Gurteen and Lowell: Nineteenth Century Views on True Charity
Earlier this month I reported on Rebecca Gomez’s dissertation critique of “learned helplessness,” when young people — often with foster care backgrounds — feel like puppets who move only when others move them. When we go back 150 years, to the 1870s, we find similar concerns that led poverty-fighters then to distinguish between two other “p” words: “poor” and “pauper.”
One Buffalo pastor, S. Humphreys Gurteen, said poverty was a problem, but an underlying cause was not material. He worried about the “concentrated and systematized pauperism which exists in our larger cities.” Gurteen wrote regarding “paupers” — those among the poor who had given up on working — that, “If left to themselves and no kind hand is held out to assist, they will inevitably sink lower and lower, ’til perchance they end their course in suicide or felony.”
Gurteen criticized a give-with-no-questions-asked approach that was well-intended but harmful to those on the “borderline of involuntary poverty [who would] learn to be dependent, ’til at last, though by degrees, every vestige of manliness and ambition will have been destroyed.” Automatic giving, Gurteen said, is “the natural axiom of a lazy religion. . . . Look the question face-to-face for one moment. . . . Is it charity toward our neighbor to give one the strength of every well-thumbed letter or doleful tale, when by so doing we are only rendering easier the downward path of a fellow creature?”
Gurteen in the 1870s also asked, “Is it love . . . to let a sickly sentimentality cloud our reason?” He saw pressure to change, when necessary, as a key part of compassion. Gurteen proposed a middle ground of charity tempered by judgment, which he called the “more rational, more philosophic, more God-like method.” He asked whether the chief way for the better-off to help the poor or homeless was “by giving a handsome subscription from a full purse to this or that charity? By small doles of money or clothing to some favored individual? By doing our charity by proxy?”
Instead, Gurteen insisted that compassionate citizens become “personal workers” concerned with more than “the mere relief of bodily wants.” He emphasized the need to deal with spiritual as well as material problems. Aware of new social conditions, including the emergence of some involuntary unemployment and the special need to assist a person impoverished “by no fault of his own,” Gurteen still reminded church members that they could “do an immense of charm by Charity, so-called. It is possible to reduce a fellow-being to the condition of a willing pauper, by fostering habits of indolence.”
To avoid either giving thoughtlessly or not giving, Gurteen founded the Buffalo Charity Organization Society in 1877, the first such group in the United States. Its charter: “To avoid these two extremes, both of which are fatal.” Gurteen said a person practicing true charity “views man as God has made him, [possessing] self-respect and holy ambition.”
Charity Organization Societies (COS’s) grew in other cities. Josephine Shaw Lowell, the sister of Civil War hero Robert Shaw and the first woman to serve as Commissioner of the New York State Board of Charities, founded New York City’s COS in 1882 and wrote Public Relief and Private Charity in 1884. Lowell criticized Social Darwinists for callousness, but also opposed indiscriminate charitable practice that “fails to save the recipient of relief and community from moral harm, because human nature is so constituted that no man can receive as a gift what he should earn by his own labor without a moral deterioration.”
Like Gurteen, Lowell recruited volunteers willing to “supply the precious element of human sympathy and tender personal interest which must often be lacking where the care of dependence is a business and the common everyday work the means of livelihood of overtaxed officials.” Like Gurteen, she offered “work tests” to the able-bodied: They gained the opportunity to chop wood or sew clothes and thus show their willingness to work while earning their room and board, and also contributing to those unable to chop or sew.
Lowell’s bottom line was: “Nothing should be done under the guise of charity, which tends to break down character. It is the greatest wrong that can be done to him to undermine the character of a poor man.” Maybe that sounds like a conservative approach, but Lowell was a Progressive leader. In 1890, she founded the New York Consumers’ League, which fought for improved wages and working conditions for women.
Lowell also helped to lead the Anti-Imperialist League, which had prominent members such as Mark Twain and Samuel Gompers. They, alongside her, opposed the annexation of the Philippines, a U.S. territory pulled from Spanish rule that finally gained independence in 1946. An emphasis on character and justice transcended ordinary left-right distinctions.