Beyond Benevolence: The New York Charity Organization Society and the Transformation of American Social Welfare, 1882–1935, by Dawn M. Greeley

Abstract

What do you do—if you enjoy a life of material comfort—when someone on the street asks for spare change? Do you turn away, embarrassed? Do you hand over the leftovers of your restaurant meal, feeling virtuous? Do you remind yourself that charity cannot solve intractable poverty and so absolve yourself? Do you engage in conversation, pleased that at least you recognise the humanity of the person in need? Which of these things makes you feel least bad, and, anyway, why is this about how it makes you feel? These questions, and others less simplistically put, are fundamental to historians’ conversations about social policy, poverty, ideas about who ‘deserves’ relief, and different systems of charitable giving, just as they are to the debates among philanthropists and policy-makers themselves. They animate this book, as they did previous scholarship with which Dawn Greeley grapples, and whose arguments she challenges. Although she focuses on one (extremely influential) organisation, Greeley narrates a much larger story about the cyclical nature of poverty relief, as well as historians’ conversations. As such, it is an excellent intervention in an ongoing, often frustrating, exchange about the significance and meaning of charity in a liberal society intent on not questioning the central tenets of capitalism itself. Indeed, perhaps inadvertently, the book reminds us that very few truly original ideas have emerged in the field of poverty relief in two hundred years.