PART IIIBUSINESS REHABILITATION

[146]Of the 13,970 cases passed upon in the period to which this table relates, 56 could not be classified according to the plan adopted.

It was the aim of the Rehabilitation Committee to make final disposition of each application for a specific object by means of a single grant. This it succeeded in doing in the cases of 17,560 (86.8 per cent) of all applicants aided. Before the other 2,681 applications were finally disposed of, 5,777 grants had been made, usually at the rate of two grants to a case. Three grants were rarely made, although there were exceptional cases of applicants who received three or four different kinds of aid in five or six separate grants.

Table 44shows the extent to which re-opening occurred.[147]

[147]In addition to cases analyzed above and in the table, 904 cases which were at first refused were afterwards re-opened to receive a grant.

TABLE 44.—NUMBER OF RE-OPENED CASES BY NATURE OF FIRST GRANT

The form of aid through which the greatest proportion of cases was disposed of by a single grant was transportation. Of these but 4.6 per cent were ever re-opened.

A single grant for transportation was effective in so high a proportion of cases because the applicant as a rule was being sent where work awaited him or to relatives pledged to furnish him a home.[148]The re-opened transportation cases are mainly those of persons who could not adapt themselves to life in other communities, and who returned to San Francisco and were given household furniture or business rehabilitation. Housing was a form of aid offered principally to self-supporting families; hence those whose first grant was for housing were usually wage-earners whose income sufficed not only to furnish the house, but to pay part of the expenses of building it. Business cases were usually re-opened, not for aid for other purposes, but for additional aid for business,—a legitimate demand where circumstances showed that an applicant was threatened with failure for lack of a small amount of additional capital.

[148]SeePart I,p. 58ff.

There seems to be no reason in the nature of things why a first grant of aid for household furniture should not have been conclusive in a greater number of instances. Families were required to present fairly definite plans before being given aid to re-establish their homes. If they could have been dealt withmore liberally in the beginning, there would have been less re-opening. Most of these first grants for furniture, however, were given between August 20 and November 1, and were inadequate. Although at the time they were treated as final, later on, especially during January and February, families who made request were given an additional grant for furniture.

General relief is in its very nature indeterminate. It is not surprising, therefore, to see that one case in six returned for additional assistance. Some of the families were given intermittent care until June, 1907, and then became charges of the Associated Charities and the other regular relief agencies.

Grants for tools were nearly all given very early in point of time, and were for small amounts. They averaged but $34.71. Such of these applicants as later applied again were considered eligible to receive grants for household furniture, or were assisted to build homes, on the same basis as though they had not previously received aid. The same is true of many families who early received small amounts of general relief. When they succeeded later in forming definite plans they were given grants for household furniture, for housing, or for business.

It is evident that in any disaster so great that months are devoted to the work of reconstruction, a number of families must be dealt with at least twice and some must be carried through the entire period that the wonted relief work of the community is superseded by the unwonted. Even though action taken on an individual application be regarded as final, there will be many re-applications, some because there is the craving for another slice, some because there is a planning to make good use of aid that is being offered in new forms, and others because there is the facing of a new family crisis. In each instance, as a rule, there must be a re-investigation, which means that the time of investigators and of committeemen is drawn in part from the consideration of current cases. All cases suffer corresponding delay. As was to be expected, the greater number of re-openings were in the first three periods of the rehabilitation work. Of 912 household grants made before the end of October, 1906, only 175 were filed away to remain “closed.”

How could the re-opening of cases have been in part obviated?

First, by avoiding the mistake of filing a case as “closed” when it was unfinished.

Second, by supervising the expenditure of money given for a definite purpose to persons of weak wills or poor judgment, and by making the grant, if the state of the funds permitted, sufficient adequately to meet the purpose. To illustrate: 371 families received grants for furniture, and 461 for business rehabilitation, each in two allotments. In some of these cases, because of the withholding of the funds, the first grant was inadequate. In others, the money was spent to poor advantage or for purposes other than the original intention. The Rehabilitation Committee in making business grants hesitated to hand an applicant more than the average business grant of $250. If provision from the start could have been made to have business grants expended under the supervision of trained workers, larger sums could have been safely placed to the credit of the applicants, many business failures would have been averted, and the call for second grants avoided.

Third, by opening earlier the Bureau of Special Relief. If the Bureau had been started in May instead of in August to give emergency aid in money as well as in kind, it would have released the Rehabilitation Committee from the need of considering the granting of petty amounts, and would have left it free to concentrate effort in its own field. To illustrate: The Rehabilitation Committee before the middle of August made 480 small cash grants for general relief, and 373 for tools. The Bureau could have handled these quickly and effectively by giving help in kind or in cash to an amount of $50 or less. Later, when plans for permanent rehabilitation had been made on the one hand by the Rehabilitation Committee, on the other by the families themselves, the way would have been clear for the more weighty decisions. The quick exchange of records would have meant that the facts held by the Bureau were available as the basis for further investigation.

The length of time elapsing between application and grant was seriously studied by the reviewers. The results need not be given in detail. It should be noted that delays in a time of emergency must not be judged by the standards applied to the normal work of a relief society. The time elapsing between applicationsand grants varied materially with the period of the relief work. In the first period, extending from May 5 to July 7, 1906, the proportion of grants made within three weeks of the date of application was larger than in the second, the period of accelerated applications, extending from July 7 to August 20, 1906. During the third, the period beginning August 20 and ending November 4, 1906, the proportion of grants made within three weeks of the date of application was smaller than during any other period of the relief work. The proportion of grants made six weeks or more after the date of application was at the same time much larger in this period than in the earlier periods. In the fourth period of the work, extending from November 4, 1906, to April 4, 1907, the proportion of grants made within three weeks of the date of application was smaller than in the first period, but much larger than in the second and third periods.

During the first period of rehabilitation work, the burden of care fell on the army as well as on the Finance Committee of Relief and Red Cross Funds. It was the time when the people were not ready in large numbers to make application for rehabilitation. Only 1,843 applied during the nine weeks. During the second period of six weeks, 6,479 applied to the central and to the seven section offices in which were working the newly organized force of investigators. If any standard were to be upheld, deliberation, which meant delay in dispatch of cases, had to be in order. When in the third period of ten weeks the number of applicants was but 2,872 and the force of investigators, case reviewers, and committeemen had had time to get on a sound working basis, the episode of the withholding of the eastern funds caused a partial paralysis of decision. In this period the long delay in making grants is a reflex. In the fourth period of twenty-two weeks, during which the number of applications was 10,994, when retrenchment was not the key-word, the sharp reversal of policy makes any testing of relative speed impracticable. The cumulative effect of working conscientiously together brings the power to dispatch cases. Whether the relative dispatch would have been greater or less in the fourth period if the district plan had been adhered to can be answered either way merely by a conjecture. Two facts must be borne in mind: First, no physical suffering resulted from delay.The emergency cases were always handled with rapidity, first through the camp commanders and the staff at headquarters, later through the Bureau of Special Relief. Second, mental suffering did result from delay, but to be thorough, rehabilitation work must be carried out with deliberation.

There is first presented a table classifying the grants for different purposes according to amount of grant.

TABLE 45.—GRANTS FOR REHABILITATION BY AMOUNT AND BY NATURE OF RELIEF GIVEN[149]

[149]Because of variations in the practice of treating successive grants of the same nature to a single applicant as a single grant or as different grants, the figures in the “total” column of this table differ from the corresponding figures presented in other tables and in the text.

The table indicates the amounts allotted to individuals for the various forms of rehabilitation, and brings out striking differences in the sums required for different purposes. Of the 9,958 homes furnished, 9,168 (92.1 per cent) were refurnished at less than $200 each, and 4,708 of these (47.3 per cent of the total) at less than $100. The larger sums, $200 and more, usually mean that a family having spent its first furniture grant for some other justifiable purpose was later given a second furniture grant, or that the so-called furniture grant included $50 to $100 given for clothing andincidentals. Single sums given for a double purpose have been classified under the predominant purpose. Thus the numerous grants reading “Household Furniture and General Relief” have been classed as household grants; $300 or over was involved in less than 1 per cent of the grants so classified.

Grants for business were much larger than those for the household. More than one-half (56.2 per cent), to be sure, were for less than $200, but 15 per cent were for $300 or more, and of these, 3 per cent received $500. Seldom was the grant more than $500.

Grants for general relief in 82.2 per cent of all cases were for less than $200; in 50.9 per cent for less than $100.

Housing[150]is the form of aid that called for the largest individual grants. About one-fourth, 23.7 per cent, were under $200; 41.6 per cent were between $200 and $300; and one-fourth were $500 or over. The sums granted for transportation and for tools, on the other hand, were very small, 84.2 per cent of the former and 94.5 per cent of the latter being for amounts under $100.

[150]Bear in mind that the bonus grants are not included (seePart IV,p. 239ff.), nor the camp cottage expenditures (seePart IV,p. 221ff.).

TABLE 46.—GRANTS AND REFUSALS TO APPLICANTS WHO POSSESSED RESOURCES, BY AMOUNT OF RESOURCES

To summarize, 77.1 per cent of all grants were for less than $200, and of these more than half, or 41.1 per cent of the entirenumber, were under $100. The grants of $200 to $299, constituting 15.7 per cent, are made up principally of sums for housing and business. Grants of $300 and over constitute the remaining 7.2 per cent, and most of these were for business rehabilitation or housing. In the study of business rehabilitation that follows inPart III, it will become evident that the number of comparatively small business grants included some failures.

A glance atTable 46shows that to possess resources other than income did not in itself render applicants ineligible for relief. Of the 6,232 property owners that applied, 4,958, or 79.6 per cent, received aid. Though the percentage of refusals was higher among those with the greater amount of resources, 791 persons, 62.2 per cent of those with $1,000 and over, received aid. Under the grant and loan plan[151]aid to build was conditional on ownership of a lot, and the success of a business plan was usually felt to depend on the applicants’ having something to supplement the grant asked for. Small property owners with small incomes who did not intend to rebuild, needed household or other aid, and there were some property owners who could not, if they would, have their holdings converted into cash. In fact, the persons aided who had resources were, in general, those whose resources could not or should not have been used for refurnishing or for current expenses; those refused were the few who had available cash savings or who had been so fortunate as to receive their insurance money early enough to make an independent start. A thousand and one special considerations and facts entered to make a classification of this group of cases a call for a digest of each case. Such a digest is not practicable in this limited Relief Survey. If made, it would be an index of the individualizing work done by the Rehabilitation Committee. It may be safely said that the Committee rarely erred on the side of generosity. The immediate lesson to be learned is that the presence or absence of resources is only a factor in rehabilitation. No generalizing policy of grants and refusals can be built upon it.

[151]SeePart IV,p. 253ff.

InTable 47, 5,284 refusals of aid are classified by the reasons for refusal and the nature of the applications.

TABLE 47.—REASONS FOR REFUSAL OF REHABILITATION, BY NATURE OF APPLICATION[152]

[152]It will be noted that the totals of this table are considerably larger than the corresponding totals ofTables 33and34. The difference seems to be due to the fact that in preparingTable 47two or more refusals of aid on a single application were treated as separate refusals.

Part IIIBUSINESS REHABILITATION

Businessrehabilitation grants were made from the beginning of the relief work in cases where assistance in another form would have been less effective. Thus, on May 16 and 18, within a month after the disaster, the Rehabilitation Bureau made a grant of $75 for a shoe repairing shop, and another of $100 for a restaurant, and on May 30 and June 29, 1906, grants of from $250 to $500 each for a restaurant, a rooming house, a book store, and a grocery. It is interesting to note that to no one of these first six business cases was it found necessary to give additional aid. The Rehabilitation Committee soon after its organization, July 2, 1906, roughly formulated its business rehabilitation policy, which is embodied in the following notes from the minutes of July 19:

1. The Committee is not disposed to set people up in business in which they have not previously been engaged, although it is possible some exceptions will have to be made.2. Estimates of amount necessary to start a business must be cut to the lowest practical figure.3. References and other evidence should be required that applicant is capable and that request is reasonable.

1. The Committee is not disposed to set people up in business in which they have not previously been engaged, although it is possible some exceptions will have to be made.

2. Estimates of amount necessary to start a business must be cut to the lowest practical figure.

3. References and other evidence should be required that applicant is capable and that request is reasonable.

The theory of rehabilitation in business, craft, or calling remained practically the same from May, 1906, to the close of the work in 1908. Nevertheless, there were differences from time to time in the handling of applications, due to the factors which have been shown in the preceding part[153]to have influenced the rehabilitation work in general. In the first period the applications for business rehabilitation were comparatively few and the grants small.In the second, the Rehabilitation Committee was getting fully prepared to carry its work. In the third, no new applications for business were received and action on those pending was deferred, except in the cases of unsupported women and aged people. These were given business rehabilitation during the period of arrested progress only when the need was very urgent and other means failed. In the beginning of the fourth period a sub-committee of the Rehabilitation Committee, known as Committee VI, was appointed[154]to consider business rehabilitation cases. The work of Committee VI and the fourth period are practically synchronous, because after the beginning of the fifth period, in April, 1907, the few business rehabilitation cases considered were acted upon by the Rehabilitation Committee itself without the intervention of its sub-committee.

[153]SeePart II,p. 113ff.[154]SeePart II,p. 125.

[153]SeePart II,p. 113ff.

[154]SeePart II,p. 125.

Committee VI was fortunate in having for its chairman Charles F. Leege, a merchant and banker of wide acquaintance and of extended experience, and four members, three of whom had had abundant commercial training. It had a staff consisting of a secretary, six to eight visitors, and three clerks.

This committee took up its work with enthusiasm, for its members believed that in no way could money be spent to greater advantage than in the manner proposed. While the business applications which had been accumulating since August were being disposed of, in November, 1906, printed forms[155]were prepared for future applications, and the public was notified of the conditions under which business aid might be obtained by means of the following announcement, displayed for some days in the newspapers:

SAN FRANCISCO RELIEF AND RED CROSS FUNDS(Incorporated)Rehabilitation DepartmentFor business rehabilitation, applications will be received from those who have been successful in trade, business, or profession, and who have been so crippled by the fire that they cannot now provide themselves with the necessary equipment or stocks in trade, and who have no other way of supporting themselves or their families.Assistance can be given in a limited way only, and for the same line of business, and the committee reserves the right to deny any applications.Applicants can address a letter or postal card to Business Committee, Gough and Geary, San Francisco, giving name and address. Blanks will be sent immediately, which must be filled and returned by mail. No applications will be received after November 30, 1906.Personal calls and applications cannot be received.

SAN FRANCISCO RELIEF AND RED CROSS FUNDS(Incorporated)Rehabilitation Department

For business rehabilitation, applications will be received from those who have been successful in trade, business, or profession, and who have been so crippled by the fire that they cannot now provide themselves with the necessary equipment or stocks in trade, and who have no other way of supporting themselves or their families.

Assistance can be given in a limited way only, and for the same line of business, and the committee reserves the right to deny any applications.

Applicants can address a letter or postal card to Business Committee, Gough and Geary, San Francisco, giving name and address. Blanks will be sent immediately, which must be filled and returned by mail. No applications will be received after November 30, 1906.

Personal calls and applications cannot be received.

[155]SeeAppendix II,p. 443.

The blanks sent to applicants were framed so as to help the applicant to explain clearly on what scale he had been doing business up to the time of the disaster, what was the present relation of his assets to his liabilities, and on what scale he proposed to re-establish. He was directed to present letters from wholesalers or others with whom he had had business relations. As a part of the subsequent investigation, it was often possible for the committee’s visitors to secure written statements from creditors or from wholesalers, stating definitely what terms they were willing to make for the payment of old debts or for the establishment of new credits.

An applicant’s plan for re-establishment was not considered complete until it included a proposed definite location. Before making a grant for a lodging house or shop, the location for either of which is important, the committee usually required the applicant to secure a definite option on a reasonably good location. One of the most important functions of the visitors on the staff was to visit and to determine the merits of these proposed locations. Every effort was made to prevent an applicant from starting business in a poor but costly location merely as an excuse for securing an allowance from the relief funds.

The general aim of Committee VI was to supply the right sort of man with money enough to pay one month’s rent, to buy the necessary fixtures, and to cover a deposit on stock or on machinery or instruments. The applicant went into debt for the rest of his equipment, with the idea of discharging the debt little by little from the profits of the business.

Between October, 1906, and April, 1907, Committee VI considered 2,032 applications. Applicants to the number of 464 were refused aid of any nature; 111 applicants were given aid, but for purposes other than business; and 1,226 were given businessaid in amounts ranging from $50 to $500.[156]The remaining 231 cases were withdrawn or taken over by other committees. Most of the applicants, many of whom collected little or no insurance upon property destroyed by the fire, represent the class that prefer a very modest living in an enterprise of their own to better wages working for others. There were those, too, who by reason of age or other infirmity had small prospect of holding their own as wage-earners, and can hardly be said to have had the choice between the two ways of making a living.

[156]Committee VI made about one-fourth of all the business grants that were made. The total number of cases in which grants were made was 4,916, and the total sum granted was $872,437.20. SeeTables 40and41,pp. 157and158.

A re-visit, for the Relief Survey, to persons who had applied for aid for business purposes, was begun in July, 1908, and completed in November, 1908. This re-visit covered 1,000 cases, in 894 of which aid had been given, and in 106 refused. Cases from all periods of the rehabilitation work were selected at random, and should therefore be representative. Of the 894 grants, 196 were made before October 27, 1906, by individual committeemen representing the Rehabilitation Committee. The remaining 698 grants to these cases were the work of the special sub-committee known as Committee VI. The average grant for business received by the 894 applicants to whom grants were made was $247.55.

It is not to be understood, from the statement that 1,000 persons were re-visited, that all were found and personally interviewed. A number of the families had disappeared and could not be found. In cases of this sort an effort was made to secure as much information as possible from outside sources; and naturally the information supplied was more complete on some phases of family or business life than on others.

The word “family” in the sections which follow is used as meaning any applicant for aid and the persons with whom he lived. As will be shown below, a number of the families aided consisted of but one person.

Data as to nativity were obtained for 750 of the 894 revisited families which received aid. These are shown inTable 48.

TABLE 48.—NATIVITY OF HEADS OF FAMILIES RECEIVING BUSINESS REHABILITATION

From this statement of the nativity of heads of families, it appears that the American born constituted almost exactly half (50.3 per cent) of the entire number. There were, among the heads of the families aided, 122 Hebrews, of whom 22 were born in Russia, seven in Roumania, five in Austria, four each in Germany and in America, and one each in Poland, Hungary, Turkey and England; 76 Hebrews did not give their nativity. Together, the Hebrew families constituted over 16 per cent of all the families revisited for which information as to nativity was secured.Table 49shows the conjugal condition of the families aided.

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