#deserving poor

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[redswrap]

Unconditional Soup

I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to convince people to give my little organization, Time of the Month Club, money to buy homeless women tampons and pads which, once used, will be heaved into some landfill along with disposable diapers and other unpleasant detritus of lives lived in the city.

If one subscribes to the notion that teaching a man (or woman) to fish is superior to giving them…

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The Reproduction of Public Dependency

The depression that wracked the U.S. between 1873 and 1878 left charity officials convinced that there were few truly deserving dependents. Economic turmoil left approximately three million people without work, many for several years, and industrialization and urbanization made the issue far more visible to charity officials. Veritable armies of tramps and vagrants roamed the countryside even after the economy began to rebound in 1879. Workers protested drastic pay cuts and unemployment by the tens of thousands, most notably during the massive general strikes of the Great Upheaval in 1877. Professional charity reformers and state charity officials rejected workers' contention that no jobs existed, as well as the notion that massive industrialization had created structural unemployment. Instead, "the most prominent economic theories of the era" supported charity officials' views that workers were merely lazy. As historian Paul Ringenbach explains, "Classical economists, both in Europe and the United States, treated unemployment as a transitory and essentially insignificant phenomenon.... The responsibility for sustained idleness, therefore, rested largely on the shoulders of the working class itself." Accordingly, local and state charity officials offered aid erratically. Poorhouse keepers continued to require that able-bodied men first complete a work test by chopping wood or breaking stones. State after state, meanwhile, passed or strengthened vagrancy laws that criminalized public dependency and tramps searching for employment. Massachusetts passed the first vagrancy act in 1866. Modeled on the infamous Black Codes of the South, the act enforced six months' labor in a workhouse or house of correction for convicted vagrants and vagabonds. This act, ironically, was enacted just a month after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, "thereby voiding the southern Black Codes which, among other things, had punished free slaves for vagrancy and idleness. At the very moment when Republicans in Congress were enshrining the legal supremacy of free labor as a cornerstone of Reconstruction, their brethren in Massachusetts were engaged in constructing an apparatus of labor compulsions." Pennsylvania followed in 1871,1876, and 1879; Illinois in 1874 and 1877; New York in 1880 and 1885, and the other New England states throughout the 1870s. Members of the newly formed state charity boards and professional charity reformers—especially those involved with the new "scientific charity" movement—redefined beggars as "swindlers" who refused to do their proper share of work in exchange for alms. As Amy Dru Stanley suggests, advocates of scientific charity "convert[ed] a dependency relation into a relation of contract." Charity officials and professional charity reformers would maintain their skeptical view of the poor and public dependents well past 1900.

The growing influence of hereditarian thought—especially degeneracy theory intensified the fears of charity officials and professional charity reformers about public dependents. Professional charity reformers like Lowell believed that socially undesirable behaviors like intemperance or prostitution were hereditary in nature. A tendency towards public dependency, therefore, could be passed down to children. A poor environment, moreover, contributed to an individual's degenerate state and would be reflected in future generations. Likewise, a moral environment could potentially improve a family's germ plasm.This mixture of environmentalism and hereditarian thinking reached its peak in Richard L. Dugdale's 1877 tract, "The Jukes": a Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity, which traced a 1,200 member clan of drunkards, thieves, bastards, beggar prostitutes, syphilitics, and murderers. In a manner reminiscent of Howe's 1848 report on idiots, Dugdale stressed "human cost accounting" and argued that the 1,200 members of the Jukes clan had cost New York more than $1.3 million over the past 75 years.

During the mid-to-late 1870s, state charity officials in New York and other states even adopted a pejorative, hereditarian view of the deserving poor. This transformation is perhaps best illustrated by Charles S. Hoyt's exhaustive 1876 survey of county poorhouse inmates, "Report on the Causes of Pauperism." Hoyt, the secretary of the State Charities Board (SBC), argued that the "the number of persons in our poor-houses who have been reduced to poverty by causes outside of their own acts is, contrary to the general impression, surprisingly small." Accordingly, the Board began experimenting with requiring county poorhouses to extend work programs to public dependents—even the traditionally deserving and partially disabled poor. SBC member Martin B. Anderson, for instance, contended, "We believe that work should be provided for weak-minded and partially infirm paupers, even if it shall return no profit to the counties. The inmates of our poor-houses will always be healthier and happier when employed than when idle."

Leading professional charity reformer—and advocate of scientific charity— Josephine Shaw Lowell played a key role in popularizing charity officials' harsher vision of public dependency and the deserving poor. In 1876, at only 33 years of age, Lowell became the first woman to be appointed to the New York State Board of Charities. Her appointment derived largely from her 1876 report on able-bodied paupers for the New York State Charities Aid Association, which many professional charity reformers saw as "a model of the new social-scientific approach." As Waugh explains, Lowell's report blended statistics and anecdotes in order to discover "the 'truth' about public dependency. Once the truth was made manifest, its scientific aura of 'neutrality' would impress both legislators and the public to approve the needed reforms." Lowell lambasted charity officials' current approach to public dependency. She suggested that charity policy effectively told "the vicious and idle: 'We will board you free of cost, if you will only come and stay among us.' The money wasted in this way is the least of the evils of the present system; the corrupting influence of these worthless men and women, as they pass from town to town, lodging among the people, must be incalculable."

Historians have dismissed Lowell as a harsh elitist obsessed with restoring order, yet her legacy is more complex. As historian Joan Waugh explains, Lowell reflected her family's history of "conflicting traditions—elitism versus democracy, exclusiveness versus inclusiveness, paternalism versus liberalism." On the one hand, Lowell believed strongly in building voluntary, rationalized charity programs, as did most of other professional charity reformers in the late nineteenth century. She shared with other leaders of the scientific charity movement a "didactic impulse...'to instill' in the urban poor worthy values" and a devout belief in the moral value of work, and an environmentalist faith that properly structured institutions could prevent degeneracy. On the other hand, despite her Brahmin background, Lowell and her family held "an inclusive vision of American society—a vision at odds with the paternalistic exclusivity of many of their peers." Lowell maintained her family's radical political traditions, which extended from her father's financing of the Utopian Brook Farm community and her entire family's active role in the abolitionist movement to her later support for mothers' pensions, the living wage, binding arbitration, and the Homestead Strike. Lowell's work on the feeble-minded, however, represented her more elitist, exclusive side.

Once on the State Board of Charities, Lowell redefined the question of custodial care for the feeble-minded in such fearful terms that neither the board nor the legislature could dismiss the issue. In fact, Lowell's first presentation on the topic in January 1878 proved so convincing that board secretary Charles S. Hoyt immediately arranged for her to meet with Wilbur and the Syracuse trustees and ordered 1,000 copies of Lowell's report printed. Although the text of Lowell's report has not survived, her message can be pieced together from the Syracuse asylum's annual report for 1878 and speeches in

which she used a similar methodology. As the Syracuse trustees recounted, Lowell documented that in county poorhouses, "carelessness in the administration...in the matter of a proper and rigid separation of the sexes" contributed to high rates of illegitimate births among "imbecile and idiotic females." Such women, Lowell argued, were easily seduced. Their children invariably "became a permanent burden upon the counties." Feeble-minded women were even more vulnerable outside local poorhouses, although the story ended the same way: with mother and child "abandoned to the charge of the county authorities. Lowell thus suggested that by failing to control feeble-minded women, local poorhouses were reproducing public dependency, a notion anathema to charity officials. Lowell's highly gendered understanding of public dependency and feeble-mindedness, moreover, proved influential in the formal eugenics movement that developed after 1900.

In order to establish a custodial asylum, Wilbur reluctantly joined forces with Lowell. Wilbur believed that a specifically eugenic institution was not necessary, since he thought that idiots rarely reproduced. Nonetheless, Wilbur began to work with Lowell. Her help—along with Wilbur's carefully cultivated relationship with the State Board of Charities and, in particular, his strong public support for the board in its battle with the superintendents of insane asylums in the mid-1870s—proved decisive. In June 1878, the legislature approved an $18,000 appropriation for the new institution. Later that year, the New York State Custodial Asylum for Feeble-Minded Women opened its doors in the Finger Lakes town of Newark under the supervision of Wilbur and the Syracuse trustees.

Reflecting Lowell's defining influence on the new asylum, lawmakers and the state board of charities declared that the Newark asylum would serve only women of child-bearing age, and only those capable of useful work. Moreover, inmates could not leave the asylum if they became self-sufficient, nor could relatives easily extract them from the institution. Newark asylum did not have a commitment law until 1914. Nevertheless, inmates' families had a hard time retrieving them; moreover, many inmates had no relatives with whom they could live. In 1909, for instance, relatives gained the release of just seven inmates out of a total population of 817. Superintendent Edwin T. Dunn transferred two inmates to state insane asylums, released one to a county superintendent of the poor, and ruled one inmate ineligible (perhaps she had reached menopause). Wilbur, however, carefully followed legislators' mandates. The official circular that he sent to all county superintendents of the poor during the late 1870s and 1880s stated that "young and healthy" women would receive priority for admission. Moreover, he rejected women whom poorhouse officials classified as "unteachable." Wilbur's successors at Newark maintained these admissions policies.

To a certain degree, however, Wilbur's vision of the ideal custodial asylum shaped life at Newark. Following Wilbur's 1873 outline for a custodial program, the State Board of Charities planned that the more capable inmates would help to care for the less capable. Accordingly, Wilbur sent the Newark asylum a mixture of higher-grade and lower-grade inmates from Syracuse and the country poorhouses—from which the vast majority of inmates arrived. This policy presaged Charles Bernstein's admissions strategies once he took over as superintendent at the Rome asylum in 1902. Only 8.21 percent of inmates admitted to Newark in 1883 and between 1886 and 1920 came directly from Syracuse. Reflecting the fact that the majority of inmates came directly from county poorhouses, most of the approximately fifteen women admitted in 1881 arrived without even a change of clothing. Superintendents also noted that they had to teach most inmates how to do domestic work. SyracuseIn practice, women with epilepsy, cerebral palsy, various types of paralysis, and chronic diseases made up a considerable proportion of Newark's population (one-third in 1881). Superintendents and the board repeatedly complained that the county superintendents of the poor sent potential inmates because they were insane, delinquent, aged, or otherwise troublesome, instead of idiotic, imbecilic, or feeble-minded women. Despite provisions in Newark's by-laws barring women with epilepsy and the establishment of the Craig Colony for Epileptics in 1894, Newark asylum seems to have always had a considerable number of inmates with epilepsy, a variety of physical disabilities, and chronic health conditions. The asylum's superintendents lauded the caretaking abilities of inmates who, at times, watched over as many as seventeen inmates—work that not only reduced costs but also addressed superintendents' continual problems with retaining employees. The superintendents of idiot asylums in New York and other states—and indeed state institutions in general—could rarely match the going wage rates Wages at the Newark asylum were significantly lower and hours were longer than at other nearby jobs. In 1906, for instance, the gardener received $50 but could earn $75 elsewhere. Superintendents also often found that "higher-grade" inmates were more interested in caring for "unteachable" inmates than employees. Trent reports, "Higher functioning inmates, in contrast, not only tolerated the monotony and unpleasantries but, indeed, seemed to thrive on them." Although most professional charity reformers deplored such practices in the country poorhouses and state insane asylums, having inmates care for each other became increasingly common in state idiot asylums and institutions for the feeble-minded across the nation during the late nineteenth century.

But whereas Wilbur primarily used occupational training programs to make his students self-sufficient enough to return to their families, state charity officials used inmates' labor at Newark to provide care on the cheap. In its 1879 report to the legislature, for instance, the State Board of Charities explained that at Newark, "the various household occupations necessary in so large a family [will] be done, as far as possible, by the inmates, for economy's sake...."34The first superintendent of Newark, C. C. Warner—the former superintendent of the poor for the well-regarded Onondaga County Almshouse—required all inmates capable of any type of work to labor. By 1886, inmates were making all of the clothes for the 134 residents; in 1893, inmates produced 713 dresses, 519 chemises, and 43 strait-jackets, among other items. Other inmates worked in the kitchen, laundry, canning room, and bakery and, after 1907, in the garden. By 1907, Superintendent Winspear (the third head of the asylum) proudly reported that more than 90 percent of inmates were working. He noted that "about fifty per cent [were] capable of doing very good and remunerative work under proper direction." Indeed, Winspear planned to ensure that "every inmate not actually ill shall be occupied every day at some suitable work or exercise." He intended to occupy inmates who were not capable of working full-time—namely, "low grade girls" and inmates in ill health—with "walking parties."

Newark superintendents' extensive use of inmate labor significantly reduced costs and, thereby, the cost of their dependency on the state of New York. Given that institutional expenses remained a potent political issue well past the turn of the century, the frugality of Newark's superintendents undoubtedly pleased the state charity officials and legislators. Overall, Newark's cost of maintenance (excluding clothing) was just 68 percent of that at the Syracuse asylum, thanks to inmates' work. In 1909, for instance, inmate labor reduced the cost of clothing by nearly half (the asylum spent $4,109.20 on materials for clothing; the matron, meanwhile, valued inmates' labor in the sewing rooms at $3,486.61). Inmates also produced $600.21 worth of canned goods ranging from strawberries and plums to floor wax and lard, helped raise $2,483.57 in farm produce, and helped save $2,116.07 in provisions and $1,189.06 in household stores. Overall, inmate labor reduced expenditures on food, household supplies, and clothing by nearly 22 percent in 1909 (including salaries, managers' expenses, and miscellaneous items, inmate labor reduced costs by just over 15 percent). Thus, for inmates at Newark, work constituted a civic obligation to be self-sufficient—or at least reduce the cost of their dependency. Nonetheless, unlike at the Syracuse asylum, inmates' labors did not provide them with a path to discharge.

In contrast to Wilbur, superintendents at the Newark asylum did not believe that productive inmates could be safely discharged; indeed, Newark superintendents' hereditarian concerns led them to retain nearly all inmates. Trustees and superintendents alike continually harped on the relatively small number of inmates who had children before they entered the asylum and the lack of sex segregation in poorhouses (the annual reports usually reported that 20 to 25 percent of inmates had been mothers, but cited a rate of 50 percent in 1898). In 1889, the asylum's trustees described the institution as serving "Imbecile women in our State, born in alms-houses and never having had any other home, have been mothers from once to four times." The four "higher grade" inmates whom W. L. Willett discharged in 1892 represented a rare exception. Willett later reported that all four had obtained "good places to work through the efforts of the superintendents of the poor of the counties from which they were committed." Willett later received "good reports" from the former inmates. Nine inmates were released to their relatives in 1894 after improving considerably; most became self-sustaining. A few others were dismissed in 1912 because they were no longer seen as "menace[s] to society," but these discharges appear to have all been rare exceptions. In total, women discharged as not requiring custodial care, not imbecilic, much improved, and improved made up 64 or 10.18 percent of the 599 discharges between 1894 and 1920 (most women were classed as "improved"—39, or 6.51 percent). Six inmates (were discharged after gaining writs of habeus corpus. Between 1879 and 1920, the Newark asylum had a discharge rate of only 3.92 percent. In contrast, the Syracuse asylum had an overall discharge rate of 9.37 percent between 1882 and 1920, nearly 2.4 times greater than Newark (discharge data is not available for 1879, 1880, or 1881). Male pupils at Syracuse were forty percent more likely to be discharged than female students. Moreover, the largest group of discharges at the Newark asylum (28.38 percent of the 599 discharges between 1894 and 1920) represented inmates who had reached menopause.

Newark superintendents' habit of abruptly dismissing inmates at menopause did not ease families' attempts to absorb their relatives. In contrast to Wilbur, Newark superintendents paid little attention to whether their families could receive them (inmates whose relatives could not take them were sent to their county poorhouses). In 1894, Mrs. Elizabeth Goodings, for instance, wrote to the State Board of Charities begging that Superintendent Winspear not discharge her daughter: "I am totally without income (77 years of age) and dependent on my soninlaw [sic].... He will not be wiling to receive Emily into his home.... It would break my heart if my oldest child should be obliged to go to a county house or an insane asylum.... Does it not seem cruel to throw these children back into the condition from which you have taken them...[?] With the exception that they cannot propogate [sic] their kind, will not there last condition be as sad as their first?]”

Newark's pioneering model of custodial care—preventing the "feeble-minded" from reproducing public dependency while demanding that they fulfill the civic obligation to be self-sufficient—had a nationwide impact on how lawmakers and charity officials dealt with people labeled feeble-minded. Superintendents at the Newark asylum proved that, if inmates were carefully selected for their ability to be producers, custodial care was cheaper than educational idiot asylums. At Newark, moreover, inmates' labor helped to defray the cost of their own public dependency on the state—an approach that legislators in many other states found attractive. Indeed, the deserving, disabled poor were becoming undeserving, burdensome dependents whom charity officials expected would become at least partly self-sufficient.

The New York State Custodial Asylum for Feeble-Minded Women at Newark provided charity officials and lawmakers with a cost-effective means of addressing a new policy problem: how to prevent the reproduction of public dependency by people labeled as feeble-minded. Nonetheless, the asylum was too small to house all feeble-minded women of child-bearing age. Nor could the asylum accept women who "aged out" or homeless male graduates of Syracuse. Finally, like the Syracuse asylum, the Newark asylum did not provide a solution for what to do with people who could not work—those who were labeled "unteachable" or were too ill. All of these factors would lead lawmakers to establish the Rome State Custodial Asylum for Unteachable Idiots in 1894.

- Sarah Frances Rose, No Right to Be Idle: The Invention of Disability, 1850-1930. Dissertation, University of Chicago, 2008. pp. 67-82

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Inquisition 

On day 4 of  NaPoWriMo My topic is probably my most controversial to date as Ive written on the Benefits Assessment process. I’ve given it the title Inquisition and anyone who has ever been through it will know why.  If this doesn’t scare you as to what Brexit Britain is really going to be like then I really don’t know what will I hope you’ll enjoy what will be a challenging and thought provoking…

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There is also the humiliation of asking for sedekah, and occasionally for zakat, and being refused -- an experience that is far more common today. Hamzah, one of the more 'reputable' poor, speaks with more feeling about this humiliation than about the gain he is denied. . . . As is usual in these cases, the refusal was not a blunt rejection but a cold shoulder -- silence ( sengap). Later in the year I listened to Hamzah grumble to a friend about being shortchanged on wages by Haji Kadir. He had helped fill and sew gunny sacks with paddy disgorged from the combine-harvester, for which he expected a wage of 50₵  a gunny of M$25 for the fifty gunny sacks he had done. H was given only M$5. When I asked him whether he complained (merungut), he explained, 'Poor people can't {complain}. When I'm sick or need work, I may have to ask him again. I am angry in my heart.' Here then is the bitterness, the swallowed bile, of a man who has decided to conduct himself according to the rules imposed by the rich -- to be available, discreet, and deferential, unlike his brother Razak and unlike others of the poor who rarely ask for help

Scott, Weapons of the Weak, 176-77.

[rtpeat]

How did welfare claimants come to be seen as scroungers?

How did welfare claimants come to be seen as scroungers?

See on Scoop.it – News and Current Affairs When William Beveridge conceived the welfare state seventy years ago, the poor were seen as “deserving” now viagra no prescription

those using the welfare state are most often seen as “scroungers”. How has the…

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Choices.....

In the debate around benefits, or in fact around entitlement to assistance or help of any kind there has been of late a massive move towards stigmatising the recipients of the apparent largesse of the state. This is most apparent around the use of the phrase 'strivers vs scivers'. This is, as many others have pointed out, reminiscent of the Victorian concepts of deserving and therefore undeserving poor. Which essentially can be simplified as those whom we can identify with and empathise with, those where we say 'there but for the grace of God go I' juxtaposed with those whose experience and values are so wildly different to our own that it is easier to attribute fecklessness, irresponsibility or weakness as a cause of misfortune rather than acknowledge how the world works.

But to me it goes deeper than that. It is about choice. I don't come from a liberal background that assumes that everyone is essentially good and if they are given opportunities they will somehow succeed and achieve unparalleled affluence. My upbringing taught me about original sin, the concept that we are all born as seflish and slightly broken people. It would be easy in some ways to assume from that perspective that people will therefore use every opportunity to take without thought, behave without consideration of consequence and be morally bankrupt. This seems to be a mistake that christian and non christian people readily make.

It doesn't help that from Thatcher onwards we were schooled in the politics of envy. Those that profit from the status quo, from the hard work of others and foster inequality through the lie that all have the opportunity to thrive if they work hard enough - these people misdirect the wider population by appealing to our greed.

Two areas where this is most apparent are pensions and benefits.

Over recent years there has been a great deal of talk about the gold-plated pensions of the public sector and subsequent moves to erode and reduce public sector pensions appealing to the public jealousy at the apparent bounteous pay outs. Of course the reality is that rather than dragging down those who apparently do well, to gain equality the private sector should be encouraged, or even forced to compete by raising the pension provision for their employees.

Similarly with benefits, rather than slashing benefits for those who can't, or even won't, participate in employment the answer is not, if you believe that competition motivates everyone and everything, to penalise and demonise the weak and poor in our society. The answer is to force employers to pay a wage to employees such that even the lowest skilled jobs carry an incentive to work that is more than to avoid a punitive system. It is worth remembering that with unemployment figures rising and falling so fluidly, the benefit system provides a pool of redundancy for employers to draw on in he good times. this reservoir of workforce is totally subsidised by the state. When the next big corporation like Starbucks is revealed to have avoided paying their dues, remember where they will get their next batch of employees when they open their next branch.

Take away the cynical polemic point and we are left with choices. Despite the self evident fact that some people do abuse the system we can choose to assume that the significant majority do not. We can apply logic and consider that if people had the skills or knowledge to live a more fulfilling and productive life most of them would choose that way of being rather than subsist under our current system.

For every one of my clients who smokes away their benefits, or has a sky subscription I can't afford, rather than apply injudicious envy, I can choose to examine why people find themselves in that situation and apply some compassion. I can choose to look at the bigger picture and rather than victimise vulnerable and distressed people I can examine the morality of banker's bonuses, tax avoidance and people buying a holiday home through some perception of hard work and being deserving. The full version of that advert sickens me on many levels.

I can choose to stop being a victim of malicious propaganda and look at how our broken society really works.