The New Deal as a Triumph of Social Work

Frances Perkins and the Confluence of Early Twentieth Century Social Work with Mid-Twentieth Century Politics and Government

S. Miller

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137527806
• eBook ISBN: 9781137527813
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The New Deal as a Triumph of Social Work concerns the 'hand' the New Deal plays from the perspective of early American History in which government and business cooperation is assumed and economic rights are addressed collectively whereas political rights are considered individually. The New Deal reconfigures this 'ratio' of rights by folding 'social work' into the aims of government. Miller describes the vital part Frances Perkins and her personal history play in this development.

1

Bold, Persistent Social Work

Abstract: The pathway to Frances Perkins’s career in social work and government combines empirical observation and scientific method with quirky pragmatism and personal commitment. The era before social work practice is codified stamps both Perkins’s mode of work and the New Deal’s “temper [of] bold, persistent experimentation” [Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Address at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia, May 22, 1932]. This chapter outlines Perkins’ personal history, ranging from her initial encounters with poverty to her reading of Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, which inspires her to do something about the poor. Perkins’s experiences in Chicago’s Hull House, Philadelphia Research and Protective Association, and National Consumers League, in addition to her investigation of the Triangle Fire, prepare her to help shape New York State and national government and the New Deal.

Keywords: Abraham Flexner; Annah May Soule; Charity Organization Society; Chicago Commons; Edward T. Devine; Florence Kelley; Hull House; Jacob Riis; Jane Addams; John Dewey; National Consumers League; Philadelphia Research and Protective Association; Settlement houses; Triangle Fire

Miller, Stephen Paul. The New Deal as a Triumph of Social Work: Frances Perkins and the Confluence of Early Twentieth Century Social Work with Mid-Twentieth Century Politics and Government. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. DOI: 10.1057/9781137527813.0004.

Frances Perkins might not have become a social worker had she not observed factory workers while doing fieldwork for her Mount Holyoke College sociology course. Perkins becomes aware of the plights of working, disabled, and unemployed Americans. Although she majors in chemistry and physics at Mount Holyoke from 1898 to 1902, she intermingles her interest in scientific investigation with a budding personal commitment to social reform informed by empirical observation and the social sciences.

Perkins’s studies challenge her social preconceptions. She learns new approaches to social reform utilizing fledgling social sciences. At a time when the study of history emphasizes “great men,” Perkins’s American history professor, Annah May Soule, takes her classes to nearby factories to collect data about working conditions. Soule acquaints Perkins with a scientifically rigorous and experiential approach to “social studies.”

This method familiarizes Perkins with poor industrial workers. Perkins’s parents, though “charitable,” do not consider the possibility of larger social conditions relating to poverty.¹ The young Perkins also assumes that poverty is merely a symptom of alcoholism, laziness, or overspending.² However, in Soule’s class Perkins sees how the absence of workers’ compensation can turn one person’s accident into an entire family’s poverty. At textile and paper mills, Perkins witnesses factory work’s hazards, child labor, long hours, low pay, and unjust wage disparity for women and children.³ Perkins concludes that poverty does have social causes, and when Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives publicizes abject big city poverty, Perkins feels personally challenged by Riis’s question to his readers: “What are you going to do about it?”⁴

Perkins finds answers to Riis’s query when Florence Kelley visits Mount Holyoke in February 1902. Kelley shows how Soule’s social science methodology can be applied to social work.⁵ Like many educated women of Perkins’s generation with limited career choices, Perkins feels “formless” in her professional “aspirations”⁶ before discovering Kelley’s “program . . . for industrial and human and social justice” which molds her “aspirations for social justice into some definite purpose.”⁷ In several years, Kelley’s program leads to Perkins working for Kelley’s National Consumers League in New York.

Perkins credits Kelley with showing her “the work which became my vocation.”⁸ Kelley makes becoming a social worker seem possible.⁹ After graduating Perkins seeks employment at the Charity Organization Society of New York, but the organization’s head, Edward T. Devine, suggests she first “gain some life experience,” and Perkins teaches in several Connecticut and Massachusetts schools, eventually teaching physics and biology at a wealthy boarding school near Chicago in Lake Forest, Illinois.¹⁰

Perkins’s proximity to Chicago allows her to work at Chicago Commons and live at Jane Addams’s Hull House, two early settlement houses. Addams’s establishment of the first American settlement house makes Addams, in the words of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “the first heroine of social work”.¹¹ Hull House, and the settlement houses following it, says Schlesinger, “gave the middle class its first extended contact with the life of the working class.”¹² Social workers live with the poor at settlement houses in immigrant neighborhoods. Comfortable middle class Americans, such as Perkins, personally experience the degradation and drudgery of sweatshops, unregulated child labor, unsafe and unclean work environments, and suppression of unions and collective bargaining.

Hull House distributes vital goods and services no government agency offers, such as food, medical care, health services, educational classes, childcare and kindergarten, job training, library services, banking, employment, shelter for the homeless and abused,¹³ and instruction in the English language and becoming an American citizen.¹⁴ Also significantly, Hull House provides homes and meeting places for those researching poverty and its causes, thus triggering creative synergy amongst reformers seeking solutions.¹⁵ This feature of Hull House and other settlement houses influences Perkins throughout her career in social work and government, and helps her develop the “conference method” as a tool for investigating the Triangle Fire. Her first prolonged social work experience emphasizes “the intense vitality,” “intrinsic optimism,” and “self-confidence bolstered by optimism” that Kirsten Downey recognizes in both Frances Perkins and Franklin Roosevelt.¹⁶ This persistent vitality and optimism is a hallmark of Perkins’s social work that later reverberates within Roosevelt’s presidency.

Perkins quits teaching to become a fulltime volunteer at Hull House in 1906. In 1907, she begins working for a small nonprofit organization, the Philadelphia Research and Protective Association. In her first social work job, she demonstrates a bold persistence that twenty-five years later she brings to Washington.

In Perkins’s first paid social work job, she helps dismantle sexual slavery operations. One might expect government to be in the forefront of remedying such a serious social problem, and Perkins does in fact need to appeal to the Philadelphia municipal government for help. Nonetheless, the need for Perkins, as a social worker, to take the lead in these investigations indicates how government has changed since then.

For this job, Perkins jokes that she has no formal social work “training” and yet “began at the top.”¹⁷ Indeed, she is the Association’s only paid employee. In a sense she has no superiors although she earns so little she needs to ask advice about how to eat on a meager budget from the poor women whom she helps. With little supervision, Perkins does every significant part of the Philadelphia Research and Protective Association’s work from managing the office and fundraising to social research and investigation to writing up reports and taking actions based upon them.¹⁸

There is then little agreement abo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: The Social Work of Desire
• 1  Bold, Persistent Social Work
• 2  A Method of Moral Progress
• 3  The Fifty-Four-Hour Bill and Social Works Alternative Professionalization
• 4  The Perkins Persona
• 5  Enter Populists. Enter Progressives. Enter Social Workers. Enter Frances Perkins
• 6  Americas Founding Economic Rights Today: Modern Government
• 7  The New Deal as the Social Work of Desire
• 8  The First Charge upon the Government
• 9  Between Social Work and Government: Investigating the Triangle Fire and Perkinss Conference Method
• 10  Social Work through Government
• Epilogue: The First Boondoggle Wasnt a BoondoggleThe New Deal as the Social Work of Desire and the Heart of Work
• Index