ABSTRACT
In the early fall of 1880, Annie Sullivan, then an “inmate” of Massachusetts State Almshouse at Tewksbury, one of the largest poorhouses in the nation, said these words as she accosted Sanborn, by this time Massachusetts’s newly installed Inspector of Charities. This chapter explores how and why Annie was sent to Tewksbury, what her experience there was like, and Sanborn’s important role in administering the relatively vast array of Massachusetts “charities,” as they were known in those days (unlike today’s use of the term, “charities” covered government services to vulnerable groups as well as private efforts). To set the context, I begin with the general malaise that the Gilded Age brought to America, and the increasing conflict between classes that emerged with the growth of capital and labor in America. While neither poverty nor poorhouses were new to America, the period marks the beginning of the politicization of class status, as well as the institutions that, dependent on your view, either “served the poor” or viciously “repressed them.” Interestingly, Sanborn was quite proud of his role in the history of Massachusetts charities, and is in fact lauded as a forerunner of modern social work, while, perhaps unsurprisingly, Sullivan’s account of being an inmate is quite a bit less laudatory. Nevertheless the difference in view is paramount to understanding not only Sanborn and Sullivan, but how social class works as a lens. More than four years in the poorhouse would develop and reinforce Sullivan’s lifelong class consciousness as a victim of poverty, while the Gilded Age would further mark Sanborn’s distance from those he presided over as a charity official.
