GRASS ROOTS PRIVATE WELFARE

Abstract

Any comprehensive study of social changes in the United States during the past quarter-century would feature the decline in the importance of private charity and the enormous rise in public expenditures for the care of the poor and other persons in a particular status. At times this rising trend seems to sweep everything before it, obliterating an earlier era in which far more reliance was placed upon individual appeals at the local level to care for the unfortunate. Now comes a new volume of essays inspired by its editor, Alfred de Grazia, late of Stanford University, and aptly entitled, "Grass Roots Private Welfare."¹He also contributes the foreword and the closing chapter. Mr. Herbert Hoover served as chairman of the advisory council on the essay competition. The judges of the prize-winning essays were Dr. George W. Bachmann, director of medical studies (retired), the Brookings Institution; Rev. Asa J. Davis,