“The organized charity scrimped and iced
In the name of a cautious statistical Christ.”[70]
Social work is confessed by the definition, to be “cautious” and “statistical.” Used in this opprobrious sense the words make a reproach that could scarcely be more bitter, but who would want a doctor to pour out without stint the strichnia needed by his patient’s heart? The development of methods, standards and technique has been referred to in these pages as matter only for congratulation. But obviously these have their dangers like everything else. Our childish humanity has been tempted, from the days of the medicine man on, rather to claim the confidence of a gullible public by the impressiveness of its ceremonies than arduously to achieve that confidence by the excellence of its performance. The temptation to aim at an impression is especially strong in the case of social work because it often does for people the sort of things that friends are at the same time sporadically attempting. When with every intention of producing efficiency social work tries to establish “standards” it again has to risk the shift of emphasis from the work to the technical measurement and the resulting tendency to attempt what can be put through in good form instead of what most needs to be done.
But the greatest resentment is probably not caused by these lapses, which social workers themselves know better than outsiders. “Organized charity” did not, as it is so easy for those who know only the present to assume, originate suspicious scrutiny. Charity was “cautious” in the sense of the bitter couplet long before the present organized charity movement. The fierce old English poor law took no chances on “impostors”[71] and the dread of them by the private charities of the continent in the sixteenth century has already been referred to in these pages. It is, of course, easy to see the necessity for “investigation” when charity is on a large scale. But it is easier to resent for oneself, or one’s friends, the mortification of being suspect; and to many people “organized charity” has never meant anything more than an attempt to prevent overlapping and imposture. But in the scientific charity movement precaution soon sank into insignificance beside the more positive purpose of learning enough about a situation to tackle it intelligently. This is a trifle harder to understand and even easier to resent. When we want help we usually have a pretty definite notion of just what help we need, we are in a touchy mood to begin with, and unless we are very nice people indeed we resent any questioning of our preference. It is a matter of common knowledge that those who do not appreciate the difficulty of the doctor’s task and the time required for cures drift from one dispensary to another and try physician after physician in search of one who will treat their troubles as they think they should be treated and give them the relief for which suffering dares not cease to hope. What wonder if a yet greater dissatisfaction is felt with the deliberateness of the social worker. And if, as we have said in the definition, he is to proceed by “scientific” methods he must be as “cautious” and “statistical” as the doctor.
But granting the need of caution in procedure it is shocking and repellant, on the face of it, that this organized charity should make the throbbing woes of a fellow creature the subject of dehumanized records. It is bad enough that people should be required to strip their predicament bare, exhibit all their helplessness and violate reticence to expound whatever can “throw light on the situation”—but why must it be recorded? But it is shocking enough to learn that someone we care for is known as a certain sort of case in a hospital and yet we have now so far appreciated medical exigencies as to accept it as a necessity. In other matters also we may come to realize that there is no impertinence in impersonal treatment for purposes of serviceable classification, and for all classification the prerequisite is records.
A final source of misunderstanding is the double nature of the social worker’s task. Not only in relief work but in other lines as well he is not free to do as he would, he cannot always command the means. He can decide what he thinks would best be done but then he has to consider what sort of approximation to that best the resources of his association or community allow. The Webbs, in outlining a proposed reorganization of the English relief system, say that “Nothing has contributed so much to make the visits of the Poor Law Relieving Officer odious as the mixture of his inquiries—as to the sickness of the person who is ill, or the lunacy of the person of unsound mind, and at the same time, as to the means of the family and as to what relations could be made to contribute.”[72] This stewardship for public or contributed funds and for doing things quite irrelevant to any intention of social work do more than anything else to make it seem “scrimped.”
Social work, then, may take heart of grace. It is, once again, being condemned chiefly on misunderstanding and for the rest on its mere shortcomings. All human undertakings must expect that and try to amend and carry on.
It may summon its courage and meet the last charge, the one that seems to make it most uncomfortable, a charge that not only says it bails the sea with a sieve and locks the door when the horse is out of the stable, but goes farther and ascribes motives—“the social worker is called an apologist for the status quo; he is called a little brother of the rich; he is accused of taking tainted money;”[73]—and why? Because social work continues in what its critics consider “remedial” work instead of addressing itself to wholesale and summary prevention.
Whose fault is that? Let any one who blames it on social work turn to the reports of the national conference. Let him turn to the “Survey.” He will find no lack of interest in prevention. The fact is that social work is paid for by voluntary subscriptions, philanthropic foundations, and state appropriations. So far all these sources of support, the potential representatives of the people in the legislature no less than wealthy donors, are more accessible to an appeal for relief of existing misery than to an appeal for the prevention of possible catastrophes. This ties the hands of social work even in the simple matters in which it might alone do more “preventive work.” But social work cannot alone, in any but a secondary sense, prevent the situations it is called upon to relieve. It works prevention as hard as it can and puts it up to the community in plain terms, but the situations which, at our present stage of progress, largely occupy its services could only be prevented by a living wage and regular employment, work that would not poison or exhaust the worker, sanitary and decent housing, clean milk, and so on through the list of those simple requisites of a civilized life which are now inaccessible to a large part of our population. Social work cannot give employers the will or the ability to pay a living wage; it cannot provide the masses with decent housing and unadulterated food nor, all at once, with a corresponding standard and habit of living. And if it should stop all it is doing now, in order to devote itself to prevention, neglected children would grow up unhealthy and vicious, the feeble-minded would multiply and every calamity of today become a fruitful source of multiplied disaster tomorrow. One might as well ask that all physicians cease treating from day to day the many diseases that afflict us, the better to devote themselves to a wholesale campaign of prevention. The social work of our definition has its own specific work to do from day to day. It must, like medicine, care for the handicapped in each generation and prevent the spread of contagion while it uses the margin of its energies for prevention and progress.
Social work as we have described it, is not synonymous with social reform. It has no more responsibility for reform on “general principles” than has any other profession or calling. That it should ever be thought to have is a tribute to its thoroughness and convincing proof of its devotion to prevention.