacking poverty...

...While these "moral reformers" differed on tactical and strategic matters, they agreed on a core philosophy, says Schwartz...

...The moral reformers understood that the civic virtues of diligence, thrift, and sobriety are morally compelling, as virtues by definition are...

...The key figures whom Schwartz treats are Jane Addams (1860-1935), the leader of the settlement-house movement, and Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918), the Social Gospel advocate...

...As he shows, the idea that "the poor should fight important battles them-selves"—that overcoming poverty requires moral reform—is hardly a new one...

...They are not optional or a matter of choice...

...Schwartz does not reduce the reformers to cardboard preachers...

...and Josephine Shaw Lowell (1843-1905), a Civil War widow from a Unitarian family who in 1882 helped found New York's Charity Organization Society...

...In reading Fighting Pov^^ty with Vi^^-ue, one is struck by how quickly that 1970s view has come to seem dated...

...Schwartz provides reason to think it might work better today than it did in the nineteenth century: A variety of structural reforms put the poor in a better position today to improve their condition through virtuous behavior...

...He Terry Eastland's books include Ending Affirmative Action (1996) and Freedom of Expression in the Supreme Court (2000...

...Opposing the unconditional dole they thought pauperized its recipients, all four believed instead that the poor—whom they regarded as capable of acting rationally to better their situation—should help themselves by practicing the virtues of diligence, sobriety, thrift, and familial responsibility...

...In recovering the teachings of the nineteenth-century moral reformers, we thus are also embracing an "old" morality after several decades of flirtation with the new, relativistic one of values...

...The "single-minded focus on structural and environmental reform," Schwartz dryly notes, "has proven to be an ineffective antipoverty policy...

...and what it now is, how it is now being practiced, and what its prospects for success are...

...Significantly, while they were supporters of market capitalism, they also were open to public policies that might benefit the poor, such as old-age pensions, workers' compensation, and unionization...