Give This Man Work!

• Published in: Social science history 2001, Vol.25 (2), p.217-246
• Main Author: Waugh, Joan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0145-5532; 1527-8034
• DOI: 10.1017/S0145553200010695

“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 among the city's working class.The imperative of the letter (“Give This ManWork!”) 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).