AN

CHAPTER XIII

A FEDERAL DEPARTMENT OF

PUBLIC WELFARE

N important phase of the public welfare movement in the United States is that centering around the proposal for a Federal Department. While this movement seems somewhat delayed at the present time, its consideration will prove an important element in the discussions of the public welfare as related to state and local departments. Here again there is great diversity of views, difference of opinions, and varied interpretations of the scope and purpose of a federal department of public welfare. For the most part, students of social science and public welfare have shown little interest in the movement and have troubled little to improve conditions.

An exception to this rule, however, is found in the concrete discussion of Robert W. Kelso, former commissioner of public welfare of Massachusetts, Richard K. Conant, present commissioner of public welfare, Sanford Bates, and Herbert A. Parsons, of the state department of public welfare in Massachusetts. Mr. Kelso and Mr. Conant present the arguments for a federal department. Mr. Bates and Mr. Parsons present the arguments against the department. These papers are reproduced from the Journal of Social Forces and were the result of a radio debate and

therefore should be read with this in mind holding the authors responsible for these views only as they represent a formal statement representative of the subject. They are given in this volume because they represent the clearest and most informing discussion which we have seen on the subject.

A second type of source material in which those who are interested in public welfare may judge of the scope and purpose of federal departments will be found in typical bills which have been presented or proposed. Whether this legislation will ever be enacted or not, it is important in indicating the scope of the subject, certain forms of reorganization, as well as difficulties in the way of effective legislation. They are also representative of the difficulties involved in such legislation and reorganization. The two outstanding proposed bills are therefore included in this chapter.

EVIDENCE FOR A FEDERAL DEPARTMENT

Mr. Robert W. Kelso presents certain arguments for a state department: "At the outset of this discussion we learn that the elements of a Department of Public Welfare proposed by the affirmative are already in existence-a Children's Bureau; a Bureau of Education; a Division of Indian Affairs; a Public Health Service. these elements, instead of being arranged coherently under one head are at present scattered among existing departments just as they happened

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to grow. One is in the Department of Labor; another in the Treasury; still others in the Department of the Interior. Each must wait for the consideration of its problems until the more pressing affairs of the department have been attended to, and none has representation or opportunity for the consideration of its pressing matters in the cabinet.

"It is my share in the discussion to point out to you the reason why these scattered bureaus have grown up. That reason constitutes a complete answer to the contention of our opponent who has just preceded me. He says, you know, that charity like crime is local, and that the national government should not meddle in matters which apply to the states. On the score of meddling we believe him to be altogether sound. In his view of charity we think he is mediaeval. For the charity which he has in mind is only that old-time phase of personal, friendly, neighborly relief to persons in distress. Charity in the sense in which we must use the word in this discussion regarding the Public Welfare is to be defined as social service, a thing of vastly greater import and infinitely more far-reaching in consequence. The various public welfare bureaus now scattered through our Washington machinery have arisen out of the very fact that charity in its social service meaning has ceased to be local. They are eloquent evidence of the truth that the public welfare of your city or

mine, of your county or mine, of your state or mine, has become definitely and forever the concern and the problem of the whole people.

"It is not so many decades ago that the people of the United States lived an agricultural life, and many of them were frontiersmen. We were a country of distances. So recent is it that space and the seasons of the year were a serious obstacle to getting together, that we still inaugurate our president on the 4th day of March, that representing the winter traveling-time to the capital. It is only a little while ago that we had no railroads, no steamships, no telephone, no telegraph, no regular mail delivery, and very little in the way of a weekly let alone a daily press.

"Now those days have gone. We have more railroad mileage than all the rest of the world. We have the telephone in almost every household. We have steamships, reducing the old six-weeks voyage across the Atlantic to less than one week. We have even an aerial mail service; and as we stand here at Medford Hillside speaking, somewhere between 700,000 and 1,000,000 persons scattered from London to the Rocky Mountains, and from the Arctic to South America, are listening. We have eliminated space and time to such a degree that the world of today is no longer even similar to the world of a decade ago.

"So great is the advance in chemistry, in physics, in industrial development, that the pro

duction of goods definitely approaches a great unit basis of operation; wherefore we build mighty cities about a single industry. And thinking so hard about the making of goods and the earning of dollars, we forget so to build those cities that play, which is the real business of childhood, is provided for, and family groups are herded together in cramped quarters with a view only to the economy of operation. So intensive is this movement in industry that human beings are arranged almost like spools upon a spinning frame to whirl about, each one with his distinct set of motions, hour after hour, day in and day out, year in and year out, all of them links in the long chain of production.

"We have ceased to be a vast land dotted with households occupied by individuals isolated from each other. We have become one mighty people, with interests so closely and so vitally inter-related that the ill-health of one is the misfortune of another; that the ignorance of your child is the drawback of mine; that the welfare of one town or one city, or one district can in no wise be injured without hurting the whole.

"Shall we say then that such mighty problems as the conservation of child life, the treatment of women in industry, the sound standards of city building for purposes of sanitation and the protection of health, and the provision of public schooling for youth, are nevertheless the exclusive busi