The Field of Public Welfare

Abstract

ORGANIZED social work in the United States recently turned the half century. The National Conference of Social Work, originally known as the Conference of Charities and Correction, celebrated its semi-centennial at the meeting held in Washington in 1923. The attendance at the first conference numbered about twenty recruited from four states, whereas at the fifty-third gathering in Cleveland in 1926 there was a registration on a nation-wide basis of 4,080 delegates with representatives from Canada and overseas, and a paid membership on July 1 of the same year numbering 3,904.1 The first Charity Organization Society was established in Buffalo in 1877. When the fiftieth anniversary of its foundation was commemorated in the fall of 1927 by means of a conference on family life of today, there were listed in the current directory of family social work societies no less than three hundred and twentyfour agencies throughout the United States which were following in the footsteps of this venture.2 The first probation officer was appointed under authorization of a statute passed by the General Court (legislature) of Massachusetts in 1878. At the time of the fiftieth centennial in Boston, all of the states except one had juvenile probation and thirty-six had extended the system into the adult field, with the sole probation officer of fifty years ago multiplied until paid officers throughout the United States now number 3,191.3 Rapid expansion differing only in degree may be noted if we consider social settlements, agencies engaged in child welfare, and those formed to promote recreation and leisure time activities. The juvenile court and medical and psychiatric social work are of comparatively recent origin when measured by the older social movements begun shortly after the Civil War. Their spread has, nevertheless, been even more rapid than has the growth of some of the older forms. The first Juvenile Court was established in Chicago in 1899. Accenting child study as this court did, it naturally followed that there should have been established in conjunction with it a Psychopathic Institute, the first of its kind, designed to be rapidly followed by others promoting constantly widening horizons in the study of children. It was eminently fitting that the twenty-fifth anniversary of the foundation of the first Juvenile Court should have been commemorated jointly with the fifteenth anniversary of the first Psychopathic Institute.4 Other children's courts which organized clinics for child study during the next decade, privately or publicly financed, included Boston, Detroit, New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Westchester County. A notable group of child