DAVID WAGNER. The Poorhouse: America's Forgotten Institution. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield. 2005. Pp. xi, 179. Cloth $60.00, paper $22.95

Abstract

The social control thesis, a child of 1960s' suspicions about elites and the purposes of their institutions, has held powerful sway over social welfare scholarship for more than a generation. The argument—that welfare institutions served to secure an orderly working class, regulate the labor force to the advantage of capitalists, and impose middle-class values on workers—has been challenged and refined, debated and bemoaned. But even after four decades, social welfare scholars still have to wrestle with the issue of social control. David Wagner, who acknowledges the tutelage of Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, is no exception. He dutifully surveys the past debates about social control and humanitarianism, grounds his project in this mix, and then tries to turn the discussion away from this dichotomous stranglehold. He challenges historians to compare the poorhouse of the past to the homeless shelter of the present (and finds current provision for the homeless poor to be inferior even to the dreaded poorhouse of old). Much of the subject matter in this book is familiar to social welfare historians. The origins of the almshouse, the debates over indoor versus outdoor relief, the attempts to remove certain categories of the poor (children, the insane) from the poorhouse, the professionalization of social work, and the twentieth-century demise of the almshouse are topics well known to the field and need not be described here. But within this familiar outline, Wagner offers up several very original ideas.