Charities and the Commons: The Pittsburgh Survey, Part II. The Place and Its Social Forces

by Various

There is the instance of a man and wife, the man apparently recovering from tuberculosis. No careful physical examination was made either of the husband or wife. Various attempts at finding employment for the husband were made but he began to fail. Then suddenly the wife's condition became alarming and it was discovered that she was in a more advanced stage of the disease than her husband. Meantime the couple had not been assisted in tracing the whereabouts of the husband's parents, supposed to be well-to-do. In the end, fortunately, the couple themselves received word from the parents who were in California prepared to receive the family (which included three young children) and to provide care for the sufferers and if the worst came to give a home to the children.

There are the many instances, where material relief has been given to sickly families and the improper sanitation of the neighborhood or the imperfect disinfection of the houses, the causes of the conditions, have not been investigated and rectified.

There are the instances where a family, left as the result of an industrial accident without its male bread winner, has not had the kind of assistance which would enable it to secure the proper settlement with the particular industrial plant in which the death occurred.

There are the instances where the wayward boy has not been given the specialized training which might have turned him into an interested workman with a constantly increasing salary.

There are the instances where widows have been allowed to carry too heavy burdens and where, unknowingly, children have been put illegally to work, through holes in the laws which should be blocked up.

There are instances where with the failure to see the male bread winners the whole moral and physical condition of the families has rotted because shiftlessness and intemperance have been allowed to run riot.

There are the instances where endless evil has developed when the most hardened of beggars, because of their very vociferousness, have been permitted to set an example of easy living to the honest and toiling people in a whole community.

There are the instances where material relief has not been followed by agencies for the development of a better family life: better cooking, better home keeping, a larger fund of recreation, more harmony, better individual development, more thrift. In other words, such a development that there need not again be descent below normal living.

In Pittsburgh as elsewhere there has been too much reliance upon visits to the families and upon a superficial sizing up of conditions. As a result there has been too little development of treatment beyond the mere giving or withholding of material relief and of medical and nursing relief. Notable exceptions there are, but on the whole it can but be said that material relief alone, and that in many instances by no means adequate, has bulked too large. The same must be said of outdoor relief everywhere. To-day it requires as much attention for its right development as any other field of social effort.

It cannot be said that the outdoor relief agencies of Pittsburgh have been as effective as educators of the community and directors of its charitable impulses as they would have been with proper co-operation. On their own initiative they are now putting an amount of effort, and brains, and heart into the work of co-operation which assures far more definite results when the new order has established itself. For instance, it would have been possible, with proper co-ordination, for the relief agencies to gather a vast mass of data regarding dependency wrought or deepened by two social evils to which Pittsburgh is prone, the prevalence of typhoid fever and the number of uncompensated industrial accidents.