Looking to Traditional Values to Solve Today’s Social Problems

What Makes Charity Work? A Century of Public and Private Philanthropy
edited by Myron Magnet

Charity is most successful, writes Myron Magnet, when it “encourages the poor to take control of their own lives and teaches them habits of self-reliance and traditional virtues.”

Government assistance, Mr. Magnet says, often fails to truly help the poor because it “treats them as victims of forces beyond their control, robs them of a sense of personal responsibility, and neglects the values they need to escape from poverty.”

What’s more, many charitable groups have “lost their way,” he writes, in helping destitute people turn their lives around.

Drawing on the reporting of New York’s City Journal, the publication he edits, Mr. Magnet presents this collection of case studies of charities that have been able to bring previously impoverished people into the economic and social mainstream.

In a chapter entitled “How Dagger John Saved New York’s Irish,” William J. Stern tells the story of Father John Hughes’s work with poor Irish immigrants in New York in the mid-1800’s. By teaching them to read, work hard, and tell the truth, writes Mr. Stern, he was able to “turn the sons of criminals” into policemen, “the daughters of illiterates into the city’s schoolteachers.”

Mr. Magnet offers the examples in this book to influence current efforts to help people move off welfare. With the right approach, he urges, we can “deliver whole classes of people from poverty and degradation into the middle class.”

Publisher: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 1332 North Halsted Street, Chicago, Ill. 60622-2694; (312) 787-6262 or (800) 462-6420; fax (312) 787-6269; elephant@ivanrdee.com; http://www.ivanrdee.com; 242 pages; $24.95; I.S.B.N. 1-56663-334-6.