March 22, 2001 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Fighting Poverty with Virtue: Moral Reform and America’s Urban Poor, 1825-2000
by Joel Schwartz
Looking back at 19th-century antipoverty activists could help break the contemporary impasse between liberals and conservatives in their efforts to battle poverty, writes Mr. Schwartz, a program officer at the National Endowment for the Humanities.
In many respects, he says, the recent emphasis on compassionate conservatism and faith-based charities signals less a new era and more a return to the “concerns of the past.”
In this historical study of efforts to help the poor in the years after 1825, Mr. Schwartz seeks to show the accomplishments and failures of groups that emphasized moral change. He analyzes how and why many 20th-century leaders rejected the idea that poverty was the result of poor moral character, and examines how people who promote moral values are faring today in the battle to advance their beliefs.
Part One discusses the meaning of moral change to 19th-century advocates, particularly to four influential yet largely forgotten figures of the past: the Rev. Joseph Tuckerman, Robert M. Hartley, Charles Loring Brace, and Josephine Shaw Lowell. Despite their differences, Mr. Schwartz writes, those leaders shared a belief that society could best help the poor by enabling them to help themselves and by “inculcating and encouraging the poor to practice the virtues of diligence, sobriety, and thrift.”
In Part Two, Mr. Schwartz examines the theories of late-19th- and early-20th-century activists, including Jane Addams, the settlement-house leader, and Walter Rauschenbusch, a social-gospel advocate. They believed that it was “unfair to demand individual effort by the poor to rectify poverty for which society is collectively responsible, ” Mr. Schwartz writes.
Today, he says, a growing number of antipoverty advocates are looking more closely at the role of values. Part Three examines the practical impact of this shift, which Mr. Schwartz says may be seen in the encouragement of faith-based charities and in debates over welfare and other public policies.
He also discusses the differences between urban poverty in the 19th century and today, but he points out similarities by drawing on the writings of 20th-century black leaders such as Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, and Malcolm X. The lesson, Mr. Schwartz suggests, may be that “we need not choose between two mutually exclusive alternatives, with the poor being either wholly responsible for their conditions . . . or wholly unable to remedy it .”
The book also contains a biographical appendix of the major moral-change activists and an extensive notes section.
Publisher: Indiana University Press, 601 North Morton Street, Bloomington, Ind. 47404-3797; (812) 855-4203; fax (812) 855-8507; iupress@indiana.edu; http://www.indiana.edu/~iupress; 376 pages; $39.95; I.S.B.N. 0-253-33771-2.
