The duality of culture and practice: Poverty relief in New York City, 1888--1917

Abstract

In 1893, Charles Henderson, a Baptist minister and member of the newly formed Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago, published the first of his several books on the American social-welfare system. In this book, entitled An Introduction of the Study of the Dependent, Defective and Delinquent Classes and of Their Social Treatment, Henderson set himself three tasks. First, he sought to differentiate rigorously the classes and sub-classes of the poor. Drawing upon scientific research in medicine, psychiatry, eugenics, and sociology, as well as the accumulated records of numerous charity organizations and state agencies, he constructed a complicated taxonomic system to distinguish among various social types. In a chapter dedicated to "unemployed and homeless dependents," for example, he proposed a hierarchical scale ranging from "those who are temporarily out of employment, but who have some resources and are able to work" down to the "social bottom stratum" where one would find "the vicious wanderers, the semi-criminal vagabonds and the sturdy rogues." In between these poles were two classes the "partially futile," defined as "men who are willing to work and able to do something, but fall below the average in ability to co6perate in industry," and the "wholly futile," described as "the unemployable ... (who) are not capable of keeping step with the average workman, nor of adapting their slow and uncertain movements to the speed of modern machinery."2 Henderson's second task was to review the range of alternative relief practices for providing assistance (and punishment) to these various classes of "dependents, defectives and delinquents." Here he compared the advantages and disadvantages of numerous types of employment assistance schemes, social investigations, "work-tests," various sorts of outdoor and indoor relief organizations, and the practice of giving money as compared to the giving of food, coal, and other necessities. His third task was to demonstrate the linkage between these two domains the classification of the poor and