On March 26, 1880, Anna R. arrived at the door of a newly established charity. A widow, often sick, with no relatives in town and few means of employment to support her five children, she had scrapped by for the last five years in Indianapolis with little help from the trustee–– the person responsible for the administration of public relief, or what we now might call welfare. The volunteer who took her statement at the charity society noted in the official record, “She don’t think this a good city for the poor – they don’t look after the poor enough.”
Anna knew poverty. When she was 11 her family immigrated to America from Ireland, presumably searching for better opportunities. Instead she found more hardship. Her husband died from a workplace accident on a railroad during the Civil War, while she was four months pregnant. By 1874 she had landed in Greencastle, Indiana, destitute, and raising five children ages seven to twelve.
In the Gilded Age one of the most common community responses to dealing with beggars – or paupers as those who seemed chronically, perhaps willfully dependent on charity were derisively called – was to make the beggar another community's problem. A town's trustee would issue the mendicant a one-way railroad ticket out of town, then hope the receiving town’s trustee didn’t do the same and send her right back. In October 1874, Greencastle did just that, and made Anna and her children Indianapolis's problem.
Anna’s life bottomed out in Indianapolis. She went barefoot in winters, and the report of the Indianapolis trustee noted that in the winter of 1876 the family was “burned about the feet,” presumably a case of severe frostbite. “They sleep on a pile of rags on the floor. Not enough clothing to cover themselves. … She also claims to have heart disease.”
Such conditions might suggest to you that Anna and her family needed immediate public welfare, private charity, or both. But as Americans encountered their first modern, industrial depression in the 1870s, many persons took as an article of faith the belief that relief created a disincentive to seek work, that it “demoralized” the poor. Chronic unemployment, poverty, and dependence were not necessarily viewed as proof of structural economic failings. More often they were seen as proof that poor persons suffered from moral defects that, in an age of enthusiasm for science, were also commonly believed to be inheritable. A popular interpretation of evolution and genetics suggested that a poor person inherited a predisposition to laziness, similar to the way we think of alcoholism as an inheritable risk, today. Easily-won relief might cause a biologically frail person to slide down a path of degeneration, forever living a squalid life of dependence on charity and welfare and then passing on that condition through her blood to her children. As Indianapolis’s trustee noted of Anna, “She is destitute, but continued help from the county has made her chronic. This old Irish fraud depends on public charity for a living … Is a professional liar and beggar. No help can make them live any other way than like hogs. They are stable bred and cannot rise above their breeding.”
Private charities often were no more inclined to support the needy and sick than the public relief officials were. In 1879 Anna and a daughter spent the winter sick, and did not receive any assistance for her family. Now her daughter had contracted typhoid and was “afflicted with lung disease.” All of her daughters worked when able to, but the badly frostbitten feet limited their employment opportunities, as did the reality that for poor women, typically the only available work was taking in other peoples’ laundry for about $1 per week. By the time of her visit in the spring of 1880 to the Indianapolis Charity Organization Society, – a charity committed to the principle of not giving out too much charity – Anna was $28 behind on the rent, one of her sons was in reform school and Anna’s petition to get him out had failed, while the other son had “typho-malarial fever” and had missed his $2.50 a week job for three weeks. A daughter also had “lung trouble” and had been unable to work for the last ten weeks. At her age and health, Anna also “could not do much work, even if she were free to do it.”
Yet in spite of the obvious want, the final decision of the Charity Organization Society in 1880 echoed the judgment of the trustee from 1876: no relief given. Curiously, in contrast to the trustee’s report from 1876, the Charity Society report on Anna found her to be “worthy of any charity, sober, industrious, and works hard to provide for her family.” An Archdeacon similarly testified that Anna only solicited aid from benevolent societies when faced with the most dire circumstances brought about by the onslaught of so much illness in her family, and judged that “under these circumstances, with which I am reasonably well acquainted, I think she is deserving.”
How did Anna R. come to be dismissed first by the public official responsible for administering welfare, and then the most ambitious and prominent new charity in town? An elected position, the trustee either followed the wishes of the local political machine, in which case relief might flow freely, or followed the wishes of the already sizable number of voters who thought that too much of their tax dollars went to the supposedly "unworthy" poor, the sort imagined to be stable-bred hogs. The trustee in Indianapolis, Smith King, knew his base of support was with the latter group and generally spent his term slashing expenditures.
The Charity Organization Society was a newcomer to charitable giving. Its officers, like the town trustee, held these truths to be self-evident: that all mendicants are created venal, that they are endowed by their constitution with certain insatiable appetites, that among these are lies, liquor and the pursuit of charity. Perhaps Anna’s thread-bare, sick and dirty condition repulsed them, and suggested on a visceral level the image of a family of hogs, even when rationally they knew she needed and merited relief. Perhaps they knew that if she easily won relief from them, their office would be swamped by a thousand others just like Anna. We can only guess what happened to Anna and her five kids. The details wretched lives exist only in Case Record # 80 of the Charity Organization Casebook of 1880. (Family Service Association of Indianapolis Records 1879–1971, Collection # M 0102, Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis. Last name abbreviated at request of the Family Service Association.)
Postscript:
In an unfortunate coincidence, I feel free to write about the history of poverty and unemployment and dependence at Daily Kos, after mostly lurking for the last several years, because last week I filed my first claim for unemployment insurance benefits. Having earned a history Ph.D. from a world-class research university, serving six one-year contracts as a visiting assistant professor at a regional, public university in the mid-south, and publishing my first scholarly book(due out at the end of this year! It makes a great gift! Well, maybe not!), I find myself out of work and depending more upon the capricious fortunes of the job market than on my own, considerable talents and initiative. I do not have it as bad as Anna or any of the other poor and unemployed from the Gilded Age, about whom I still hope to research and write for my life’s work. No one is calling me a hog. Yet. I have a few months before my health insurance expires, and certainly do not have typho-malarial fever or five children. Unlike an elderly widow of the 1880s, there are more employment options available to me than taking in someone else’s laundry. But like Anna, in this new Gilded Age I find myself wondering if I am slipping into a position of permanent helplessness and dependence, and of the opinion that "they don't look after the poor enough."
Wed May 30, 2012 at 7:24 AM PT: Wow, I am taken aback by your interest and support. I will be sure to share a few more history of poverty stories over the coming weeks and months, and hopefully also get into some more commentary on reform in higher education and in poverty, today. Thank you so much! Made a newly unemployed guy's day. :)