ABSTRACT
The reaction to the problem of dependency paralleled the response to the issue of deviancy. Just as the penitentiary would reform the criminal and the insane asylum would cure the mentally ill, so the almshouse would rehabilitate the poor. Private benevolent associations and public officials dispensed limited amounts of food and fuel and petty sums of cash to the poor. But the door of the almshouse became the most important symbol—and reality—in the practice of relief. The popularity of the almshouse in New York, as in Massachusetts, spelled the decline but not the eradication of outdoor relief. The New York experience illustrated the shift. For many contemporaries the almshouse was an integral part of the movement that promoted the insane asylum and the penitentiary. Almshouse organizers who agreed that the fact of poverty in the new republic pointed to a social as well as a personal disorganization looked to institutionalization as an effective antidote.
