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David T. Beito, Fighting Poverty with Virtue: Moral Reform and America's Urban Poor, 1825–2000. By Joel Schwartz. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. xxii, 353 pp. $39.95, isbn 0-253-33771-2.), Journal of American History, Volume 88, Issue 3, December 2001, Page 1104, https://doi.org/10.2307/2700475
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It is safe to predict that Fighting Poverty with Virtue will find a chilly reception among social welfare historians. This is unfortunate, because Joel Schwartz's extended, and sympathetic, account of moral reform in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries deserves to be taken seriously by scholars in the field.
The author focuses on four social work pioneers who embraced these ideals: Joseph Tuckerman, Robert M. Hartley, Charles Lor ing Brace, and Josephine Shaw Lowell. Each urged “the poor to practice the virtues of diligence, sobriety, and thrift.” Tuckerman, Hartley, Brace, and Lowell were not just dispensers of simplistic bromides, however. These moral reformers stressed, albeit to varying degrees, the limitations as well as the advantages of a virtuecentered approach. They knew “that failure to find work did not necessarily indicate (though it could indicate) moral deficiency, or ‘perversion of character.’” Most favored modifications of laissezfaire through minimum wage laws and social insurance as means to “increase the effectiveness of the individualist virtues in reducing poverty.” They can best be described as realists who hoped to reduce pauperism but recognized that the great poverty of the period could not be eliminated “even if massive redistribution would have been politically feasible.”
