Fighting Poverty with Virtue: Moral Reform and America's Urban Poor, 1825-2000.

Fighting Poverty with Virtue: Moral Reform and America's Urban Poor, 1825-2000. By Joel Schwartz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. xxii plus 353 pp. $39.95).

Joel Schwartz's book is a work of historical revisionism with a decidedly contemporary aim: to restore old-fashioned moral uplift as the first and best, if not the only, line of defense against poverty in current-day policy. To do this, Schwartz endeavors to redeem the reputations of leading 19th-century moral reformers who took it upon themselves to keep the poor from the dread state of pauperism (or welfare dependency) by teaching them how to be industrious, thrifty, and sober. Moral reformers, Schwartz contends, and more distressingly the virtues they preached, have been unfairly vilified by later generations of structural reformers, radical social critics, moral relativists, and social historians. Schwartz sees this hostility to "traditional" virtues as part of a broader cultural reorientation that culminated in the cataclysmic permissiveness of the 1960s, and notes that it has had devastating consequences for the poor. Poverty, he quotes conservative analyst Myron Magnet, "turned pathological" (p. 147) o nce the poor were free to embrace welfare dependency, indulge their hedonistic impulses, and stray from the two-parent family ideal. What they needed more than anything was a lesson in frugality and self-control.

Schwartz develops his argument as a three-part, roughly chronological narrative of virtue's rise, fall, and prospective "restoration" as the leading edge of anti-poverty reform (xxi). Part one, circa 1825-1900, focuses on moral reform in its heyday, as seen principally in the writings of four distantly connected but presumably representative figures: Unitarian minister Joseph Tuckerman, who ministered to the poor in early republic Boston; Robert M. Hartley, an early temperance advocate and founder of the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (1843); Charles Loring Brace, best known as founder of the Children's Aid Society (1853), and instigator of the infamous "orphan trains;" and Josephine Shaw Lowell, who helped to establish New York's Charity Organization Society (1882) in the midst of a long and varied reform career.

Organizing his discussion around the themes of diligence, sobriety, and thrift, Schwartz sifts through their writings to establish how the reformers embraced and made "virtue" the cornerstone of their work. He does not, despite an occasional reference to bourgeois, Victorian, or Protestant sensibilities, recognize this version of "virtue" as the product of a distinctive intellectual or ideological heritage, to have a politics, or to be grounded in ideas about race, gender, and class. Nor does he otherwise attempt to situate moral reform in a particular time, place, or socioeconomic context. To Schwartz, the Victorian view of virtue is based on timeless, universal truths; its social value to the poor is similarly timeless and self-evident. Indeed, in Schwartz's a historical vision, there was only one way for anyone, and especially the poor, to exercise virtue and to get ahead in the 19th-century U.S.--as there is today: by adhering to a highly individualized credo of self-reliance, self-restraint, and social q uiescence (and, he adds in passing, to recognize the sanctity of the two-parent family). Nowhere in this vision does he acknowledge that the concept of "virtue" was itself highly contested, or that it could be invoked as a challenge rather than as a spur to the dehumanizing and exploitative conditions of wage work.

Schwartz unquestioningly reaffirms this credo when he comes to the defense of moral reform. The reformers were not "blaming the victims" when they tied poverty to character flaws; they were recognizing that the poor were ignorant of, and could be taught, moral truths that would translate into material gain. They were not being callous when they preached frugality and sobriety in the face of mass unemployment; they were offering much-needed survival skills. The relentless obsession with preventing pauperism was not a ploy to distract attention from deep-seated structural inequalities; it was an acknowledgement that being poor and self-reliant was a far better character-builder than futile efforts at social change. Yes, Schwartz concedes, the reformers cared more about stemming dependency than ending poverty, but in this they were justified. The problems were too vast to yield to misguided social activism. Besides, preventing dependency--even in the face of material need--was a righteous cause.

In part two Schwartz shifts his attention from moral reform to its detractors, by way of explaining its demise from the Progressive era through the 1970s. Here the analysis focuses on a selective critique of writings by a handful of emblematic left/liberal figures, from Jane Addams and Walter Rauschenbusch to Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward. Schwartz dismisses the idea that the turn away from moral reformism had to do with its patent inadequacy, with a legitimate critique of laissez-faire capitalism, or even with the emergence of alternative, more structurally-oriented reform movements. The real culprit--whether motivated by Progressives' wrongheaded critique of individualism or by a misguided egalitarianism that refused to pass moral judgment on the poor--was the "conscious de-emphasis of the capacity of the poor themselves to improve their situation in meaningful ways." (p. 132) Aside from the fact that it is simply inaccurate as a characterization of what Addams et al. actually thought, what is signi ficant about this statement is the way it summarily dismisses collective action, protest, labor and community-based organizing, and political advocacy as "meaningful" avenues for poor people to improve their circumstances. It also fits in with Schwartz's equally sweeping contention that the drift of left-liberal thinking and policy has been to treat the poor as helpless victims of society, with neither the capacity nor the responsibility to help themselves.

But Schwartz's account grossly exaggerates the degree to which 20th-century social policy ever, even at the height of the Great Society, truly strayed from the moral precepts of the 19th-century reformers. The War on Poverty was heavily invested in education, training, and social services--the hand-up, not the hand-out--to bring poor people into the mainstream of employment and opportunity. Poor people have always been expected to exercise more thrift than everyone else, as even the most generous of state welfare benefits suggests. What conservatives characterize as a profligate turn to cash benefits was largely a phenomenon of the post-affluent (and post-liberal) 1970s, comprised chiefly of expanded assistance to the elderly and other categories of "deserving" poor, and can be seen in historical perspective as a relatively brief interlude, quickly followed by retrenchment.

For Schwartz, though, the rejection of moral reform was all-encompassing, and with it the stage is set for part three, in which he builds a case for the current-day necessity of moral reform. His argument hinges on a stereotype-ridden, if hardly novel, comparison between 19th-century Irish Catholic immigrants and African Americans who joined in the great urban migrations of the 20th century. Unruly and untutored Irish Catholics made it our of poverty, he claims, because they became more like Protestants, and adapted to the still-dominant moral consensus of diligence, sobriety, and thrift. Blacks, who became urbanized after the fall, were "less receptive to the message of virtue" (p. 188), and the poorest among them became trapped in the self-destructive behavior of the urban "underclass." These conclusions are based on a reading that disregards much of the historical literature on Irish and African American urban migrations: on the changing labor market conditions migrants faced; on the role of political and labor organization and machine politics in opening up opportunities; on their strategies for getting work, establishing households, forming communities, and putting together steady incomes; on the hardening lines of racial segregation sustained by public policy as well as prejudice and violence. Indeed, it is only by ignoring the preponderance of historical literature that Schwartz can claim that these migrants arrived in the city needing to learn the virtues of hard work, savings, and personal responsibility from social elites.

But this is not the only distortion undergirding Schwartz's brief for reviving moral reform. Another is his claim that the contemporary urban poor are less virtuous than their 19th-century counterparts, and that the decline of virtue is responsible for the persistence of poverty. He bases this claim on several unsubstantiated premises, beginning with the statement that rates of crime, violence, drug abuse, and bad behavior are higher in poor neighborhoods today than in the 19th century. From there Schwartz echoes a host of conservative commentators in declaring single parenthood to be the mother of all "moral defects" in today's "underclass" (p. 202)--a contention that conveniently overlooks the effects of poverty, segregation, low wages and long hours, as well as the unavailability of the health, educational and other social supports that every family counts on. He further states, in apparent disregard of the precipitous rise in so-called "working poverty" over the past two decades, that the "structural," or economic dimensions of poverty have been resolved. On this basis, he concludes, the project of fighting poverty in the 21st century is above all one of "remoralization": of the poor, social policy, and society writ large. And it is in this spirit that Schwartz points approvingly to the explicitly moral turn in (post), welfare policy, as a sign that we are finally on the right track.

Flawed as historical analysis, Schwartz's book is nevertheless illuminating in underscoring important dimensions of the "compassionate conservatism" that emerged as a powerful force in late 20th-century U.S. social policy. One is that, like its 19th-century counterpart, it puts a much higher premium on fighting pauperism than fighting poverty-and can in this sense claim the "end of welfare" as a major triumph. A second is that, in contrast to their predecessors, compassionate conservatives are in a position to enlist the full apparatus of the stare, as well as civil society, in the name of moral reform. Finally, compassionate conservatism finds justification in a vision of "traditional" values that not only narrows but distorts the historical record. All the more reason for historians to pay close attention to the ongoing work of historical revisionism behind contemporary moral reform.