CHAPTER IV

We have now propounded a tentative definition of social work based upon an interpretation of its development and present practices. We will not be sure of the correctness of that interpretation until we have tested the applicability of the result to the whole range of social work. Nor can we do this fairly by making our own presentation of social work. For such a test we must find some ready-made presentation which will marshal social work in all its diversity. The reports of the national conference do this and, indirectly, the courses offered by the school for training social workers. This chapter will test and, if possible, expand the definition by the testimony of the conference and the succeeding chapter by the testimony of the schools.

The conference is divided into ten sections:

At the annual convention each of these ten sections holds its own group meetings at which papers are presented and discussions conducted on the subjects appropriate to the section. It will be seen that the division into sections is on a basis of administrative fields rather than technique or function. The fields however are not mutually exclusivebut overlapping. Children although giving their name to the whole first section appear among “delinquents” in the second, candidates for health in the third and so on. Indeed, all of the ten section names might serve as subheads under most or all of the other topics.

More significant in the search for a definition is the fact that these several fields are not exclusively possessed by social workers. “Children” are also the special concern of elementary teachers, “delinquency” is primarily referred to the courts, “health” is the conceded bailiwick of the medical profession and so forth. Even at the conference many papers are presented by persons other than social workers.[32]

These two types of overlapping make the masses of material with which we have to deal both indeterminate and confusing. But representing as they do the mutual interpenetration of social work and other callings, they give a fresh opportunity to distinguish the nature of social work. We may inquire what is the special interest of social work in “children,” in “delinquents,” in “health,” and in what ways does it differ from the respective interests of teaching, law, medicine and so forth.

It is obviously impossible to review in readable compass the fifty years in which the conference has met and, as there have been great changes in social work during that time, it would be profitless for a contemporary definition. A new arrangement of sections was made in 1918, and therefore the reports of the years 1918, 1919, and 1920 (the last in print when this study was made) were chosen for detailed analysis.

That analysis can be most simply presented to the reader by sections, putting before him an itemized statement of the subjects covered in the reports of each section (treating the three years as a unit) and then following this sectionalreview with such considerations as have recommended themselves cumulatively and can only be offered on the basis of the material as a whole. We are looking for the characteristics of social work as a whole and can therefore consider only such features as continue to show themselves throughout the sections. In the following itemized lists for each section the figures represent the number of papers in which the subject indicated was the principle topic.

I. CHILDREN.The forty-five papers presented in this section dealt with the following subjects:Plans for removing the handicaps of the illegitimate without increasing illegitimacy8Recreational needs of children7General protective schemes, plans for extending a sheltering arm over children isolated in the country and for establishing state-wide vigilance5Standards for child care4Reports on the practices of particular localities4The working of children’s courts4Nature and causes of that chronic and excessive troublesomeness which is called juvenile delinquency3Special psychology of children3Best ways of providing for children dependent on the public2The responsibilities of the public to its neglected children2Problems of day nurseries2Health needs of children1

I. CHILDREN.

The forty-five papers presented in this section dealt with the following subjects:

It requires but a glance at the above list to see how much wider is its range than that of a teachers’ or medical men’s convention. There is nothing to connect the topics—except children. This synthesis of social work in personality which has been already indicated as the “social” element in social work becomes increasingly evident in any review of the conference. As it has proved difficult of definition it will be well to keep it in mind in order that it may take shape during the following review:

II. DELINQUENTS AND CORRECTION.Probation and parole4Protective work for young people4Special value of policewomen in protective work for girls2Juvenile delinquency2Runaway and neglected girls1Papers not devoted to a single subject17Including such considerations as the influence of war on criminality, municipal detention for women, the function of a truancy officer, the desirability of creating a public defender and the moral education of training school inmates.III. HEALTH.Standard of living19Coordination of health services5Special problems of health in war time4Housing3Health work among the foreign-born3Health problems of the Red Cross2IV. PUBLIC AGENCIES AND INSTITUTIONS.Administrative questions15Effects of prohibition3State pensions for mothers3Pauperism2Control of leprosy, by colonization or otherwise2Such standardization of record keeping as to make the records kept by the several states comparable2Education of the public in their responsibility to public charges, public care for negroes, care of crippled children, care of defectives and delinquents—one paper each4V. THE FAMILY.Questions of administration1Registration of all appeals in a social workers’ exchange3Advantages of an orderly approach to social case analysis3Examples of case work treatment3The family2Marriage laws2Tasks growing out of war10Maintenance of family solidarity during absence of men, reinstatement of returned soldiers, Red Cross programs and functions of “home service.”Papers not devoted to a single topic included such subjects as:Case work as a source of information for sociology.Case work as contributing to democracy.Case work as interpreting industrial problems.Case work as serving those above the poverty line, cooperating, interpreting social work to the public, organizing the community, family budgets, thrift and pensions for widowed mothers.VI. INDUSTRIAL AND ECONOMIC PROBLEMS.Cooperation, health insurance, British labor party program, minimum wage, soldiers’ and sailors’ insurance, state care of mothers and infants, inheritance, land monopoly, the position of the negro in industry, trade unions in the public service, social work and the revolution demanded by radicals, causes for the existence of the I. W. W. and economic justice.VII. THE LOCAL COMMUNITY.Special needs of rural communities11Recreational facilities of all grades6Americanization on a neighborhood basis3Effects of war on a neighborhood1Other papers not easily classified deal with various expedients for focussing local interest, settlements, the community store and community kitchen, the social unit plan, enlistment of the business men’s interest in community progress and councils of national defence.VIII. MENTAL HYGIENE.State departments or societies and other organized agencies for mental hygiene8Training of social workers for the new task4Experience of the war in the care of neuroses3Care for the feeble-minded3Mental hygiene in industry3Mental hygiene and delinquency2Mental hygiene and education1One paper each on—Stimulation of public interest in care for the insane, the psychiatric element in all case work, the individual versus the family as the unit of social work, social problems asthe reaction of mental types, the court’s dealings with the mentally afflicted, and the relation of social work to the state’s program, to hospitals, physicians, and the community in fostering mental hygiene. A few other papers present the actual lore of the new subject.IX. THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIAL FORCES.Publicity for social work activities and education of the community in appreciating them6Impetus of the war to large scale organization for common purposes and the desirability of integrating social service6“War chest”3Registration of cases3Other papers treat of--Endorsement and standardization of social work agencies, salary standards for social workers and their labor turnover and teaching materials for learners.X. 1918—GENERAL PROBLEMS OF WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION.Ten papers no different in import from those in other sections which have been cited as discussing conditions created by the war.1919 and 1920—UNITING OF NATIVE AND FOREIGN-BORN IN AMERICA.State immigrant commission, labor organizations and public education as Americanizers, the foreign language worker and foreign language press, foreign organizations and family welfare, democracy and immigration, neighborhood life, and the treatment of immigrant heritages.

II. DELINQUENTS AND CORRECTION.

III. HEALTH.

IV. PUBLIC AGENCIES AND INSTITUTIONS.

V. THE FAMILY.

VI. INDUSTRIAL AND ECONOMIC PROBLEMS.

VII. THE LOCAL COMMUNITY.

VIII. MENTAL HYGIENE.

IX. THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIAL FORCES.

X. 1918—GENERAL PROBLEMS OF WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION.

1919 and 1920—UNITING OF NATIVE AND FOREIGN-BORN IN AMERICA.

Such, in briefest possible outline is the scope of the annual conference on social work. What have its papers contributed to the correction or expansion of a definition?

The first proposition of the tentative definition was that all forms of social work originated in a spontaneous effort to extend benefits. How is this affected by the testimony of the conference? In the first place it is abundantly confirmed. The conference papers deal pre-eminently withpioneering in the extension of benefits and opportunities. The phraseology does not always suggest this but one has only to look beyond the phraseology to the action in order to find it. If we look at the first section we see it to be in effect proposing that the whole community shall deliberately and without delay rearrange not only schools and home life but industry and general living conditions so as to give to all its children opportunity and encouragement such as are now given only to the most fortunate. We find it advocating a scheme of child welfare on a county basis which shall seek out “all children in need of care for any reason” and demanding enforcement of proper health precautions for the children of unenlightened parents and a real chance in life for the illegitimate child. Among the titles of this one section at one conference appear “Progress Toward Better Laws,” “Planks in a 1920 Platform,” “Lessons from North Carolina,” “A Community Program, etc.”[33]But these platforms and programs are not to be ascribed to the community in any sense except that of being proposed for the community as a whole by social workers. At the same conference they are discussing “Social Workers as Interpreters” of social conditions and methods of getting “publicity” for their aims.[34]The same sort of title takes up the tale in the next section, a “Program” again, “Aims and Methods” twice, “A Plan,” and so on throughout the conference. Although other professions, education and medicine for example, are constantly busy jacking up standards, their general undertakings are fully accepted. For all regular purveyances of education and medicine the community has given a blanket order and expects to pay “within reason.” Social work is in a different case for it is constantly trying to put over something which is still but tentatively and experimentally accepted and depends root and branch on the willingness of some people to do, out of hand, for others.[35]

The president of the conference in 1920 referred to a “belief in human improvableness and a willingness to tackle the job.”[36]That is as far as the conference usually philosophises in this direction. And this is the sort of phraseology that makes one forget that social work is extending benefits—this casual reference to tackling the job. It is another of the paradoxes in the development of social work (we have already noted science rescuing personality), that when charity offered only a minimum of rough food, uniform raiment and herded shelter to the utterly destitute there was much made of the generosity of the donor, but now when social work has been carried to a point where it often provides for the handicapped a great deal better than the rank and file manage to provide for themselves it is taken to be a case of noblesse oblige.

We may read in the “Observations of a Philanthropist” penned a century ago that “It’s greatly for the interests of charity that the objects of it should be respectful and grateful. We think our kindness in a manner repaid when it is thankfully received; it’s a pleasure then to have done it and an incitement to do more,”[37]or in a “hospital” report that “the number of proper objects are amply sufficient to employ the bounty of the rich.”[38]

The difference here indicated is not accounted for by the fact that these were the observations of philanthropists while the conference is composed of professional social workers for whom benefaction is all in the day’s work. As has been already indicated, the papers read at the conference are not all by social workers. Furthermore, the “incitement” now employed to get from all manner of men financial support for the undertakings of social work is of a very different order. Let any one consider the appeals which come to his desk. They contain little to rouse his vanity and the offer of an opportunity to acquire merit isalmost as uncommon. The degree of need and the certainty of accomplishment are the things never omitted.

This suggests the cause for change. A century ago need might equally well have been urged, but what could then have been promised of accomplishment? All that was then expected was surcease of the hour’s suffering. That is a fit subject of congratulation as when a complaisant philanthropist wrote of the London of his time there “is not a disease that can afflict human nature nor a want which the varying conditions of man can require but finds an open asylum, a resort ready prepared with the needful accommodation for reception, comfort, instruction and cure, and with the exception of a few cases entirely free of expense.”[39]

But what is that compared with the great modern adventure of eliminating poverty and holding disease at bay? Science has brought to charity faith and hope in terrestrial terms. The historian who unearthed the above statement remarks, “In theory, society consists of a large number of charitable people; in fact the number of those who can be properly so described is a small one. The few who are really in earnest in their desire to alleviate distress even at the cost of considerable expenditure of time and money, are surrounded by a multitude of persons who are willing to assist but only provided they can do so at no great inconvenience to themselves. This lower power of sympathy passes gradually through the stages of languid interest to complete indifference.”[40]

Modern social work is no longer dependent on the appeal to “sympathy” alone. It has a wide range of interest and through its practical application of the various social sciences it associates itself with all our hopes of progress. Expectation not only to mitigate the effects of calamity but to prevent its recurrence gives social work a claim on public attention which charity never had.

Along with this change in expectation goes naturally a change in attitude toward the beneficiaries of social work. “There can be no line of cleavage in the advancement of public sentiment between the development of the general social agencies such as church and school and the more intensive forms which we have come to know as social work.”[41]The old view of society saw many staunch persons standing on their own feet and a few weak brethren or victimized who needed support. But the view implied in this quotation recognizes an interdependence among all the members of society, an interdependence of which the particular predicament of those who happen to be in need of social work is merely an incident.

But the speakers at the conference go still further. “So long as there are human frailties there will be need of social workers. But let us not forget that the larger vision of social work contemplates not charity alone but justice, and all social ills arising from environment are man-made and therefore changeable.”[42]If the beneficiaries of social work are thus counted scapegoats for us all, being victims of social injustice, then every act of prevention (and we have said that all social work is now at some remove preventive) is for the general safety and no more than a proper self-defence. Social work now resents the smugness that can represent as especially disinterested any service to those who have been paying the penalty of blunders or iniquities for which the prosperous may be equally responsible. It is only justice to them or less and it is sound policy for all. No wonder social work will not stand to be considered charity! It considers its preoccupation with the backwaters of race progress to show no gracious condescension on its part—merely an appreciation of the extent and importance of the backwaters.

But all this shows social work more than ever spontaneousand gratuitous, for it does not work for even a heavenly reward; and it must, unadmonished, stir the community to support the work it sets itself to perform. It is only the old condescension that has gone. The extension of benefits remains, but has become something constructive and collectivistic.

Such a change in attitude toward benefaction would necessarily affect the second criterion of social work proposed in our tentative definition—its incidence in response to need. What is the testimony of the conference on this second criterion? The analysis of subjects dealt with in the first section reads “plans for removinghandicaps,” “recreationalneeds,” “protectiveschemes,” “standards for childcare,” “nature and causes ofdelinquency,” “providing for childrendependenton the public,” “responsibilities toneglectedchildren,” “healthneeds.” Two subjects, which as given, do not commit themselves on the question of need complete the list. In the second section the persons under consideration are by definition subject to some sort of provision and control. They are delinquents. But that the interest of the social workers is especially in fostering and guarding them is shown by the fact that young people’s need of protection is the subject of six papers, juvenile delinquency of two, runaway and neglected girls of one more, while the rest deal with adjustment of treatment to the needs of older offenders, with probation, parole, education and the form of detention desirable in a given case. The third section deals entirely with standards of living in relation to disease conditions, and with means of extending medical service. The remaining seven sections continue to show need as the occasion of social work, but it is a sublimated sort of need which would be much misrepresented by any classification of the beneficiaries as “needy.” The whole level of interest has passed above and beyond that.

As has been already indicated discussion turns on “programs,” “plans,” “standards,” and it is in a positive andanticipatory vein as by people embarked on a constructive undertaking. The note of initial accomplishment is most clearly struck in the “local community” division with such titles as “The Boy Scout and Community Building,” “Organization of Games and Athletics in Rural Communities,” “Signs of Rural Hope,” etc. But turn to the context and you will read, “The Scout program recognizes the need of the boy for a recreational program for his unused time which at the same time is educational. Scouting also recognizes the need that the man has, etc.”[43]The neglected rural situation, the poverty of interest in some neighborhoods—these are what have drawn social work to undertakings that carry no hint of remedy in the expression given their objects.

In a dynamically conceived society it is hard to say where remedy shades into prevention and prevention into construction. Prevention of disaster not only involves the maintenance of continuously good conditions but the anticipation of wants. If we are not to have juvenile delinquency boys must have some chance for wholesome recreation. If we would avoid bad housing we must arrange betimes a good city plan preserving open spaces where they will be wanted later and developing each type of building in a neighborhood where it need not be soon perverted to a use for which it was not intended and will not be well adapted.

Dr. Simon Patten contended that the present productivity of the world was such as to free mankind from any fear of general dearth and cause all our prospects to be potentially in terms of abundance and not of want, to rescue us from the old “pain economy” of insufficiency and give us a “pleasure economy” on a safe margin of sufficiency. Under these circumstances, he said, “world riches may replace the living sacrifice and become the social contrivance that lowers human costs and we must cease to think that theanguish of the sentient creature is compensated by the development of moral qualities which merely reconcile man to repeating the experience of suffering.”[44]Social work has already ceased to think in that fashion and is working in the spirit of a pleasure economy so that the terminology of need is no longer pre-eminent. “There are times when self-sacrificing zeal is demanded and all honor to those who then devote or lose themselves in service. That is only one side of it. The need of sacrifice is always a reflection on the men or circumstances calling for it.”[45]That is the view of modern social work, the frame of mind in which it sets about its work. It talks about what has to be done as a matter of course and is chiefly concerned with the best way of doing it. It is beginning to outgrow “sob stories” even in asking support from an indifferent public—they set too low a standard of toleration and there are some modern social workers who turn from them abashed, as from dallying with an outrage beneath endurance. The battle ground of reform must be on another plain where the initiated see danger but the complaisant still need convincing.

“When once the worst is gone the second best becomes intolerable.” Gray, the historian of English philanthropy, describes the effective philanthropist as the ideal agitator, “It is his to discover those larger ends of common welfare which reach beyond the moral perceptiveness of ordinary men in their ordinary moods. He is, as it were, an explorer in the unmapped world of the ideal life from whence he brings back news of an unreached good, such tidings as sound like travelers’ tales in our ears, but which haunt the mind of men until they seek to verify the story by a practical policy calculated to transform the actual. Only it must be observed that the most daring speculator cannot move very far from his base and the wildest Utopia is determinedby the conditions of its year of publication.”[46]

“I hold,” said Dr. Southard to the 1919 conference, “whatever the ideal order, the practical order of work called social work begins with the eradication of evil. It may sound better to sow goodness or to transplant goodness, or even to graft goodness in the eager social world, and beautiful little gardens of Eden or smaller cases of goodness can be shown here and there to the social visitor—nevertheless, I hold, with the prejudice of a physician perhaps, the eradications of evil are more in the first order of our work than disseminations, transplantations, and grafts of goodness. At any rate, if there be anything at all in the millennial hopes and ingrained optimisms of Spencerian evolution, it is plain that by and large we are putting evil behind us and arriving at goodness by a clever technique of successful destruction.”[47]This “eradication of evil” may, as one side of the “technique” of evolution, operate in the terms of any developing organization; but in terms of eradication of evil, not in its own functioning or its subject, but in the conditions of its object it is not common outside of social work. It is not to be found in the business world where all purveyance shuns the applicant most in need of its wares and seeks the one best able to pay. It is not to be found in the law, which tries to hold the scales even to all comers. It is only slightly and intermittently in state-craft which while it is coming more and more to inhibit abuse of the helpless does still, from an age-old sense of security in the alliance with wealth and power, bend its constructive energies to encouragement of the prosperous. It is not even in education, which constantly tends to provide in each school grade teaching suitable for those who will have longest to study and is only importuned by demands fromoutsideto cater in the lower grades to those who must get in them all the education theyare ever to have. Social work stands alone in its purely personal championship of the less secure in prosperity. It is in its enormous demands for them that it seems to have turned to purely constructive things.

It is indeed possible that along the lines of prevention social work is developing a function which is positive in the same sense as hygiene is positive in the field of medicine and that social work will, to that extent, independently “plant good” as well as “eradicate evil.” But it is also possible, and in the light of past developments more probable, that any constructive phase of social work which proves permanent should come to be looked on as a routine purveyance and no longer considered social work. This we have already seen to have happened in the case of free education and many other things.

The conference has thus confirmed and filled out the elementary features of social work which it inherits from charity, voluntary benefaction and response to need. What does it have to say of the qualifying features that have transformed charity into social work—the emergence of the individual as the only and sufficient nexus for its services and the adoption of scientific guidance?

The first of these has already been touched on in relation to the first section. Throughout the second the discussion all bears on the prevention of delinquency or the care of delinquents. There is not much discussion of pure justice, the burden of the argument is all that we should “approach every individual prisoner with conscientious determination to give him the best service of which we are capable, realizing that his future is largely in our hands.”[48]A public defender is asked for “in order that every person accused, no matter how poor, may have a full and fair trial.”[49]And for sentenced prisoners social work asks something more than mere detention, “we used to look upon them, in thestage of repression, en masse. * * * Instead of committing a man to a particular institution he is now committed to the custody of a board of control * * * to be examined * * * to determine just where he will fit into school or industry. The man will be assigned by his board, to the particular prison to which he is best suited for mental and physical treatment.”[50]“If a child who is mentally sound comes into court with a mind bent on the commission of some offence he should be sent to a special school having for its purpose the education of such children. Let the great departments of psychology and sociology of our colleges and universities devise a course of instruction and education that will reclaim a juvenile delinquent who is mentally and physically sound”[51]and “we should extend the methods developed in the Children’s Courts to apply to all ages, wiping out our arbitrary age line by improving the treatment of the older groups.”[52]

It is in this section that there appears at its plainest the paradox that the questions purely dependent on what we call personality are questions of social relationship and all genuinely social questions are questions of personal life. A public policy is justified in terms of personal benefit but interest is claimed for personal difficulties on the ground that they illuminate public issues.

The third division is one that speaks quite unequivocally concerning the nature of social work, for there is an old and kindly profession already established in this field and social work must justify its own entrance there. All of the subjects in this health section are of interest to the doctor as well as the social worker, but for the doctor they throw light on the causes and cures of disease, for the social worker they are a point of departure for active work to establish better standards of living. Nineteen of the papers presented deal specifically with that subject. Fivemore deal with the co-ordination of various health agencies—a task in social engineering. One speaker, himself a physician, reports no less than ten agencies united in efforts to improve a city’s health. Only four of these (the board of health, the hospital, the tuberculosis society and the medical profession) were permanently concerned with health. The other six, the schools, the park department, the city statistics department, the industries, insurance companies and churches were enlisted, as the context shows, as so many agents establishing connections with the individual beneficiaries of the campaign. The work of choosing them and enlisting their co-operation demanded a knowledge of social not of physiological conditions.

In the next section, that devoted to public agencies and institutions, the conspicuous fact is that social work does not forget that public care is for private people. It hardly seems necessary to quote from all the sections even in pursuit of this most elusive of the characteristics of social work. One more citation will be enough. “We social workers have our contribution to make to that ultimate attainment of democracy which must be wrought out, not in uniformity but in diversity, not only in the right of man to individual freedom but in his ability to enter into that right.”[53]

The extension of the sense of public responsibility, the realization that reform must come in all the interlocking activities of a highly organized business, political and social life has tempted some people to think that the days of social work are numbered or to seek out for it some highly specialized or recondite function. But if we are right in ascribing to it this function of challenging all forms of service to reach and satisfy individual needs it may be more important in the future than in the past. Wholesale and collectivist methods call for constant adaptation of general means to particular cases and the more we give of governmentservice the more we may need of social work. The more varied our health service, the more flexible and extensible our educational opportunities, the more occasions there will be for adjustment. Such follow-up work as is done by hospitals and by the workmen’s compensation office, the work of the mothers’ assistance fund, of the voluntary experiments in special nutrition classes, vocational guidance, and scholarships for trade school attendance, are only a few examples of the kind of thing social work branches into as established agencies extend their own responsibilities.

The fact that social work rescues people who fall through the meshes of the school system, people dismissed from clinical treatment only to return to a regimen bound to revive their troubles, that it discovers the round pegs in square holes and the neglected groups and anomalous cases has caused other people to see it as all converging in a liaison work which shall ultimately be all there is left for it to perform and which shall be in essence social case work. From what has already been said it will be evident that there is no reason to think that social work which has been so prolific of criticism of our established institutions and a pioneer in experiment should cease to exercise this function, which is as infinite in possibilities as the life of man itself, or even that it will cease to work along lines of inquiry or of group work. That little word “social” opens up the possibilities of all the permutations and combinations in human consciousness. The conference at least hints that social work knows it.

And what of the method by which social work is to be conducted. Is it, as the tentative definition said, suggested by the social sciences? There is not a great deal of explicit reference to social science, but the concepts of economics, social psychology and sociology are constantly in evidence and even political science has its say in an “engineering” conception of the state, in definitions of democracy and in criteria of progress. The almost complete disappearanceof the question of relative responsibility of the individual and society which morality and philosophy have debated in so many forms testifies to assimilation of the sociological concept of social life as an integration of individual lives rather than an aggregation and of the individual life as no digit but an incident “* * * time moves swiftly in the social field and the special knowledge of today easily becomes the common knowledge of tomorrow.”[54]And after all that has been said in the preceding pages of the obvious effects of a scientific method and scientific attitude in making social work what the conference shows it to be it scarcely remains to prove or even argue the confirmation, the reinforcement, the expansion of the last qualification of social work.

Nine round-table conferences and five committee reports, in addition to the papers presenting concrete programs and reports of local experiments testify to the careful checking up of method. The constant references to programs, standards and experience, to records and the search for causes, the emphasis on prevention and the patient, objective, therapeutic attitude of the social worker all testify to the conquest of the field by science. But the completeness and significance of that conquest are plainest in the ever-present, implicit but unmistakable assumption that all the undertakings discussed are parts of a systematically coordinated campaign based upon continuing observation of cause and effect.

Thus have the reports of the conference confirmed and filled out the tentative definition. But the analysis did not cull from them any fresh characteristics of social work. Their mass of commentary, aimed, as it seemed, in all possible directions, would suggest no testimony except in answer to leading questions and we will have to be satisfied with such expansion of the definition as, while adding nonew terms, commits the already proposed items to more significant implications. The definition so expanded must be passed on, for challenge or alteration by the evidence of the training schools.

FOOTNOTES:[32]The 1920 conference heard from four judges (three of them of juvenile courts), three college professors and one college president, a bishop, a rabbi, a governor, and a state commander of the American Legion, as well as from doctors and other professional people who occupied positions ranking as social work.[33]Conference, 1919, pp. 111, 123, 133, 136.[34]Ibid. 1920, pp. 271 and 278.[35]Ibid. pp. 188, 111, 129, 135 and 298.[36]Ibid. p. 4.[37]History of English Philanthropy, p. 269.[38]Ibid., p. 273.[39]Ibid., p. 271, referring to the opening of the 18th century.[40]Ibid., p. 266.[41]Conference, 1920, p. 74.[42]Ibid., p. 77.[43]Ibid., p. 267.[44]The New Basis of Civilization, p. 55.[45]Philanthropy and the State, p. 235.[46]Ibid., p. 302.[47]Conference, 1919, p. 583.[48]Ibid., 1918, p. 147.[49]Ibid., p. 171.[50]Ibid., 1919, p. 100.[51]Ibid., 1918, p. 126.[52]Ibid., p. 136.[53]Conference, 1918, p. 287.[54]R. W. Kelso, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 22, No. 1.

[32]The 1920 conference heard from four judges (three of them of juvenile courts), three college professors and one college president, a bishop, a rabbi, a governor, and a state commander of the American Legion, as well as from doctors and other professional people who occupied positions ranking as social work.

[33]Conference, 1919, pp. 111, 123, 133, 136.

[34]Ibid. 1920, pp. 271 and 278.

[35]Ibid. pp. 188, 111, 129, 135 and 298.

[36]Ibid. p. 4.

[37]History of English Philanthropy, p. 269.

[38]Ibid., p. 273.

[39]Ibid., p. 271, referring to the opening of the 18th century.

[40]Ibid., p. 266.

[41]Conference, 1920, p. 74.

[42]Ibid., p. 77.

[43]Ibid., p. 267.

[44]The New Basis of Civilization, p. 55.

[45]Philanthropy and the State, p. 235.

[46]Ibid., p. 302.

[47]Conference, 1919, p. 583.

[48]Ibid., 1918, p. 147.

[49]Ibid., p. 171.

[50]Ibid., 1919, p. 100.

[51]Ibid., 1918, p. 126.

[52]Ibid., p. 136.

[53]Conference, 1918, p. 287.

[54]R. W. Kelso, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 22, No. 1.

Back to Index Next