Of the re-visited applicants who were given rehabilitation for trade, 87, or about one-half, fall within the small-grant low-capital group. Some of the 87 proposed to become peddlers, canvassers, or agents, but the majority planned to be merchants or dealers. Notion stores, branch bakeries, cigar stands, grocery stores, millinery stores, tea and coffee routes, and stationery stores were among the enterprises contemplated. Two-thirds of the families either had no dependents or had wage-earners to supplement the income from the business. The proportion entirely without resources is high, being 62 out of 87. Twenty-six incurred indebtedness in order to engage in business; and of these, 23 were in business in 1908. Of the 61 who did not borrow, only 31 remained in business.
It seems that to start a small enterprise, grants of under $300 to persons who could not bring their capital to a point between $500 and $700 without assuming an unwieldy debt, were too small, in the absence of close supervision, to assure their restoration within a reasonable length of time to a normal standard of living.
The large-grant low-capital trade group had but 31 members. Nearly half of the number were families with dependents and without wage-earners. Their enterprises were of the same character as were those of the small-grant group. Only eight of the 31 went into debt, and the amounts they obtained were in no case as much as the grant. Six of the eight remained in business. Of the 23 that did not borrow, 14 remained in business. Because of the small number of cases involved, no conclusions should be drawn as to the relation between success and borrowing.
There remain of the trade enterprises a high-capital group of 54 persons in half as many different lines of buying and selling. Over half of these families had dependents, most of the families having dependents being couples with from one to five young children. Four-fifths of all the families had before-fire resources. The persons who contracted indebtedness numbered 42, and of these, 39 were in business at the time of the re-visit. Eleven of the 12 families who did not borrow were in business. Because of the similarity of the proportion of successes among those who incurred indebtedness and among those who did not, and because of the small numbers involved, conclusions would be worse than valueless.
2. STUDY OF REFUSALS
One hundred and six persons who had applied for aid for business and had been refused were visited in 1908, and most of them were located and personally interviewed. The visitors had dreaded to meet these disappointed applicants face to face, and were agreeably surprised to find that most of them were quite willing to be interviewed and for the most part bore the Rehabilitation Committee no ill-will. The many who were doing well were proud to have achieved success without aid; and those who had failed to get into business and were doing poorly, were pleased to have some one on whom to lay the blame. Only one man refused point blank to give an interview.
Except for showing a preponderance of married couples, the families to whom aid was refused were constituted about as were those families to whom aid was given. They had in general much more extensive resources than the grantees, though 13 had no resources whatever and 22 others had less than $500.
The reasons for which aid was refused were in general more technical than those for which assistance of a less specialized nature was denied. Six were refused, in fact, because their character and habits were thought to be such as would militate against success; two were remitted to the care of near relatives; and two were found to have rehabilitated themselves unaided. Ten only were refused because they had not been in business before the fire; and 20 because they presented no feasible plan or because they wanted to start saloons, which latter proposal, naturally, the Committee could not approve. Five were refused because they wanted to be re-established on a large scale. The largest grant the Committee could have given them would have been too small for their needs. The remaining 61 were refused because they were judged able to rehabilitate themselves, if not in business, then through wage-earning.
Of the 106 refused grants by the Committee, 42 did not start business, but 62 started without the aid applied for. Two of those refused had died. Of the 62 who entered business, eight failed and the remaining 54 were still in business in 1908. Failure to start was much more general among the candidates for rehabilitation in personal service than among those who sought aid for manufacturing or mechanical enterprises, which serves to emphasize what has been said as to the greater expectation of success in the lines involving mechanical skill.
As was to be expected from the fact that exhaustive investigation was not attempted by the Rehabilitation Committee in 1906, a certain number of the refusals appeared, in the judgment of the reviewer, to have been unjustified. There were 23 such instances. In 12 of them conditions were not without remedy. Reports on seven of the cases were submitted to the Rehabilitation Committee, and grants of from $250 to $350 each were promptly made. Five other families were found in which circumstances had changed so as to make aid advisable. To the 12 families, the sum of $3,090 altogether was distributed in 1908.