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Social Science History 25.2 (2001) 217-246



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“Give This Man Work!”
Josephine Shaw Lowell, the Charity Organization Society of the City of New York, and the Depression of 1893

Joan Waugh


“Give This Man Work if you would keep his wife and children alive; one child has already died from starvation,” wrote a concerned citizen to the East Side Relief Committee (Devins 1905: 322). The East Side Relief Committee was a special work-relief unit set up in 1893 by Josephine Shaw Lowell, the founder in 1882 of the Charity Organization Society (COS) of the City of New York (COSCNY) to combat the effects of the depression. That industrial depression in the early 1890s resulted in major unemployment and much suffering [End Page 217] among the city’s working class. The imperative of the letter (“Give This Man Work!”) illuminates the COS’s policy toward relief before, during, and after the depression of 1893, a landmark date in social welfare history. Earlier, Lowell and the COS were best known for their concerns about the role that “indiscriminate” relief played in harming the moral character of the recipients and undermining the living standards of employed workers, not how it could be used to ameliorate joblessness. “I believe that among the many causes of poverty,” Lowell asserted in a speech, “one of the most potent is careless relief-giving, whether by what are called charitable societies, by private individuals, or from public funds” (quoted in Stewart 1974 [1911]: 216).

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Lowell and the COSCNY were determined to provide leadership in “teaching the rich how to give and the poor how to live.” Indeed, at least as early as 1890, the press, the public, and other charities acknowledged the national charity organization movement as representing the cutting edge in the philanthropic field. “In Anglo-American cities in the later half of the [nineteenth] century,” Peter Mandler (1990: 21) observed, “the relief of families was almost totally handed over to the ‘scientific charities,’ such as the various Charity Organization Societies.” And nowhere did a charity organization society enjoy such prominence and power as the one led by Josephine Shaw Lowell in New York City, which, as another scholar (Butners 1980: 279) has claimed, “served as a model for similar organizations throughout the country and was deeply involved in shaping private philanthropic and public policies toward the dependent individual.”1

The COSCNY was especially proud of its reputation for developing modern preventive programs, for its advocacy of civil service reform in public charitable institutions, and for its strong ideological stance in advocating a professional, businesslike brand of welfare. This new type of welfare was quite consciously shaped to complement corporations, whose new business practices were similarly imbued with efficiency and professionalism, and whose leaders were frankly admired by many Gilded Age reformers and intellectuals.2

The specter of joblessness and despair raised by the economic disaster of 1893, however, prompted the leadership of the New York Society to acknowledge, for the first time in its short history, that relief, under some circumstances might be a right for working people. Lowell’s East Side Relief [End Page 218] Committee was designed to be a model of judicious work-relief that could be used, not only throughout New York City, but also throughout the country, in 1893–94 and for any future depressions. Thus, after 1893 there was a noticeable shift in COS ideology and practice. In order to trace this change and analyze its significance, I will examine the charity organization career of Josephine Shaw Lowell, whose policy initiative shaped the response of the COS to the greatest depression of the nineteenth century. I argue that contrary to its historical reputation as an organization existing more for the “prevention of charity” than for providing actual charitable relief, Lowell and the COS leadership responded with flexible and innovative work-relief programs to meet the exigencies of the desperate winter of 1893–94.

Historians, Lowell, and...

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