ABSTRACT
In early 1926, Linton Swift, head of the American Association of Organizing Family Social Work (AAOFSW), warned his board of directors that they needed to commission a study of their agencies’ provision of material relief to poor people. Expenditures for relief were increasing and “the societies themselves were at a loss for an explanation.” The economy had rebounded from the recession of the early 1920s, and there seemed to be no obvious reason for the rising applications and costs. A statistical study produced later that fall by Ralph Hurlin of the Russell Sage Foundation confirmed the reports from the field that Swift had been receiving. Ninety-six agencies in thirty-seven large cities showed a 215 percent increase in the amount of relief granted since 1916. Hurlin broke down the causes for the increase: the number of families receiving relief had increased 63 percent, the population of the cities had grown by 19 percent, the cost of living had increased 57 percent, and the average grants had increased by 24 percent. Swift wrote to Karl de Schweinitz, general secretary of the Family Society of Philadelphia (an AAOFSW member agency), “it appears from Hurlin’s charts that the peak of ascending relief is not yet in sight. If it is impossible for family societies, particularly in chest cities, to obtain much greater resources, what are we going to do about it?”1
