POOR RELIEF

The concept of "poor relief" can be taken very broadly to include all
forms of aid, charity, and public assistance to the poor at all times,
in all places. But here the focus will be on the modern, Western
concept that emerged at the end of the Middle Ages and was to a large
extent superseded by the modern welfare state.

The economic management of poor relief by lay authorities was a
central theme of sixteenth-century charitable reform in Western
Europe, a movement that drew on rich medieval precedents. Writers from
Ernst Troeltsch to W.K. Jordan attributed systematic reform to
Protestantism, but in recent decades Natalie Davis, Brian Pullan,
Bronislaw Geremek and others have stressed the commonalities as well
as the varieties of reform throughout Europe. In the interpretation of
Marxist historians such as Catherina Lis and Hubert Soly, sixteenth
century conceptions of poor relief served the needs of an emerging
mercantile economy and permitted urban elites to regulate the supply
of labor. Changes in poor law arrangements, in their view, reflected
the transition to capitalist forms of production.

England provided the most systematic poor relief of any country in
Europe by the early seventeenth-century. The "Elizabethan Poor Law"
(l597 and 1601) required poor persons either to support themselves or
to apply to their own parishes of settlement for aid. Overseers of the
poor in each parish determined eligibility for relief and levied
parish poor rates on property-owners. Justices of the peace validated
the rolls and compelled payments from those who failed to contribute. 

Various local experiments, many of them modelled on the workhouse
established in London's Bridewell hospital in the l550s, inspired
Parliament to make parish overseers responsible for organizing work
for the able-bodied poor. But many parishes never erected bridewells,
and local authorities saw fit to dole out relief to unemployed workers
without necessarily "setting them on work." In the view of Paul Slack,
the English were able to establish a system so comprehensive because
the country was relatively wealthy and could afford to raise the
greater number out of the threat of destitution.

The extension of entitlement to "outdoor relief" in the Speenhamland
reform of l795 initiated a period of debate in England. The "new" poor
law of 1834 instituted the principle of "less eligibility" and "the
workhouse test," to make sure that recipients of relief would not be
better off than those employed at a free-market wage. Scholars have
recently qualified earlier generalizations about the harshness of the
new system, while reaffirming the political impact of empirical social
investigators such as Charles Booth, Seebohm Rowntree, and Sidney and
Beatrice Webb whose critique of the poor laws laid the foundation for
the modern European welfare state.

Spain has been viewed as resistant to all change in the name of
Catholic orthodoxy. But in a study of sixteenth-century Toledo, Linda
Martz describes the efforts of reformers armed with the ideas of Juan
Luis Vives and backed by the Spanish crown. Resistance often won the
day, but Spanish religious movements also generated new charitable
initiatives. St. John of God and his followers established hospitals
for the lowliest as well as the most repectable of the poor. Domingo
de Soto argued against a new prohibition on the mobility of the poor
in terms that were economic as well as religious: the poor should be
allowed, he said, to migrate like ants searching out the richest part
of the plant.

The relationship between attitudes and social realities has been a
leading theme in much of the research on poor relief and policies
toward the poor in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Michel Foucault argued that the removal of marginal populations from
public spaces into the h_pital-g_n_ral, of Paris in l656 reflected a
new value placed on rational order. But Jean-Pierre Gutton describes
at least a century of previous efforts to confine the poor and set
them to work and shows that the strategy of confinement always had its
critics. Analyzing wills and testaments at Grenoble, Kathryn Norberg
has shown how Counter-Reformation piety supported both individual
almsgiving and bequests to institutions where the poor were confined.
Finding a similar pattern at Montpellier, Colin Jones shows
eighteenth-century donors supporting various forms of aid when they
came to view the hospitals as inefficient. Olwen Hufton argues that in
spite of the interest of the elite in the reform of relief, the
resources available from every quarter--including the work projects
and emergency relief from the royal governemnt--were so limited as to
throw the poor on their own to survive by "an economy of makeshifts."

The transition from the enlightened liberal paternalism of the
eighteenth century to a far more limited and repressive policing of
workers in a laisser-faire industrial economy emerges clearly in Mary
Lindemann's Patriots and Paupers, Hamburg, 1712-1830. A system that
required an elite of volunteers to identify all the needy and to
arrange relief, including the provision of work where appropriate, was
overwhelmed by the demographic expansion and industrialisation of the
city and the region, and by the political upheaveals of the Napoleonic
period.  

Recent studies of nineteenth-century poor relief have explored the gap
between the official rationale provided for relief policies and the
perspective of the poor who received relief. A study of Antwerp from
1770 to 1860 by Lis and Soly shows that the poor availed themselves of
correctional institutions and insane asylums to provide sustenance to
family members. Lynn Hollen Lees has shown how mothers in
nineteenth-century London exploited various private and public
resources to supplement inadequate family income, circumventing the
official rule that only the impotent poor receive help outside the
established workhouse. 

The evolution of poor relief in the United States has been shaped by
notions of exceptionalism, but English law and English reform
movements were influential at every stage. As in England, early
nineteenth century reformers condemned the practice of "outdoor
relief" and extolled the merits of poorhouses. But by 1850, according
to Michael Katz, the poorhouse was viewed as a costly failure and most
states had greatly expanded their relief rolls in order to meet the
crisis of Irish famine immigration and the dislocations of urban
growth. In a further reaction against outdoor relief, the late
nineteenth century saw the rise of the "scientific charity" movement.
In Public Relief and Private Charity (1884), Josephine Shaw Lowell, a
leader in the movement, urged the formation of charity organization
societies everywhere to study the poor and coordinate the activities
of those organizations that could best provide short-term relief
without doing moral harm to the recipient.

The dramatic impact of the Great Depression of the l930s on even the
most self-reliant poor was documented by E. Wight Bakke in a 1933
study of the sequence of expedients that the unemployed of New Haven
tried before resorting to relief. The federal government took over
from insolvent local authorities, establishing various
precedent-setting measures, supported through grants-in-aid to the
states from the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). The
idea of linking relief and work was embodied with partial success in
the Works Progress Administration. Women's efforts to secure the
welfare of children led to the provision of aid to dependent children
under the terms of the legislation that established Social Security.  

By 1948, when the United Nations adopted the Declaration of Human
Rights, the principles of the New Deal in the U.S. and of the Popular
Front in France influenced the provisions of article 22: "Everyone, as
a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled
to realization, through national effort and international co-operation
and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State,
of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his
dignity and the free development of his personality."  

According to the U.N.'s Human Development Report 1991, over one
billion people now live in absolute poverty. On a global level, the
traditional concept of poor relief to maintain bare subsistence
remains in the forefront even as idealistic statements of universal
rights are linked uneasily with support for development plans and
investment strategies. In richer countries, meanwhile, the notion of
entitlement vested in poor citizens is contested.            



Bibliography

Michael B. Katz. In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of
  Welfare in America.  New York: Basic Books, 1986.

Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly.  Poverty and Capitalism in Pre-Industrial
  Europe.  Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979

Olwen H. Hufton. The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France, 1750-1789.
  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974.

Peter Mandler, editor.  The Uses of Charity: the Poor on Relief in the
  Nineteenth-Century Metropolis.  Philadelphia: The University of
  Pennsylvania Press, 1990.

Paul Slack.  Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England.  New
  York: Longmans, 1988.



Thomas M. Adams is the author of _Bureaucrats and Beggars: French
Social Policy in the Age of the Enlightenment_ (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1990) and is a program officer at the National
Endowment for the Humanities.