Part 2

The commission expressed its belief that widows’ families were the most important single group in poverty and that they should be dealt with by a method unhampered by the need of dealing with other cases. The commission’s bill, it was argued, would further break up indiscriminate relief, introducing state control and state standards for a great group of dependents, continuing the process begun for the feeble-minded, insane, blind and the like. The friends of the bill believed that the state Board of Charity administered so much relief that widows would not be adequately cared for by it. They urged that while House Bill No. 1366 in terms disclaimed any intention of regarding its proposed relief, pauper aid, yet in fact it could not fail to be so regarded by possible claimants. The commission called the aid it proposed giving subsidies rather than pensions, as it regarded its aid as in no sense payments for services rendered but assistance in rendering needed service to the state.

The report of the commission was signed by Professor Foerster and Mrs. Park. Mr. Tilley presented a minority report stating that he was fully in accord with the desire of the commission to adequately assist widowed mothers with dependent children, but that he felt that the report was based upon insufficient evidence. He further believed that the present machinery of relief was entirely adequate for the purpose desired.

The bill proposed by the commission provided for a permanent commission of five, two of whom should be women, who should have authority to order subsidies paid by the overseers of the poor, in such sums and manner as the commission should decide. The commission is authorized by the bill to make its investigations by its special field agents, and it is made the duty of the overseers to visit the family at least once in every four months and to report its condition to the commission. Two-thirds of the amounts paid to families who have no settlement and one-third of the amounts paid to all other families shall be repaid to the overseers by the state Board of Charity. No relative other than those legally bound to aid the family, and no private society shall be asked to contribute any portion of the subsidy.

The commission by its bill provided a new state machine designed to administer a specific pension or subsidy to a specific class of dependents. The bill proposed by the opponents of the commission’s bill, defined and enlarged the present relief machinery of each locality. The purpose of the friends of each bill is unquestionably to render the same service to the needy widow.

THE MASSACHUSETTS REPORT ON THE RELIEF OF WIDOWS

PORTER R. LEE

Massachusetts deserves credit for being the first state to preface mothers’ pension legislation with a formal study of existing conditions. The Legislature of 1912 authorized the appointment of a commission “to investigate the question of the condition of widowed mothers within the commonwealth having minor children dependent upon them for support,” and to report to the succeeding Legislature “as to the advisability of enacting legislation providing for payments by the commonwealth for the purpose of maintaining such minor children in their homes.” The report of the commission giving its findings and recommending legislation based thereon has been published as is stated elsewhere in this issue,[2] David F. Tilley, one of the members of the commission, dissenting from the conclusions of the majority.

The success or failure of the mothers’ pension movement must depend largely upon our ability to avoid the mistakes which have characterized outdoor relief and other gratuitous payments to individuals from the public treasury, and to read into the proposed remedy a new and dignified meaning which outdoor relief has never had. It may be that both these ends will be difficult to attain. Certainly they can only be attained after the most careful study of the operation of outdoor relief, both public and private, to ascertain to what extent it has succeeded or failed and why. Such a study has long been necessary in the interests of the poor and of efficient relief work. To be successful it cannot be hasty, inexpensive or inexpert. Quite as important as this study of outdoor relief will be a study of the conditions under which children are admitted to institutions which must be undertaken with much the same end in view.

Those who have felt the need of more facts before enacting mothers’ pension legislation have been much interested in the study which Massachusetts has been making. If all the possibilities of such a study were realized in this report, a good many of our stumbling blocks would be removed. The existing outdoor relief machinery, public and private, an analysis of its success or failure and a standard for future procedure would all have been revealed.

The report of the Massachusetts commission, however, gives us very little help. It is marked by evident earnestness of purpose; but its conclusions are of little value because they represent in almost every case inferences from inadequate data. To a large extent this is to be charged to the commission’s inadequate resources; but whatever the reason the report as it stands does not give us a model for other states. It does not give us even a clear relation between the commission’s own findings and their recommendations. Because the right kind of an outdoor relief study is necessary and because the example of Massachusetts is likely to be followed by other states, it is important to subject this report to somewhat critical examination.

The commission’s method of study was five-fold:

1. A questionnaire to fifty-seven child helping societies and several public departments caring for dependent children as to the circumstances under which the children in their care were committed.

2. A questionnaire to various children’s agencies asking why children are separated from their mothers in poverty.

3. A questionnaire to public and private relief agencies asking for “the total income and the sources thereof, together with certain other facts in each widow’s family receiving through it (the agency) regular relief” for a definite period.

4. Special study of the Juvenile Court records of Boston and of the results of a day nursery investigation.

5. A use of analogies, observations and “reasons of a non-statistical kind” which suggest the desirability of legislation granting pensions to mothers.

Methods 1 and 3 brought the statistics upon which the chief conclusions of the report are based. But the commission itself by a series of statements regarding their accuracy robs one of any confidence in the results obtained. For example, these statements appear in the discussion of the statistics received from relief agencies:

“Because of its small appropriation it [the commission] was enabled to make a much less detailed and exact statistical study of the position of these widows than would have been desirable.”

“The resources of your commission did not permit it to secure its information by the personal visit of an investigator, hence the information must be less accurate than it might otherwise have been.”

“The commissioners believe that despite the limited accuracy of some of their relief statistics further study of the relief given by charities is not necessary.”

Moreover, regarding the information gained from the children’s agencies as to the causes for the removal of children from their homes, it may be doubted whether these agencies are competent witnesses. The standard of work done by the public agencies and many of the private agencies for the care of children in Massachusetts is unusually high. It may be doubted, however, whether any such agency after the most careful preliminary inquiry is fully able to determine the real economic status of a family which is usually a matter that requires long acquaintance. Many of these societies receiving children who have been removed from their mothers have very little first hand information as to the reason for it. In fact, the report itself, in discussing the information secured through this questionnaire regarding the insurance carried by the families, states: “The fact that the children’s agencies failed to answer this question in so many cases was undoubtedly because they did not possess the information.” For the same reason it is doubtful if they were competent witnesses on many other points calling for knowledge of what happened before the children came into their care.

The statistics secured through method 3 are condemned even more directly. After information had been secured through the questionnaire to public and private relief agencies regarding 1,258 families, Mr. Tilley of the commission arranged for a special study of one hundred of these in their own homes by trained visitors in the service of the State Board of Charity. These studies revealed conditions completely at variance with those stated in the returns received from the agencies themselves. The report itself comments: “It is clear that many records previously received from the overseers, especially, but also from others, were glaringly incorrect.”

It is hardly possible to put confidence in conclusions based upon data whose inaccuracy is so clear. It does not become any more possible when the inaccuracy is frankly conceded by those who reach the conclusions.

Another method of study used by the commission—the compilation of analogies and other non-statistical reasons for proving its case—is rendered impotent in much the same way. In a carefully developed argument the report draws an analogy between the proposed subsidy scheme for widows and the industrial accident compensation plan. “The situation of dependents of men killed by industrial accident is scarcely distinguishable from that of these widows.... Consequently, widows through death of husbands by disease or other non-industrial cause should be dealt with by a similar principle.”

After developing this analogy somewhat elaborately, however, the report says: “The commission rejects the principle of payment by way of indemnity of loss,” apparently abandoning the workmen’s compensation analogy just after making it serviceable.

It would not be difficult to point out other traits which are fatal to the report as a basis for scientific action, for example, its constant introduction of important conclusions with such expressions as “it is obvious,” “the inference is,” “it is not unlikely,” “so far as information was obtainable” and “important inferences are possible.” Moreover, when conclusions are based upon statistics compiled from different sources by different persons with different standards and possibly different interpretations of the questions asked, a report giving these statistics and the conclusions reached should give also a copy of the schedule used in gathering them. The report does not include the commission’s schedule.

With the purpose of the commission to point the way to the adequate assistance of widows most of us like Mr. Tilley, who submits a minority report, are in complete accord. During recent years our enlarging conceptions of social treatment have condemned utterly much of our supposedly efficient work in family and individual reconstruction. There is a widespread conviction of sin in this matter and an earnest searching for the remedy. The mothers’ pension movement is no doubt a result of this; but the conviction of sin and the earnest search are true of many to whom mothers’ pensions seem a remedy of doubtful immediate value.

If we have failed in our relief work, the children of the widow are not the only ones who have suffered. Upon the children of disabled fathers, of incompetent and neglectful parents, of all those tragic families who fall outside the commission’s category of “worthy,” our sins are visited still more heavily. The commission was charged only with the duty of studying the condition of widows; but it seems to have taken some note of families of other types. We read: “Consistently, widows through death of husbands by disease or other industrial cause ... deserve an utterly different kind of treatment from that accorded to the lazy and shiftless, the victims of drink, gambling or other dissipation or persons in transitory or emergency destitution. The commission does not believe that the same persons who administer the general poor law should alone determine the aid for worthy widows. Administration of such aid is sufficiently complicated, difficult and frequent to deserve separate care.” It might be noted incidentally that the cause of a husband’s death is not always a satisfactory test of a wife’s moral habits, and that “widows through death of husbands by disease, etc.” are not infrequently of the unsatisfactory type described by the commission. But a still more important comment is the following from Mr. Pear of Boston:

“It is well understood by social workers that those whom your correspondent terms the incompetent, and willingly leaves to the care of overseers of the poor are really in need of the most skillful ministration. They too have children. To assume that they may well be left to officials considered incapable of caring for respectable widows is evidence of a complacency which social workers cannot share.”

The report of the commission gives us much that suggests the fact of our failure to provide adequately or helpfully for the families of widows, a fact of which we had already become conscious. What we need, however, is not so much evidence of the fact of failure as a clear understanding of why we have failed. Why have public outdoor relief and private charity conceived in as deep an interest in the destitute widow as any mother’s subsidy program, failed to satisfy either the widow or the charitable or society at large?

The failure has rarely been due to lack of aggregate resources. Nobody familiar with the enormous totals spent for relief, public and private, could doubt that. It must lie somewhere in the quality of the service which brings relief with it. To determine just where it does lie calls for a study requiring money, time and the sure touch of somebody who knows what to look for. The mothers’ pension schemes which the various states have worked out give us very little that is new or of higher promise in the service that goes with relief. The subsidy plan that follows the study of the Massachusetts commission is no exception.

Few institutions have been subject to more criticism than public outdoor relief. No institution has been under fire so long with so little real effort to find out what makes it criticizable. It may well be that public assistance in some form is indispensable in this country and will be made to yield the results we seek. If so, its administration must be revolutionized. Giving existing outdoor relief officials new duties and responsibility to a new authority for part of their work, which is an important part of the proposal resulting from the Massachusetts report, will not revolutionize it. Nor will the giving of new names to old practices not otherwise shorn of the defects which popularize the new name do so. Again and again we have started with a clear call to do justice to the widow. Every time we try to translate our zeal into legislation we come square up against our outdoor relief machinery. Some one of these United States has a golden opportunity to make a study which will point the way to justice not only for the widow and her children but for every other person, old or young, who through our stupidity or his own fault, or both, finds himself forced to seek assistance. But the Massachusetts report does not point the way.

[Illustration: CALL TO MASS MEETING IN ARABIC]

THE LADINO SPEAKERS

MARY BROWN SUMNER

For four years New York has had a steadily growing colony of Castilian speaking Oriental Jews. The major part of them speak a Spanish dialect known as Ladino, but use Hebrew characters in writing. Knowing no English, they have lived in isolation, the largest group between Essex, Rivington, Christie and Canal streets. The rest are east of Lenox avenue in about twenty blocks north of 100th street.

The biggest step toward the Americanization of this group, which now numbers 15,000 and is not yet too large or scattered to be handled by a group plan, was the calling at the University Settlement last month of a mass meeting of the race. Here Joseph Gedalecia, manager of the Free Employment Agency for the Handicapped established by the Jewish community of New York, and president of the Federation of Oriental Jews, and other speakers proposed plans for lectures on American institutions and opportunities and suggested classes in English for the adults of the race.

In 1492 or thereabouts persecutions drove from the shores of Spain the Jewish merchants and scholars to whom the nation owed not a little of its development. They were welcomed by the Mohammedans and settled both in European Turkey and on the Asiatic coast. Most of the settlements of refugees preserved their Castilian speech, and the Ladino dialect, which they use today, is only slightly mixed with Greek or Bulgarian or Turkish or Arabic words, according to the section of the Turkish empire in which they happened to settle.

[Illustration:

THE CALL IN LADINO ]

ATTENTION BROTHERS AND SISTERS!

It is high time for us to come together and discuss ways and means to improve our conditions. Most of our people come to this country from Turkey and the Orient not altogether prepared for the struggle for existence that awaits them. A good many remain idle, or their work is intermittent, and others, again, work in surroundings not conducive to good health, nor is the remuneration sufficient to enable them to earn a decent livelihood, resulting in time in poverty, and in some cases our people are obliged to live in congested surroundings with disastrous effect on their health, and some are becoming tubercular. A good many of our children do not attend religious school and roam the streets without having religious training or the ideals of our religion inculcated in them, which may prove disastrous to Judaism and good citizenship. No central bureau of information for our people is available when they are in need of advice of any kind.

Therefore we appeal to you for the sake of yourself, your families and your children, as well as for the sake of Israel and your country, to attend a mass meeting which our federation has arranged to be held on Sunday, March 16, at the University Settlement where leaders of our community and other prominent men will discuss the issues affecting your interests.

_Don’t fail to attend_ and urge your friends to do the same.

FEDERATION OF ORIENTAL JEWS OF AMERICA,

Joseph Gedalecia, President. A. J. AMATEAU, Secretary.

These Spanish Jews preserved their standing as merchants, artisans or even small semi-professionals. In some towns, notably Salonika, they came to form the bulk of the population. They were seldom persecuted as they had no suppressed nationalism to defend against an invader. They never sank to the level of the native peasantry. Though materially comfortable, their intellectual development stagnated, under Turkish discouragement of education, until the young Turk movement of a few years ago. This was accompanied by a spread of popular education and with it knowledge that there was a world outside their own particular corner of the Orient. Ambition and a desire to see the world stimulated an Oriental Jewish migration which is largely responsible for their presence in New York city. It is almost the only Jewish migration to America that was not due to poverty or persecution. The Spanish Jews chose America as their place of pilgrimage in the face of the fact that the Spanish government has recently sent representatives to Turkey for the purpose of inducing them to return to Spain, an evidence that that country believes them to have qualities that would be an asset to the country of their choice.

The present westward migration of the Spanish Jew had less to offer than their migration eastward five hundred years ago. In New York their isolation has been complete, for the Yiddish speaking East Side Jew does not understand them any better than does the American, and rather despises their lack of intellectual attainments.

In physical equipment these people are superior to the Russian Jew; they have strong, handsome physiques. The men have drifted to day labor rather than to the unwholesome work of the garment trades. The girls alone are in these trades; it is said, indeed, that they have usurped the whole of the East Side kimono work from the Russians. Free from the weakening effect of European persecution, the Ladino-speaking Jews have shown even in their short and handicapped history in America so far, a daring business sense which enables them to point to half a dozen American millionaires of their race. The Russian Jew among his million immigrants can point to scarcely more.

It is to give scope to these native abilities by adapting them to American conditions that Mr. Gedalecia and other leaders of the race have for four years been working up to the mass meeting of last month. This was held under the auspices of the Federation of Oriental Jews, a union of eighteen benefit societies which the Spanish and Portuguese Sisterhood and the North American Civic League for Immigrants were largely instrumental in forming about three years ago. Night classes for Ladino Jews have been opened in two public schools. Intensive work has been done by the Industrial Removal Office, also, in distributing individuals in other parts of the country besides New York or sending them to Panama, Central and South America and the Philippines, where their antique Spanish dialect survives and where, without the handicap of language, in more than one case, beginning as peddlers, they have become merchants. Many of those who have succeeded in business import their goods from the United States, thus becoming a medium of bringing about business relations between this country and its Latin-American neighbors.

THE COMMISSIONER OF CHARITIES IN OKLAHOMA

ALEXANDER JOHNSON Secretary National Conference of Charities and Correction

The fourth report of the commissioner of charities of the new state of Oklahoma is an interesting document and much of the work reported is unique for it is work not done in a similar way or not done at all in any other state.

The plan of having a single commissioner do work ordinarily done by a secretary and a board exists only in two states—New Jersey and Oklahoma. In Oklahoma the work has been developed along some lines that are intensely interesting, although it seems doubtful whether the conditions anywhere else will lead to this plan being copied.

When Indian Territory became a part of Oklahoma, the lands were allotted in severalty to the Indians of the various tribes. Much of the land is almost worthless, but there is a great deal that is valuable because of the presence of oil, deposits of asphalt, building stone, coal, etc., while a large part of the old Indian Territory is among the best agricultural land of the state.

The temptation to exploit these Indian lands, to purchase them from the Indians at a tenth of their value, has been somewhat offset by the action of the United States government. But among the Indians were a large number of orphans. Their land has been cared for by guardians, some of whom have succeeded in getting themselves appointed, with motives anything but benevolent toward their wards.

[Illustration:

KATE BARNARD

The Oklahoma charities commissioner whose administration has secured the return of a million dollars to Indian orphans under incompetent or dishonest guardians. ]