. 
 
f 
 
 
SOCIAL WORK SERIES 
 
 WHAT IS 
 SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 AN INTRODUCTORY 
 DESCRIPTION 
 
 By 
 
 i 
 
 MARY E. RICHMOND 
 if 
 
 Director. Charity Organization Depart me.mt 
 
 Russell Sage Foundation 
 
 Author of "Social Diagnosis," "The Good Neighsop s ' iEtc. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 RUSSELL SAGE FOUNDATION 
 
 1922 
 
MVh 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY 
 THE RUSSELL SAGE FOUNDATION 
 
 WM. F. FELL CO PRINTERS 
 PHILADELPHIA 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Introduction 5 
 
 II. Social Case Work in Being ... 26 
 
 III. Social Case Work in Being {Continued) . 50 
 
 IV. Social Case Work Defined . . . 87 
 V. Human Interdependence . . , . 1 26 
 
 VI. Individual Differences . . . .144 
 
 VII. The Basis of Purposeful Action . . 159 
 VIII. The Home . . . . . . .175 
 
 IX. School Workshop Hospital Court . 195 
 X. The Forms of Social Work and their 
 
 Interrelations 222 
 
 XI. Case Work and Democracy . . . 244 
 
 XII. Conclusion 255 
 
 Index 261 
 
 4J8S91 
 
\ 
 
WHAT IS 
 SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 I 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 ^T^HERE was real teaching in the world long 
 -" before there was a science or art of teaching ; 
 there was social case work long before social 
 workers began, not so many years ago, to formu- 
 late a few of its principles and methods. Almost 
 as soon as human beings discovered that their 
 relations to one another had ceased to be primi- 
 tive and simple, they must have found among 
 their fellows a few who had a special gift for 
 smoothing out the tangles in such relations; 
 they must have sought, however informally, the 
 aid of these "straighteners," as Samuel Butler 
 calls them. Some teachers have had this skill, 
 occasionally ministers of religion have had it, 
 and secular judges, and physicians; though at 
 5 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 no time has it been the exclusive possession of 
 these four professions or of any one of them. 
 
 A writer whose stories and tales are too little 
 known says of one of her characters : 
 
 For the Doctor, in that age of medical darkness, had 
 what is more useful even to his profession than a knowl- 
 edge of medicine a great knowledge of character; and 
 was famous for his diagnosis of the maladies of the soul as 
 well as of the body . He not only perceived, which was easy, 
 from the look of Hodge's face and the trembling of his 
 hands, the direction of Hodge's wages; but saw, though 
 indeed only in a glass darkly, what few people saw at all in 
 that day, the effect of mind on body; so that the little 
 dressmaker, a meek, frightened thing, who had set up for 
 herself in Basset . . . required, not physic and plais- 
 ters, as she believed, but a start, and an order from Mrs. 
 Latimer at the Manor. The very next afternoon, Dr. 
 Richard wheezed up the Manor drive to see Pollie; ob- 
 tained her word, which was as good as a bond, to assist 
 Miss Fitten; and cured his patient.* 
 
 Even in our own day, the skill of the social 
 case worker who is able to effect better adjust- 
 ments between the individual and his environ- 
 ment seems to many of us as reading and 
 
 *Tallentyre, S. G.: Basset, A Village Chronicle, p. 93. 
 New York, Moffat, Yard and Co., 1912. 
 
 6 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 writing seemed to Dogberry to come by nature. 
 To many, such case work is neighborliness and -. 
 nothing more. There is a half truth in this*- ' 
 neighborliness theory, for the good case worker 
 must be both born and made, but its element of 
 error is the failure to recognize how much is ^ 
 being done in social work to develop a native 
 gift through training and specialized experience. 
 The difference of method and point of view as 
 between neighbor and specialist is well illustrated 
 in the Life of Laura Bridgman,* where Asa 
 Tenney is the neighbor and Dr. Howe the teacher. 
 Laura, it will be remembered, was the untrained 
 blind and deaf child discovered in 1837 by 
 the Boston philanthropist, Dr. Samuel Gridley 
 Howe, who had founded Perkins Institution for 
 the Blind. For the first time in the history of 
 the deaf -blind, one of their number under his 
 guidance was to learn through touch alone to 
 read and write and use her mind and hands in a 
 variety of occupations. Fortunately, Dr. Howe 
 
 * Howe, Maud, and Hall, Florence Howe: Laura Bridg- 
 man, Dr. Howe's Famous Pupil and What He Taught 
 Her, p. 34. Boston, Little, Brown and Co., 1903. 
 
 7 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 had the scientific habit of mind ; not only did he 
 devise new ways of releasing an imprisoned spirit, 
 but he kept accurate notes, made at the time, of 
 his methods and results. Upon this foundation, 
 as I shall presently show, others have been able 
 to build. 
 
 I have said that the Bridgman family had a 
 neighbor, an old man with a big, simple heart. 
 When Laura was a little girl he used to take her 
 for country walks, and taught her the difference 
 between land and water by letting her feel the 
 splash upon her cheek as she stood by the brook- 
 side and threw stones into it. At the time that 
 Dr. Howe asked permission to give Laura sys- 
 tematic instruction, old Asa Tenney was one of 
 those who "scouted the notion of anybody's 
 being able to teach her more than he could. 
 She knew him from anybody else, and she knew 
 a cat from a dog, an apple from a stone, and he 
 could teach her anything in the same way by 
 which she had learned these things." 
 
 The world could ill afford to spare its Asa 
 Tenneys. Affection and kindness unlock many 
 doors, straighten out many complications. But 
 8 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 when to affection and kindness we are able to ^ 
 add that knowledge of the workings of the human ^ 
 mind and that knowledge of social resources * 
 which Dr. Howe possessed, we have a new power 
 in the world added to the older power of just 
 loving one another. 
 
 In the year 1886 the parents of a deaf-blind 
 child living in Tuscumbia, Alabama, applied to 
 Perkins Institution for the Blind for a private 
 instructor. Choice fell upon a former pupil of 
 the institution, Anne Mansfield Sullivan,* who 
 had been almost totally blind from early child- 
 hood but whose sight had become partially 
 restored before her graduation from the institu- 
 tion. In her student days Miss Sullivan had 
 lived in the same cottage with blind and deaf 
 Laura Bridgman. In addition to her observa- 
 tions of this famous pupil and to her own studies 
 at the school, she was able before going to Tus- 
 cumbia to devote a good deal of time, in prep- 
 aration for her task, to the examination of Dr. 
 Howe's original records and diaries. Thus Dr. 
 
 * Now Mrs. Macy. 
 9 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 Howe's stone was cast not like Laura's into a 
 brook, but into shoreless waters upon which the 
 circles continue to widen and widen. 
 
 The story of what followed has been told many 
 times, but not from the angle from which, as an 
 introduction to the subject of case work, I now 
 propose to view it. 
 
 Helen Keller was six years and nine months 
 old when Miss Sullivan came to Tuscumbia. 
 Though her teacher did not keep a diary like Dr. 
 Howe's, we have what for my present purpose 
 serves even better. At almost weekly intervals 
 during that first year Miss Sullivan wrote to a 
 friend, the matron of Perkins Institution, giving 
 her not so much the educational details of a task 
 with which her correspondent was already fa- 
 miliar, but describing the new situations, many 
 of them social, with which she found herself con- 
 fronted, and adding the frankest possible report 
 of her own mental processes in trying to meet 
 these. So we have in the letters not only what 
 happened but how it happened, and the teacher's 
 own reactions as well as the pupil's. 
 
 On the educational side, some of Miss Sulli- 
 
 10 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 van's methods anticipate those of the most ad- 
 vanced school of present-day teachers. On the 
 . social side, also, they represent at many points 
 *our modern social case work method of pro- 
 cedure, though under conditions that social 
 work can seldom command. In 1903 Miss 
 Keller, while a student at Radcliffe College, pub- 
 lished The Story of My Life,* and Miss Sulli- 
 van's letters are given in Part III of that book. 
 My readers will not be satisfied, I hope, to know 
 anything less than all of these letters, together 
 with the whole book of which they are a part. 
 There could be no better introduction to social 
 case work. In fact, certain incidents in the 
 story are wonderful illustrations of what has 
 been termed unconscious case work, and I shall 
 try to describe a few of these incidents before 
 giving examples of the conscious processes of 
 professional case workers. 
 
 Helen had been an "eager, self -asserting" in- 
 fant. At nineteen months an illness, described 
 as "acute congestion of the stomach and brain," 
 
 * Keller, Helen: The Story of My Life. New York, 
 Doubleday, Page and Co. 
 
 II 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 had left her deaf and blind. She was learning to 
 talk before the attack, but very shortly "ceased 
 to speak because she could not hear." Soon she ^ 
 began to tyrannize over everybody, "her pother, 
 her father, the servants, the little darkies who 
 play with her, and nobody," wrote Miss Sulli- 
 van, "had ever seriously disputed her will, ex- 
 cept occasionally her brother James, until I 
 came." The parents gave the new teacher entire 
 charge of the little girl. 
 
 They have promised to let me have a free hand and 
 help me as much as possible. . . Of course, it is hard 
 for them. I realize that it hurts to see their afflicted little 
 child punished and made to do things against her will. 
 Only a few hours after my talk with Captain and Mrs. 
 Keller (and they had agreed to everything) Helen took a 
 notion that she wouldn't use her napkin at table. I think 
 she wanted to see what would happen. I attempted sev- 
 eral times to put the napkin round her neck; but each time 
 she tore it off and threw it on the floor and finally began 
 to kick the table. I took her plate away and started to 
 take her out of the room. Her father objected and said 
 that no child of his should be deprived of his food on any 
 account, (p. 313)* 
 
 * Page references throughout this summary are to pas- 
 sages in Miss Keller's The Story of My Life. 
 
 12 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Thus Miss Sullivan had the task of winning 
 over more than one insurgent. This was in 
 March. By the following Christmas she was 
 able to write: 
 
 . . . It was evident that every one, especially Cap- 
 tain and Mrs. Keller, was deeply "moved at the thought of 
 the difference between this bright Christmas and the last, 
 when their little girl had no conscious part in the Christ- 
 mas festivities. As we came downtyairs, Mrs. Keller said 
 to me with tears in her eyes, "Miss Annie, I thank God 
 every day of my life for sending you to us; but I never 
 realized until this morning what a blessing you have been 
 to us." Captain Keller took my hand, but could not 
 speak. But his silence was more eloquent than words. 
 My heart, too, was full of gratitude and solemn joy. 
 (PP- 343-44) 
 
 How was this transformation effected? Cut 
 off from the normal approaches to a child's 
 heart, Miss Sullivan had very early had a frank 
 talk with Mrs. Keller and suggested that Helen 
 be separated from her family for a few weeks. 
 There were "two essential things to teach her, 
 obedience and love," and neither could be taught 
 without a chance to pursue a consistent, unin- 
 terrupted policy. Accordingly, teacher and pupil 
 were established in a little garden house near 
 13 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 the former Keller home. At that time Helen 
 "was unresponsive and even impatient of 
 caresses from any one except her mother." In 
 the new surroundings she "was greatly excited 
 at first, and kicked and screamed herself into a 
 sort of stupor. . . . When she felt me get 
 into bed with her, she jumped out on the other 
 side." (p. 310) 
 
 Captain Keller came every day, unknown to 
 Helen, to see how his little daughter was pro- 
 gressing. He often found her crocheting a long 
 red chain of Scotch wool or stringing beads on a 
 sewing-card, and he remarked how quiet and 
 contented she seemed. One day, during the two 
 weeks of Helen's separation from her family, his 
 dog, Belle, came too. The child recognized the 
 dog's presence and, sitting down beside her, be- 
 gan to manipulate her claws. "We couldn't 
 think for a second," writes Miss Sullivan, "what 
 she was doing; but when we saw her make the 
 letters ' d-o-1-1 ' on her own fingers, we knew that 
 she was trying to teach Belle to spell." (p. 313) 
 Helen's teacher had been spelling whole words 
 into the child's hand without instructing her 
 14 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 in the manual alphabet, and had associated this 
 spelling with the corresponding objects. 
 
 Tempting as are the passages in Miss Sulli- 
 van's letters which describe her extensions and 
 modifications of Dr. Howe's great educational 
 discovery, the matter to which I must confine 
 myself here is the use that she made of Helen's 
 own world not only of her immediate household 
 but of the social occasions of the community, 
 the animal life of the farm, and the beauty and 
 variety of the whole countryside. 
 
 Laura Bridgman had not only been trained in 
 an institution as a child, but had found in it her 
 only satisfactory home as long as she lived, 
 dying there in her sixtieth year. Helen Keller, 
 on the contrary, was to become a citizen of the 
 world. As every one knows, she was graduated 
 from Radcliffe College, has written several books, 
 is interested in the education of the deaf-blind, 
 and has had the deep satisfaction of winning for 
 them many better opportunities. Her social 
 endeavors have not stopped here, however, but 
 have been extended to the much larger group of 
 all the blind, and she has also been an active 
 15 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 champion of woman's suffrage and of other 
 social reforms. That Miss Keller was born with 
 great natural endowment is obvious, but she 
 herself has always been the first to proclaim that 
 Miss Sullivan's ability to make her education a 
 social one, Miss Sullivan's genius for ignoring 
 routine and for using life itself as her best in- 
 terpreter has meant the difference between a 
 singularly happy life and one of utter wretched- 
 ness. 
 
 It is from an embarrassing wealth of material 
 that I choose the brief quotations following, of 
 which the first illustrates Miss Sullivan's use of 
 the animals on the Keller plantation in develop- 
 ing the mind of her charge; the second illustrates 
 her way of making the whole household parti- 
 cipants in the process; the third, her skill in 
 turning a community occasion to account; and 
 tfre fourth, her recognition of the part that nature 
 could play. The animals were early pressed into 
 service. 
 
 She is much interested in some little chickens that 
 are pecking their way into the world this morning. I 
 let her hold a shell in her hand, and feel the chicken 
 
 16 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 "chip, chip." Her astonishment, when she felt the tiny 
 creature inside, cannot be put in a letter. The hen was 
 very gentle, and made no objection to our investigations. 
 Besides the chickens, we have several other additions to 
 the family two calves, a colt, and a penful of funny little 
 pigs. You would be amused to see me hold a squealing 
 pig in my arms, while Helen feels it all over, and asks 
 countless questions questions not easy to answer either, 
 (p- 325) 
 
 We go home about dinner-time usually, and Helen is 
 eager to tell her mother everything she has seen. This de- 
 sire to repeat what has been told her shows a marked advance 
 in the development of her intellect, and is an invaluable 
 stimulus to the acquisition of language. I ask all her friends 
 to encourage her to tell them of her doings, and to manifest 
 as much curiosity and pleasure in her little adventures as 
 they possibly can. This gratifies the child's love of appro- 
 bation and keeps up her interest in things. This is the 
 basis of real intercourse. She makes many mistakes, of 
 course, twists words and phrases, puts the cart before 
 the horse, and gets herself into hopeless tangles of nouns 
 and verbs; but so does the hearing child. I am sure 
 these difficulties will take care of themselves. The im- 
 pulse to tell is the important thing, (pp. 321-22) 
 
 It is interesting to get Miss Keller's impres- 
 sions as well as her teacher's of that memorable 
 year. She writes: 
 
 The first Christmas aft er Miss Sullivan came to Tus- 
 
 ble J* 
 
 ^.ivan came to 1 
 
 7 4& 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 cumbia was a great event. Every one in the family pre- 
 pared surprises for me; but what pleased me most, Miss 
 Sullivan and I prepared surprises for everybody else. The 
 mystery that surrounded the gifts was my greatest de- 
 light and amusement. My friends did all they could to 
 excite my curiosity by hints and half-spelled sentences 
 which they pretended to break off in the nick of 
 time. . . 
 
 On Christmas Eve the Tuscumbia school children had 
 their tree, to which they invited me. In the centre of the 
 schoolroom stood a beautiful tree ablaze and shimmering 
 in the soft light, its branches loaded with strange, won- 
 derful fruit. It was a moment of supreme happiness. I 
 danced and capered round the tree in an ecstasy. When 
 I learned that there was a gift for each child, I was de- 
 lighted, and the kind people who had prepared the tree 
 permitted me to hand the presents to the children. In the 
 pleasure of doing this, I did not stop to look at my own 
 gifts; but when I was ready for them, my impatience for 
 the real Christmas to begin almost got beyond control. 
 (P- 4i) 
 
 All my early lessons have in them the breath of the 
 woods the fine, resinous odour of pine needles, blended 
 with the perfume of wild grapes . . . Indeed, every- 
 thing that could hum, or buzz, or sing, or bloom, had a part 
 in my education noisy- throated frogs, katydids and crick- 
 ets held in my hand until, forgetting their embarrassment, 
 they trilled their reedy note, little downy chickens and 
 wildflowers, the dogwood blossoms, meadow-violets and 
 budding fruit trees. I felt the bursting cotton-bolls and 
 
 18 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 fingered their soft fiber and fuzzy seeds; I felt the low 
 soughing of the wind through the cornstalks, the silky 
 rustling of the long leaves, and the indignant snort of my 
 pony, as we caught him in the pasture and put the bit in 
 his mouth . . . (pp. 34-35) 
 
 Then came Helen's introduction to a larger 
 range of social contacts, first through her visit 
 to Perkins Institution, and later through in- 
 struction in New York and Cambridge. 
 
 [First visit to Boston.] I was never still a moment; 
 my life was as full of motion as those little insects that 
 crowd a whole existence into one brief day. I met many 
 people who talked with me by spelling into my hand, and 
 thought in joyous sympathy leaped up to meet thought, 
 and behold, a miracle had been wrought! The barren 
 places between my mind and the minds of others blossomed 
 like the rose. (p. 50) 
 
 At the Cambridge school, for the first time in my life, I 
 enjoyed the companionship of seeing and hearing girls of 
 my own age. I lived with several others in one of the 
 pleasant houses connected with the school, the house 
 where Mr. Howells used to five, and we all had the advan- 
 tage of home life. I joined them in many of their games, 
 even blind man's buff and frolics in the snow; I took long 
 walks with them; we discussed our studies and read aloud 
 the things that interested us. Some of the girls learned to 
 speak to me, so that Miss Sullivan did not have to repeat 
 their conversation, (pp. 86-87) 
 
 19 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 At Tuscumbia there had been no one to whom 
 Miss Sullivan could turn in perplexity; she had 
 been thrown upon her own resources and had 
 been forced to work out her own solution of each 
 difficulty as best she could. But when her pupil 
 was able to travel, no teacher could have been 
 more eager to use expert advice and assistance 
 wherever these could be found. Helen heard, 
 for instance, in 1890 of a Norwegian deaf and 
 blind girl who had been taught to speak, and she 
 entreated her teacher to find such instruction 
 for her. Although Miss Sullivan dreaded for 
 her charge the disappointment of a possible 
 failure, she did not hesitate long, but took Helen 
 to a specialist in New York from whom she 
 could gain the rudiments of articulation. Care- 
 fully heeding the methods used by this expert, 
 Miss Sullivan was able to supplement the special 
 training. But for her genius, untiring perse- 
 verance and devotion, as Miss Keller testifies, 
 "I could never have progressed as far as I have 
 toward natural speech." 
 
 Again, in the matter of religious instruction, 
 Helen's teacher sought the aid of Bishop Brooks. 
 20 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 As a child [Miss Keller says] I loved to sit on his knee 
 and clasp his great hand with one of mine, while Miss 
 Sullivan spelled into the other his beautiful words about 
 God and the spiritual world. I heard him with a child's 
 wonder and delight. My spirit could not reach up to his, 
 but he gave me a real sense of joy in life, and I never left 
 him without carrying away a fine thought that grew in 
 beauty and depth of meaning as I grew. Once, when I 
 was puzzled to know why there were so many religions, 
 he said: "There is one universal religion, Helen the re- 
 ligion of love. Love your Heavenly Father with your 
 whole heart and soul, love every child of God as much as 
 ever you can, and remember that the possibilities of good 
 are greater than the possibilities of evil; and you have the 
 key to Heaven." (pp. 133-34) 
 
 Finally, to bring these extracts to an end, there 
 is abundant evidence that one of the elements in 
 Miss Sullivan's success was the gr^aJM^anknfiss. 
 with which she habitually treated Helen after her 
 confidence had been won. Her resemblances to 
 normal folk were always emphasized; the dif- 
 ferences which might so easily have set her apart 
 were minimized. This policy the teacher im- 
 pressed upon others who came in contact with 
 her pupil. 
 
 No attempt [says the editor of Miss Keller's Life] is 
 21 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 made by those around her either to preserve or to break 
 her illusions. When she was a little girl, a good many- 
 unwise and tactless things that were said for her benefit 
 were not repeated to her, thanks to the wise watchfulness 
 of Miss Sullivan. Now that she has grown up, nobody 
 thinks of being less frank with her than with any other in- 
 telligent young woman, (p. 294) 
 
 Let me summarize this illustration of uncon- 
 scious case work in a few words and try at the 
 same time to suggest some of its resemblances 
 to the conscious case work which is to be des- 
 cribed later. This remarkable teacher had a 
 true instinct for that greatest of all realities 
 the reality of personality. Beneath all the 
 handicaps of her charge and the unfortunate 
 effects of those handicaps she was able to divine 
 the unusual character of the child. Building 
 upon this discovery, she summoned one en- 
 vironmental resource after another, first to re- 
 lease, then to develop, that highly socialized 
 personality of whom we speak today when we 
 name Helen Keller. 
 
 Almost from the beginning it was possible to 
 push beyond the negative side of the task. The 
 preliminary lesson in childish obedience was 
 22 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 necessary to orderly progress, and once learned, 
 Helen's affection was soon won. To accomplish 
 this, however, Miss Sullivan took upon herself 
 the humblest duties, such as dispensing with a 
 nurse for Helen and caring for her personally 
 until she was able to care for herself. Here 
 again the instructor was too wise to build upon 
 influence gained through one channel, whether 
 obedience or affection. Soon she was able to 
 appeal to the mind of her pupil doing this 
 through everything in the child's world, even 
 through the very persons and things that seemed 
 at first to be obstacles in her path. 
 
 There is a sympathy, an affection, which makes 
 us feel strong; there is another which makes us 
 dependent and weak. Miss Sullivan's sympathy 
 released her pupil from that dependence, and it 
 did this by establishing her relation to a multi- 
 tude of vital, growing things and ideas, first in 
 space, later in time. One of the most pitifully 
 isolated of human beings thus became one of the 
 most completely identified with whatever is 
 best in the world. 
 
 I shall have occasion to refer repeatedly in 
 23 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 these pages to change of environment as a means 
 ^ of social treatment in difficult cases. In the first 
 month of her teaching, Miss Sullivan used this 
 particular means so skilfully that it was possible 
 to return Helen to her own natural world at the 
 end of only two weeks. 
 
 Another mark of Miss Sullivan's intuitive 
 social work sense was her willingness to turn to 
 any one whose expert knowledge of whatever 
 kind could supplement her own. She was wisely 
 humble, for example, about Helen's ambition 
 to learn to speak, and about the child's spiritual 
 needs. Trained herself in a school which did 
 not attempt to teach articulation to the deaf- 
 blind, she felt a certain skepticism and she over- 
 came it. In the matter of Helen's religious train- 
 ing she recognized both the urgency and the 
 extreme delicacy of the task, and turned for aid 
 to one of the greatest religious teachers of that 
 time. 
 
 Finally, she taught her charge to trust her 
 
 absolutely by being worthy of that trust. In 
 
 the service of personality of a personality other 
 
 than our own there is a field of endeavor, 
 
 24 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 whether we call it teaching or social case work 
 or by some other title, that is of all fields the 
 most exacting. We are "named and known" 
 by such service; by and through it we take our 
 "station and degree." 
 
 25 
 
II 
 SOCIAL CASE WORK IN BEING 
 
 TT MAY be well, before attempting any de- 
 *- scription of social case work as practised in a 
 genuinely professional spirit, to present some 
 illustrations of such work and later compare 
 illustrations with description. The purpose of 
 this small book is not, however, to discuss 
 method, but to inquire into what social case work 
 is and why it is. 
 
 The typical character of any group of examples 
 can be challenged, of course, especially when the 
 group is perforce so small as is the one here 
 selected, but the process by which I arrived at a 
 choice is as follows: After discarding, in my 
 search, all work not recorded with a fair degree 
 of fulness at the time that it was done, I have 
 given preference to those social case records 
 which covered a period of active treatment 
 varying from tw o to six years, and preference 
 26 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK IN BEING 
 
 to work with clients* of different nationalities. 
 The search was made in cities widely separated 
 and in social agencies of more than one type, 
 though I have had to exclude agencies in which 
 the social treatment was subsidiary to some 
 other form of professional service. To these limita- 
 tions I have added the further one of an arbitrary 
 choice of the following general types of problem : 
 A difficult, maladjusted girl who is not a de- 
 fective 
 
 A small boy in need of a home 
 A husband and wife who cannot agree 
 A fatherless family with children who are not 
 receiving proper care 
 
 A widow with children who is not an efficient 
 home maker 
 
 An older woman with difficulties which her 
 relatives fail to understand 
 
 * Few social case workers adopt the practice, permitted 
 to the physician, of referring to those with whom they 
 have professional dealings as "cases." The social worker's 
 "case" is the particular social situation or problem not 
 the person or persons concerned. For the person, as dis- 
 tinguished from his problem, the term now in general use is 
 "client." As the nature of the relation between the social 
 practitioner and the one receiving social treatment changed^ 
 
 2 7 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 I have mentioned Dr. Howe's diary records 
 of his treatment of Laura Bridgman. As social 
 workers have gradually learned how to render 
 more intelligent and effective service to indi- 
 viduals and families, Dr. Howe's practice of 
 keeping a record of developments in treatment 
 has become their practice also. At first their 
 attempts were little more than a rambling 
 chronicle of motions made in the course of their 
 work, but gradually they have learned how to 
 construct good, chronological accounts both of 
 the essential processes used and of the observa- 
 tions upon which these processes were based. 
 A record so made becomes not only an indis- 
 pensablgj^uide t o_future action in behalf of the 
 person recorded; it can be unexcelled material 
 for trainingjother case workers, and for training 
 those who, in preparation for other _types of 
 sociaLwork such as work with neighborhood 
 groups or social research or the conducting of 
 social reform campaigns seek a clearer under- 
 standing of the numberless ways in which bad 
 
 "client" replaced to a large extent the earlier term of 
 "applicant." 
 
 28 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK IN BEING 
 
 social conditions affect the lives of individuals. 
 The value of social case records extends farther. 
 Under analysis which is thoroughly competent 
 and careful they may become the basis of sta- 
 tistical studies or, more often, of social discovery 
 arrived at by non-statistical methods. 
 
 There is one drawback to all these uses of the 
 social case history. In the whole range of pro- 
 fessional contacts there is no more confidential 
 relation than that which exists between the 
 social worker and the person or family receiving 
 treatment. But unfortunately a social history 
 is far more easily identified with the person or 
 persons whose private affairs it records than is 
 any other form of record than the medical case 
 history, for example. It will not be necessary, 
 however, to report the problems here presented 
 with anything like the fulness required for pur- 
 poses of training or of research. My own quest 
 is confined to narrow limits, the one aim being 
 to reveal what social case work in its essentials 
 is. It has been possible, therefore, not only 
 greatly to foreshorten the narratives of these 
 few selected records, but, by deliberately chang- 
 29 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 ing a number of their details when these had no 
 relation to the problems and services described, 
 to conceal still further the identity of the 
 originals. 
 
 During the last decade social case work has 
 ^ had a rapid extension of its field of activity. 
 At one time, as a vocation, its field was_confined 
 almost exclusively to thjcare.of dependents and 
 delinquents, just as the first savings banks were 
 for dependents only and the first hospitals for 
 the destitute sick. But today social case work 
 in some form or other has become a necessary 
 part of many of our courts, schools, hospitals, 
 factories,, workshops, compensation commis- 
 sions, and of the hundred other places in which 
 decisions affecting the welfare of individuals 
 must be made. In many of these places, how- 
 ever, the habit of full recording is not yet well 
 established, and the work has been organized 
 so recently that long-continued service to the 
 same individuals or families, with its surer 
 measure of successes and failures, is still the 
 exception. It is for these reasons that I have 
 confined my choice of illustrations to the longer 
 30 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK IN BEING 
 
 established children's societies and family wel- 
 fare societies. 
 
 So much by way of explanation. Having 
 selected a record, my first care has been to study 
 it in detail before conferring with the case worker 
 who made it. After full conference I have pre- 
 pared my own account, with many details of the 
 history omitted and the case worker's plans and 
 policies emphasized. Finally, I have submitted 
 my account to the case worker for revision and 
 correction. Some of these precautions may have 
 been unnecessary, but at least they will have 
 saved me from becoming just one more narrator 
 of moving little stories. The six narrative 
 accounts that immediately follow, unpicturesque 
 though they are, deserve a more careful reading 
 than the discussion which later grows out of 
 them. 
 
 MARIA BIELOWSKI* 
 
 My first illustration of "case work in being" 
 describes the social treatment given for four 
 
 * All names of real people have been changed throughout 
 these narratives, as well as some other identifying but non- 
 essential details. 
 
 31 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 years to a Polish girl, who was under the care of 
 a small private society having a staff of case 
 workers and a school for difficult but not de- 
 fective young girls. From this school its pupils 
 are usually placed out in private families, where 
 they continue to be under the careful supervision 
 of the society's staff. Before the girl whose 
 story I shall tell entered the school, she had 
 been the charge for a short while of a probation 
 officer of the court. 
 
 Maria Bielowski went to work in a factory 
 when she was only fifteen. After many dis- 
 agreements with her stepmother about the share 
 of her wages to be turned over to the family and 
 also about her habit of staying out late at night, 
 she left home and began to live in lodging houses 
 and cheap hotels. From one of these the girl 
 was brought into court for stealing a few dollars 
 from a fellow-boarder. To those who saw her 
 just after her arrest she was a very unprepossess- 
 ing sight. Her features were dark and heavy, 
 her clothing ragged, dirty, and badly stained; 
 her head was crowned with three strands of false 
 hair, later found to be infested wit h vermin . 
 32 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK IN BEING 
 
 What did the probation officer discover as 
 to her background? From two places of em- 
 ployment her record was that of an irregular 
 worker. One hospital asked to examine her re- 
 ported that she had good intellectual capacity 
 but a psychopathic personality. As regards her 
 family, the Bielowskis had come from Poland 
 five years earlier the father, his second wife, 
 and four children. But the father had died three 
 years after his arrival, and the stepmother, who 
 could speak not a dozen English words, ap- 
 peared, although a good woman, to have lost 
 all control over the children. The two grown 
 sons were away from home; the younger boy 
 was in a reformatory. Should Maria, who had 
 been found guilty by the court, be committed 
 to a similar institution? 
 
 The social data obtained by the probation 
 officer made it appear unwise to place the girl 
 on probation in her own home. On the other 
 hand, her record before she had gone to work 
 did not seem to justify commitment to a re- 
 formatory. At school she had been a fair 
 scholar ; beginning with no knowledge of English 
 3 33 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 whatever, she had completed the seventh grade 
 in four years. Moreover, it was learned that 
 she had been a popular member of a Girl Scout 
 troop and of her Sunday school class, 'these 
 facts suggested that probation under conditions 
 which would assure a maximum of individualized 
 care might bring good results. Accordingly, 
 the officer sought the aid of the small private 
 society already mentioned, and somewhat later, 
 after Maria had been in its school a few months, 
 one of their case workers became, with the 
 sanction of the girl, the girl's family, and the 
 court, her legal guardian. Under this guardian- 
 ship her behavior and character have improved 
 steadily. 
 
 From a careful reading in the original record 
 of the treatment which followed and from con- 
 ference with this guardian, I have been able to 
 trace some of the steps by which the marked 
 change in the girl's habits and in her relations 
 to the world she lives in has been effected. There 
 has been no element of the magical or the spec- 
 tacular in her gradual development. 
 
 During the earlier stages of treatment careful 
 34 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK IN BEING 
 
 attention had to be given to Maria's phyjsical 
 condition. Her scalp was cleansed and her 
 teeth cared for. There was no evidence of 
 irregular sex conduct, but she was found to have 
 some symptoms of syphilis of origin unknown, 
 and was taken regularly into the city for hos- 
 pital treatments. A bad nose and throat con- 
 dition was treated at the same hospital. Enuresis 
 was controlled at the school by suggestion. 
 Twice during the following year, at times of 
 special discouragement, this symptom recurred, 
 but it responded at once to any change of pro- 
 gram which improved her mental attitude. Her 
 other physical difficulties were soon remedied. 
 
 It was at the society's little school, with its 
 less than twenty pupils, that Maria had her first 
 contact with American standards of home life. 
 Here she was given careful training in habits of 
 personal cleanliness, in the care of her room, in 
 mending and washing her clothing, in cooking, 
 and in respect for the personal belongings of 
 others. No borrowing was allowed; each girl 
 had her own bureau and closet and her own 
 small treasures. One day early in her stay, two 
 35 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 little cakes from a new baking were missing from 
 the kitchen pantry. Every girl denied taking 
 them, so the whole group were deprived of their 
 Christmas trip to town. Three days later Maria 
 confessed to the head teacher, for whom she had 
 learned to have a real affection, that she was the 
 one at fault, and this was her last dishonest act. 
 In one of the private homes in which she worked 
 a year or two later, her employer reported her 
 to be so honest that "she would not even borrow 
 an ink bottle." 
 
 After eight months in the school and her com- 
 pletion of the eighth grade, Maria was sent as a 
 mother's helper to a family at a summer resort. 
 In the autumn of that year a position was found 
 for her in another family, to help with the house- 
 work in exchange for her board and with the 
 opportunity to enter the first-year class at the 
 high school. She has continued her high school 
 course with credit ever since, making one change 
 of school, however, when transferred to another 
 city. Here there was a chance to place her with 
 a Polish professor and his wife, in whose family 
 she has had many advantages in addition to her 
 
 36 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK IN BEING 
 
 pleasure at being once more with compatriots. 
 Each summer the society finds a place for her 
 amid country surroundings, and each year it has 
 arranged a vacation, once at a girls' camp. 
 During the four years under guardianship she 
 has worked in five different families. Though 
 only two of the frequent changes were due to 
 her own restlessness, Maria has at times been a 
 troublesome charge, eager and demanding and 
 inordinately fond of personal adornment. 
 
 These family placements, which were all made 
 with the greatest care, have been valuable in 
 giving the girl a chance to participate in Amer- 
 ican life and ways, but the most important 
 influence in her improvement has continued to 
 be that of the caseworker appointed as her guar- 
 dian. Without dwelling upon details, let me try 
 to name some of the principles and processes of 
 case work that Maria's history reveals. 
 
 Probably the case worker's ability to win her 
 way with a difficult girl was due more to her 
 imaginative sympathy than to any other one 
 thing. But whether this quality was a native 
 endowment or partly a result of experience with 
 37 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 other girls, the outstanding fact of the record is 
 that the guardian did contrive to see the world 
 in somewhat the fashion that it appeared to her 
 ward. Having some of the dangers of her own 
 professional world in mind, perhaps, she was also 
 careful to avoid that rigidity of mind, that 
 \/ tendency to inhibit the client's initiative, which 
 is the too common reaction to irritating be- 
 havior. Thus she writes in a letter of explana- 
 tion : 
 
 Whenever I can possibly let a girl do what she wants to, 
 I agree to her doing it. The instances are so innumerable 
 where we have to say "no' ' that I feel we must be on our 
 guard against increasing them unnecessarily. This is not 
 the same thing as giving in to a girl because she teases or 
 insists on having her own way. 
 
 When Maria was troublesome, her guardian 
 discriminated between the trouble that she 
 caused and the real delinquency of which she 
 had been, but was no longer, guilty. Her appeal 
 was constantly to the girl's self-respect and am- 
 bition, though not so much in set terms as in 
 acts which would stimulate these qualities. The 
 society had Maria's earlier trials, in nyndNvhen 
 38 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK IN BEING 
 
 it allowed her a little more pocket-money than 
 was granted to some of its other charges. Her 
 clothes were never satisjactory to her; after a 
 few months she tired of every purchase, no 
 matter how much it pleased her at first. At one 
 time the question of clothing versus schooling 
 became so acute that she was given permission 
 to leave school and take a short course which 
 would fit her for office work. But when the girl 
 actually realized that the break with school 
 would be permanent, she changed her mind and 
 asked permission to remain. 
 
 One day Maria received a circular from a 
 distant city offering, through a course of lessons 
 by mail, to give her a perfect speaking and sing- 
 ing voice. The fee was #50. She applied at once 
 to her guardian for the loan of the money, and 
 was told that the next time they were both in 
 the city they could consult some one whose 
 knowledge of music would make him a good 
 judge of the value of the offer. A teacher at a 
 good music school was asked to test her voice 
 and give an opinion of the plan. When Maria 
 heard the small, wavering sounds that she made 
 39 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 in trying to sing to the master, even she was 
 convinced that the correspondence course was 
 not worth considering. 
 
 Another way in which arbitrariness was 
 avoided by this case worker was to assume no 
 superhuman perfection in herself. She did not 
 insist upon her own infallibility in homely mat- 
 ters any more than she had in musical ones. 
 Thus she writes : 
 
 I can remember speaking to Maria about mending her 
 clothes, particularly her stockings, and becoming con- 
 scious at the moment of a long rent in my own stocking, 
 which I had torn that morning in putting it on and had 
 not had time to change. I laughed and showed the rent to 
 the girl, and spoke of my own difficulty in living up to my 
 ideals when pressed by work. From what she afterward 
 said about this to some one else I know that I carried my 
 point with more effect by this admission. 
 
 Closely related to this habit of introducing an 
 element of give and take even into her admoni- 
 tions, and bringing to mind Miss Sullivan's 
 policy, was the case worker's determination to be 
 honest and frank to give the real reason for a 
 decision wherever this was possible. 
 40 
 

 SOCIAL CASE WORK IN BEING 
 
 Maria questioned me one day in my earlier contacts 
 with her about her trips to the hospital for treatment. I 
 told her about syphilis, about the fact that the hospital 
 had never been willing to state whether her case was con- 
 genital or acquired in very early infancy. I stated that 
 the usual causes of syphilis were promiscuity and ex- 
 posure to an infected person, and also spoke of the pos- 
 sibility of accidental infection. 
 
 This habit of giving the true answer to ques- 
 tions did not mean that the guardian always told 
 all she knew as soon as she knew it. On the con- 
 trary, she found that Maria's respect increased 
 for her when she proved to be hard to deceive, 
 when she was able occasionally to surprise her 
 charge by a piece of information supposed to be 
 undiscovered. To give all the freedom that by 
 any chance her ward could make right use of, 
 but to give this freedom under such conditions 
 that she herself could get a pretty clear idea of 
 what that use was, had proved the best policy. 
 At one time, for instance, a young Pole appeared 
 on the scene whom Maria threatened to marry 
 unless she could have a new hat at once. By a 
 judicious arrangement with her employer cover- 
 ing permitted calls and attentions from this 
 41 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 young man, and by providing clothing in due 
 season and not before, the small crisis was suc- 
 cessfully passed. 
 
 This case worker's wise handling of Maria, 
 however, all comes back to the gift of imaginative 
 sympathy, such as was shown when she sent one 
 of the girl's class compositions to a periodical 
 for young people. The composition was ac- 
 cepted by the editor with a small payment in 
 return, and its acceptance meant a great deal 
 to the young writer. 
 
 One cannot help wondering what Maria would 
 be like today if the court had treated the fact 
 of larceny in a merely routine way, without 
 taking into account the social background 
 brought to light by the probation officer, and 
 had pronounced the usual sentence for that 
 particular offense. A very different girl would 
 now be crossing the threshold into womanhood 
 untruthful, hard, perhaps depraved. As it is, 
 she faces the future with the advantages of a 
 high school education, with good health, an at- 
 tractive personality, and a number of real friends 
 who trust her. She is not a perfect mortal, of 
 42 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK IN BEING 
 
 course; she is still somewhat restless at times, 
 still magnifies the importance of trifles, and is 
 still too fond of finery. But on the whole her 
 sense of values is an adjusted sense; her ideas 
 are no longer confused and unreasonable. 
 
 GEORGE FOSTER 
 
 A young American, little George Foster, had 
 been placed with his sister in an institution for 
 children and then had been returned to his 
 parents no less than four times in five years. 
 Even under favorable circumstances these re- 
 peated changes of environment are bad for chil- 
 dren, but the home to which George and his 
 sister went back was not really a home at all. 
 The father was a drunken bully who worked 
 irregularly; the mother was promiscuous sex- 
 ually; the pair were not even married. When 
 they quarreled and fought, as they often did, 
 children and household were neglected. 
 
 Finally, acting upon a request from the local 
 overseer of the poor, a child-placing society 
 which had its headquarters many miles away 
 43 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 from the Foster family undertook to find a free 
 home for both children.* 
 
 In selecting such a home, the family's reason 
 for wanting a child and their plans for his edu- 
 cation and future are very carefully gone into 
 by the case workers of the society, who also 
 study the make-up of the household, the char- 
 acteristics and health of each member, and the 
 relation of each to all the others. The family 
 finances have to be known, the physical char- 
 acteristics and surroundings of the home, to- 
 gether with the family's standing in their neigh- 
 borhood and community, and their church 
 affiliations. In fact, the study of a home about 
 to receive a child calls for no small degree of 
 social experience. Good placement usually pro- 
 vides a dependent child without even one re- 
 sponsible parent with the best possible chance of 
 
 * A "free home" is one in a private family, where the 
 placed-out child becomes a member of the household 
 whether or not its legal adoption is contemplated ; the term 
 distinguishes this type of home from a "boarding home," 
 where the family receives compensation for the child's 
 care, and from "working homes," such as the households in 
 which Maria Bielowski lived while she attended school. 
 
 44 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK IN BEING 
 
 well-being and development, whereas careless, un- 
 intelligent placement gives him no chance at all. 
 The first placement of the Foster children was 
 not wholly successful. It was with plain farmer 
 folk. The farmer's wife was not in good health, 
 and the care of two children might have been a 
 burden to her under any circumstances, though 
 the chief difficulty was in the relation of the two 
 children to one another. Following the practice 
 of their parents, perhaps, they quarreled con- 
 tinually, thus bringing out each other's worst 
 qualities and irritating their foster mother. 
 George was nine at this time, an affectionate 
 but high-tempered child, whereas his sister, 
 nearly three years his senior, had all the char- 
 acteristics of a self-assertive, middle-aged gossip. 
 Consequently, after several visits by the so- 
 ciety's agent to the farm and to the nearby 
 school that the children attended, it was decided 
 to remove both children and place them separ- 
 ately. This latter decision was not made lightly ; 
 it was contrary to the society's usual policy. 
 From this point George's story is the only one 
 that I shall attempt to follow. He was deeply 
 45 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 distressed at the thought of leaving the farm, 
 but the visitor encouraged him to talk about all 
 the things he had enjoyed there the hay mak- 
 ing, the chickens, the garden and made him 
 realize that he was not parting with these pleas- 
 ures for good. 
 
 At this time George was brought to the city 
 in which the children's society had its head- 
 quarters, and advantage was taken of this op- 
 portunity to stucly_the child's needs more care- 
 fully than had been possible earlier. He was 
 given a thorough physical and mental testing 
 and was found to have good^ native capacity. 
 At a temporary home where the child was placed 
 under expert observation for a while, he was 
 reported to have a stubborn streak, but "when 
 he once understands that he can gain nothing 
 by his bad temper, he will be a very sweet, 
 attractive little boy. . . . He is happy 
 most of the time, and gets over his 'bad times' 
 much more quickly than he did at first." 
 
 In a few months it was felt by the society 
 that George was ready for another free home. 
 This time an application had come from a child- 
 
 4 6 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK IN BEING 
 
 less couple living in the outskirts of a small 
 town, who had adopted a boy of seven and 
 wished to take another somewhat older. On 
 visiting this home the society's field agent was 
 careful to keep in mind the adopted child's 
 probable attitude toward a foster brother. 
 She also visited fellow- townsmen given as 
 references, and, when these proved satisfactory, 
 gave the family a chance to make a tentative 
 choice among several available boys whose 
 pictures she was able to show. George's picture 
 was the one selected, and further details about 
 him were sent by mail. Soon he was established 
 in this new home. In the case worker's visits 
 to him there she gave each of his foster parents 
 ample opportunity to talk over recent develop- 
 ments and difficulties, and afterwards saw George 
 separately and visited his school. During all 
 these visits there were adjustments to be made 
 between George and the adopted child and 
 between George and his foster father. 
 
 This was in the influenza year. The boy had 
 a bad attack of the disease, which left him with 
 a cough and tubercular infection. The society's 
 47 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 field wQrker repeatedly visited his doctor during 
 this time. Gradually the condition in George's 
 lungs cleared up. Meanwhile, his foster parents, 
 though good to him, began to feel, for financial 
 and other reasons, that the care being given to 
 this second boy prevented their doing all that 
 they wished to do for their adopted son, and 
 once again it became necessary for the society 
 to uproot their young charge. Allowing for 
 the many changes, he had done fairly well in 
 school. By the time he was twelve he had made 
 the fifth grade. 
 
 The third free home has proved a much hap- 
 pier place for George Foster than any he has 
 yet known in his brief but somewhat stormy 
 career. He has lived for more than a year now 
 in the family of a professional man in which 
 there are several young people but no other chil- 
 dren. At first they thought they could not keep 
 him; he was not always respectful to his elders 
 and was not doing well in school. But he was 
 old enough to be reasoned with and, in an ad- 
 mirable interview with him, the case worker 
 succeeded in taking him into partnership in the 
 
 4 8 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK IN BEING 
 
 task of straightening out his relations both with 
 the members of the household and with his 
 teachers. Meanwhile, the family were persuaded 
 to adopt less exacting standards of what a boy of 
 twelve should be expected to enjoy in the matter 
 of improving literature. Ever since this pivotal 
 visit there has been steady improvement in 
 George's behavior and enhanced appreciation 
 on the part of his foster parents of his good 
 points. His health is now excellent. He seems 
 to have a special aptitude for music, and recently 
 has been taking music lessons. 
 
 49 
 
Ill 
 
 SOCIAL CASE WORK IN BEING 
 (Continued) 
 
 'HpHE illustrations given in the preceding 
 * chapter are of case work confined to one 
 individual. It was necessary, of course, to win 
 the co-operation of the families in which Maria 
 Bielowski and George Foster were placed, and 
 it was necessary during treatment to utilize the 
 skill of experts of various kinds, but Maria was 
 removed from her own home and did not return 
 to it, while not only was George permanently 
 separated from his own people but, when he 
 and his sister could not agree, he was placed in a 
 separate home. The case workers whose services 
 have been described in these two instances had 
 many other tasks and other clients to deal with, 
 but each had only one client in the two cases 
 under review. The narratives that follow 
 illustrate, in each instance, the treatment of two 
 50 
 
 
? 
 
 SOCIAL CASE WORK IN BEING 
 
 or more clients instead of one, and their treat- 
 ment in relation to one another. 
 
 MR. AND MRS. RUPERT YOUNG 
 
 Six years ago, the Rupert Youngs, a married 
 couple of twenty-five and twenty with a child of 
 less than two years, lived in a crowded western 
 city containing many social agencies. They were 
 referred to a district secretary of the local family 
 welfare society. In contrast with Miss Sullivan's 
 sole charge, the staff of this district office was 
 responsible that year for the social treatment of 
 more than four hundred families.* 
 
 Though the district was in the heart of a city 
 growing rapidly, its own population was decreas- 
 ing. At the time of which I write the neighbor- 
 hood contained many saloons and employed cas- 
 ual labor chiefly. 
 
 One day a Protestant church worker tele- 
 
 * These are figures of a panic year. The secretary had at 
 that time four assistant case workers and a dietitian, but 
 much better case work was possible after the industrial de- 
 pression receded and the yearly totals of the office had 
 fallen, as they did before the war was over, to a little over 
 two hundred families. 
 
 51 
 
 ft 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 phoned that Mrs. Young was having trouble with 
 her husband. A visitor was sent a man who 
 found the family evicted for nonpayment of rent, 
 all their furniture taken by an instalment dealer 
 because a third of it had not been paid for, Mrs. 
 Young and her little girl staying with her mother 
 temporarily, and Mr. Young, badly unnerved by 
 the after-effects of a drunken spree, sleeping at 
 night in a stable. The visilor arranged for Mrs. 
 Young to have a private talk with the district 
 secretary at her office the next day, and for the 
 husband to do the same at a later hour. 
 
 In this office interview the wife, who was three 
 months pregnant, seemed quite unequal to meet- 
 ing the crisis in her affairs. Her relatives and 
 friends had advised her to have nothing more to 
 do with her husband and to take court action 
 against him. She was given every chance to tell 
 her side of the story, and it was explained to her 
 that the secretary wished to hear the man's side 
 also. 
 
 When Young arrived he was in a repentant 
 mood ; he admitted the drink, admitted striking 
 Hilda, his wife, but claimed in extenuation that 
 52 
 
 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK IN BEING 
 
 everybody's hand was against him and that 
 Hilda nagged him. He agreed, in answer to ques- 
 tions, that he had a good wife who kept a good 
 home, that he loved and was proud of his child, 
 but, though acknowledging that the fundamental 
 trouble was with himself, complained that his 
 mother-in-law was partly to blame. He was 
 given money with which to buy his supper and 
 breakfast, also a letter to a doctor asking for a 
 physical examination, and was told to report at 
 the public non-support bureau the following 
 morning, where Mrs. Young and the district 
 secretary would meet him. Young, who was a 
 Catholic, arrived with a pledge of total absti- 
 nence taken before a priest. (This was his own. 
 idea.) The program agreed upon at that con- 
 ference was as follows : (i) That the husband and 
 wife should stay apart for a while; (2) that Mrs. 
 Young and her little girl should have a month's 
 rest in the country; (3) that Young (reported by 
 the doctor to be suffering from nothing but over- 
 stimulation) should, if possible, be sent away 
 from home for a few weeks ; (4) that both should 
 stop discussing their domestic difficulties with 
 53 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 the "in-laws" on both sides of the house or with 
 any one save the secretary; (5) that Mrs. Young 
 should avoid getting into arguments with her 
 husband. This was a failing of hers. 
 
 In less than twenty-four hours, agreements (4) 
 and (5) had both been broken by Mrs. Young, 
 and as for Young, his mind ran along "unrea- 
 sonable paths," catching on such small points as 
 his fear that his wife would not write to him 
 while she was in the country. He was given work 
 at washing the office windows that day ; care was 
 taken to see that he had ample food, and a 
 further medical examination was arranged for, 
 this time at a mental clinic. Here hot and cold 
 baths were recommended, with no drink, liquid 
 diet, and tobacco in moderation. Delirium 
 tremens was feared at first but it did not develop, 
 and in less than two weeks the district office had 
 secured his admission to a country home for 
 inebriates in another state. Mrs. Young had 
 promised that she would write nothing in her let- 
 ters to him that would lead to further arguments. 
 Soon he was cutting down pine trees on the farm 
 of the Home and writing that he "could lick 
 54 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK IN BEING 
 
 Wilard the Champian of the World." Frequent 
 letters to him from the district office seemed to be 
 a necessary part of his treatment. As the effects 
 of the alcohol wore off, it became evident that 
 Rupert was a temperamental individual of al- 
 most chil dlike af ectk>nateness r easily led, but 
 with little stability. In other words, drink was 
 not his only difficulty. Some who read his record 
 a year later felt that he should have been labelled 
 "feeble-minded," but the Mental Clinic did not 
 make that term a part of their diagnosis, and 
 probably it is just as well that they did not. He 
 sent several boxes of flowers to the district office. 
 If they were not acknowledged instantly he 
 would be much distressed. "Howe did your 
 mother like them," he wrote to the district secre- 
 tary; "i bet she was tickled to death with 
 them." 
 
 Two months after the troubles of the Youngs 
 had been reported to the family society they were 
 back in town, a good part of their furniture had 
 been reclaimed from the dealer without further 
 payment, a small home had been established, and 
 Rupert was at work on a temporary job. A little 
 55 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 later he returned to his regular employment of 
 driving a team. The social case record of earlier 
 days would have ended at this point with, per- 
 haps, the following description of the home added : 
 
 Mrs. Young and [her little daughterl at home. Front 
 room had been fixed up with some old prints, one or two 
 runner rugs, and a few other things that made it appear 
 homelike. The kitchen also had a strong home atmos- 
 phere. The wash tubs had been painted by Mr. Young. 
 The dish cupboard .... was full of shining dishes 
 
 Mr. Young came in, it being lunch hour, 
 
 carrying a load of wood on his shoulder. He showed a 
 good deal of pride in what his wife had accomplished in 
 the way of making the house look like home, and also in 
 his own handiwork as a painter. 
 
 As a matter of fact, however, social treatment 
 had only begun. A number of difficulties were 
 yet to be overcome, some minor and some funda- 
 mental. The difference in background and in 
 religion between the two sets of relatives 
 Young's were Irish-American and Catholic, while 
 Hilda's were German-American and Protestant; 
 the habit some of his relatives indulged in of 
 tempting him to drink; her tendency to argue 
 and scold were factors to be kept in mind. A 
 
 56 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK IN BEING 
 
 week after the home had been re-established 
 Hilda had to be reminded that the only way to 
 get on in married life was to overlook little things 
 and to co-operate. At the birth of the second 
 child Hilda would not go to a hospital nor would 
 she have a doctor at home, preferring to make 
 her own arrangements with a midwife. This 
 preference was costly later, for to it may be 
 traced the ill health that followed. 
 
 Most serious, however, was Rupert's irrespon- 
 sibility in a number of small ways. He was in- 
 definite in his statements and lax in meeting 
 obligations, easily slipping from under them, 
 sometimes with an untruth. When the second 
 baby came he insisted upon staying at home for 
 more than a week, and in consequence lost a 
 steady job. The district secretary records: 
 
 Mr. Young has still not been to work. Makes all sorts 
 of excuses .... though we were willing to see that 
 the necessary help was provided [to care for his wife] . In 
 his boyish, inconsequential way he tries to play up what a 
 wonderful family man he is. He has used this illness [of 
 his wife's] to take a little rest himself, and shows he has a 
 long way to go yet before he has any real, keen sense of 
 responsibility. 
 
 57 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 Of the methods used to overcome these char- 
 acter defects, the first was frie ndly talks with 
 Rupert at frequent intervals. The district secre- 
 tary's prompt service when family affairs had 
 been at their worst gave her a strong influence 
 over him. He was still more or less unstable as 
 time went on, but he hated to displease her. The 
 second method was to develop and make the 
 most olhis affection for his family and his home. 
 He was not allowed to forget the health program 
 mapped out for him, including the baths, but the 
 chief reliance of the social workers interested was 
 to keep the home in the foreground. When 
 bickerings were uppermost, husband and wife 
 lived only in an irritated present in which every- 
 thing was wrong, but when they compared notes 
 about their first-born, they at once began to look 
 to the future and to agree that their little girl 
 was not only .he prettiest child in the neighbor- 
 hood but that she must have the prettiest clothes 
 and the best education. The district secretary 
 took a snapshot picture of the child and had it 
 enlarged and framed for her to give to her father. 
 Meanwhile, Hilda made gains, acquiring more 
 
 58 
 
f # 
 
 SOCIAL CASE WORK IN BEING 
 
 self-control and becoming the real head of the 
 household. Rupert's proudest boast was that he 
 no longer argued with his mother -in-law. 
 
 Within the last six years the Youngs have 
 passed through two other crises without a break 
 in their home life the baby was killed in an acci- 
 dent, and for a while Hilda was in very poor 
 health. During the first of these crises the dis- 
 trict secretary was with them a great deal; be- 
 fore the second she had gone to another city to 
 live, and, save for a visit at very long intervals, 
 knows their affairs now only through occasional 
 correspondence. Rupert has not always kept his 
 pledge, but has never slipped back to the old 
 state of demoralization. At the present writing 
 they are holding their gains ; he has steady work, 
 and the home is now one of four rooms instead of 
 two. 
 
 CLARA VANSCA AND HER CHILDREN 
 
 Clara Vansca kept a filthy, vermin-infested 
 home, supported partly by begging, partly by the 
 earnings of a drinking husband. When the fam- 
 ily welfare society one in an eastern city this 
 59 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 time first made her acquaintance ten years ago, 
 she was sending the older of her two children, a 
 girl of eight, to the city dump to collect iron and 
 scraps. These she sold for drink. Three years 
 later her husband was placed in an insane asylum 
 where, save for one very brief interval, he has 
 been ever since. After Vansca's commitment his 
 wife begged more than ever, going on these expe- 
 ditions after dark and usually taking the children 
 with her. She told a pitiful story, most of it 
 true, and always asked for work but never took 
 any of the places offered to her. At this time all 
 attempts to induce her to stop drinking and to aid 
 her to care for her home and the two little girls 
 were without avail. She seemed genuinely fond 
 of them but they were shamefully neglected. 
 At last, through a child-protective agency, both 
 children were placed by the court in a Catholic 
 institution, and their mother was induced by the 
 family society already mentioned to go volun- 
 tarily to a convent. 
 
 It was at this point that the social case treat- 
 ment of Mrs. Vansca may be said to have begun. 
 Undertaken by A. B., the district assistant in the 
 60 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK IN BEING 
 
 family society, it has been carried forward by her 
 uninterruptedly ever since. 
 
 A. B. had discovered only one asset in the situa- 
 tion; namely, Mrs. Vang ca's fondn ess-for her 
 children. Building upon this she proposed to her 
 somewhat later the following plan: The home 
 could be re-established provided she did her best 
 to learn all that the Sisters at the convent tried 
 to teach her, and provided, further, that she 
 proved herself able later on to earn steadily in 
 the community when free from restraint. The 
 Sister Superior understood this plan and helped 
 to keep it before Mrs. Vansca as a goal to strive 
 toward. The Sister also reported to A. B. from 
 time to time upon the personajjcharacteristics of 
 her charge as they were revealed in the convent 
 day by day. Meanwhile, A. B. studied her 
 client's background more carefully than had been 
 possible before; and in the course of doing this 
 made the acquaintance of a group of relatives. 
 
 Clara Vansca was born in this country; her 
 parents had come to America from Lower Aus- 
 tria. The father died while she was still a little 
 child, and her mother, placing her in an institu- 
 61 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 tion, had married again but had died before 
 Clara was grown. Clara had several brothers, all 
 of whom had prospered; two who had married 
 were found to be maintainingxoiniortable work- 
 men's homes. This gave A. B. more faith in her 
 client's physical and social inheritance; evidently 
 the family came of good stock and had good 
 traditions. But their attitude toward this sister 
 had been one of impatient disapproval. By her 
 waywardness before her marriage and her con- 
 duct since, they felt that she had disgraced them. 
 As a child she had not had the influence of a 
 home, and later attempts to discipline her had 
 not been happy (one brother had whipped her 
 when she was well grown) ; later still the family 
 had all disowned her. 
 
 One result of A. B.'s visits to Mrs. Vansca's 
 people was to renew, theii; interest in their sister. 
 In fact, one of the married brothers offered to 
 give her and her children a home as soon as she 
 was ready to leave the convent. But A. B. rea- 
 lized the long struggle ahead and did not act upon 
 this proposal. She felt that, with the best of in- 
 tentions, the brothers and their wives, lacking 
 62 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK IN BEING 
 
 the experience to deal with so difficult a problem, 
 would be impatient with her client and perhaps 
 spoil everything, though at a later stage in treat- 
 ment their sympathy and interest could probably 
 be utilized fully. 
 
 When, at the end_oi ^ year, A. B. had found 
 suitable work for Mrs. Vansca outside the con- 
 vent, her first care was to see that her client 
 looked presentable and that she was in good 
 physical condition. Her teeth were given thor- 
 ough attention and the scarf that she had worn 
 over her head habitually was replaced by a hat 
 a symbol, as it were, of her changed estate. Her 
 wa ges w ere to be paid toJt^B., who was to save 
 them toward the furnishijig^of the new home. At 
 the end of sixunpre months, amid great rejoicing, 
 the two little girls were taken out of the orphan- 
 age and the home was re-established. 
 
 The succeeding year was a difficult one for the 
 family and for A. B. The latter arranged with 
 the district office that, no matter where she 
 might be, if a telephone message came from Mrs. 
 Vansca's landlady that her tenant was drinking 
 again, she was to be notified at once. Night or 
 
 63 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 clay, no matter what she was doing, she hastened 
 to her tempted client. One night in zero weather 
 they walked the streets together for a long time 
 so that Mrs. Vansca might be sober enough to 
 work the next day. 
 
 The turning point came when the sixth place 
 of employment had to be found for this client 
 within the year. Her work had been well done, 
 thanks to the convent training, but some days 
 she had come late and other days had not come 
 at all. A. B. made it clear that failure in this 
 sixth place would mean the loss of the children 
 again. She must no longer borrow money from 
 employers or fellow-workers, and she must let 
 her wages be sent to A. B. to be expended for her 
 benefit. This arrangement was modified on Mrs. 
 Vansca's promise to deliver the pay envelope her- 
 self, and with a few slips she did this for several 
 years, giving up her wages intact. The sixth em- 
 ployer proved forgiving and helpful. He was 
 often in communication with A. B., and together 
 they were able to reduce the frequency of his 
 employe's lapses. She is still working at this 
 
 6 4 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK IN BEING 
 
 same place, where she particularly enjoys the 
 comradeship of her fellow- workers. 
 
 To return, however, to the earlier years of 
 treatment, everything was done by A. B. to en- 
 courage the home instinct, strong in Mrs. Vansca, 
 but overlaid for a long while by her early institu- 
 tional experiences and by the unhappy outcome 
 of her married life. She had certain half-days at 
 home from her work, and took pleasure in teach- 
 ing the children to make the embroidery which 
 she had learned to do so well in the convent. An 
 expert seamstress voluntarily gave the children 
 home lessons every other week in sewing and in 
 cutting out garments. Later, a dietitian gave 
 both children and mother cooking lessons at 
 home. Mrs. Vansca was encouraged to make her 
 rooms clean and attractive, and to keep the chil- 
 dren in excellent physical condition and well 
 dressed. This last she dearly loved to do. 
 
 Then the relatives, who could not be given an 
 important part earlier, were shown the wonder- 
 ful improvement in mother and children. Their 
 faith in Clara having been re-established, they 
 were asked to see much of the children, besides 
 5 65 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 being urged to exchange visits with the mother 
 on equal terms. It was on equal terms that the 
 family connection met in the church of which all 
 were regular attendants. The relatives have been 
 helpful in many ways, but a suggestion made by 
 one of the brothers has had to be set aside. He 
 has recently bought a farm and wants to bring 
 Vansca home from the asylum and to have the 
 whole Vansca family help run the place. 
 
 Close watch has had to be kept of the children's 
 school records. Although neither is a very good 
 student, both are at least able to help their 
 mother prepare the itemized account of her 
 household expenses a task beyond her, unaided. 
 
 A. B. became so good a friend that she could 
 talk to Mrs. Vansca freely about her occasional 
 lapses and, when the family had to move, could 
 say, "Remember that you are going into a new 
 neighborhood where no one knows of your former 
 habits. Here is an opportunity to earn every 
 one's respect." Every one's respect became a 
 precious possession as the children began to grow 
 up. Rosa, the elder of the two, is a good-looking 
 girl, and Mrs. Vansca has become more than ever 
 66 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK IN BEING 
 
 a mother since the lads of the neighborhood have 
 been paying court to her daughter. A. B. attrib- 
 utes the complete cessation of the mother's 
 drinking to this new senses-responsibility. For 
 three years she has been perfectly sober. 
 
 During Rosa's last years at school the girl did 
 light work at service out of school hours and was 
 taught how to spend her earnings and how to 
 save them. When at last she had $300 in the 
 bank, she was encouraged to look ahead and try 
 to make it $500, though she was also encouraged 
 to take some of the burden off of her mother's 
 shoulders by paying for her younger sister's 
 clothes. Mother and daughter now earn about 
 $90 a month, over and above Rosa's board, and 
 as soon as there are $500 in the bank, Rosa plans 
 to begin buying a home for the three of them. 
 
 If this account seems to emphasize the mate- 
 rial gains the fact that Mrs. Vansca has held 
 one part-time position for between six and seven 
 years, the savings, the long process of teaching 
 her to spend her earnings wisely, the prospect of 
 buying a home, and so on there are neverthe- 
 less other gains, some of them even more impor- 
 
 67 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 tant. There have been camping experiences for 
 Rosa, trips to the seashore for all the family, and 
 occasional picnics. When Rosa was graduated 
 and wore the white gown made with her own 
 hands to the house of her admiring relatives, her 
 mother's cup ran over. There have been spirit- 
 ual gains of the greatest significance that are not 
 so easy to illustrate. The church now holds an 
 important place in the family life; and Mrs. 
 Vansca, often secretive and untrustworthy in the 
 old days, has become franker, more cheerful, 
 more dependable. Some time ago, following an 
 old habit, she said to A. B., "You may ask Mrs. 
 So-and-so if what I say is not true." To which it 
 was possible for A. B. to reply, "Never ask me to 
 verify anything you tell me again. I trust you 
 absolutely." 
 
 WINIFRED JONES AND HER CHILDREN 
 
 In contrast to Clara Vansca, the subject of my 
 next illustration, Winifred Jones, a widow in her 
 forties with five children, came of stock that had 
 been in America for generations back. Her peo- 
 ple had been substantial farmer folk in the Mid- 
 68 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK IN BEING 
 
 die West who had removed later to the nearest 
 large city, where Winifred's mother had died 
 when she was only ten years old. After the death 
 of her mother her home was not a happy one. 
 The father was a narrow, exacting man, who 
 frowned upon any recreation for his four boys and 
 girls. Her oldest sister married early, leaving 
 Winifred in charge of the household. Then the 
 father married again and, resenting this change, 
 the young housekeeper also married in her turn 
 to get away from uncongenial surroundings, 
 though her new home proved even more unhappy 
 than the. early one. 
 
 Thomas Jones, her husband, was a mechanic. 
 He drank, went with other women, was mean at 
 home in money matters, and lacked interest in 
 the proper care and training of his children. 
 The home became more and more disorderly, the 
 children less obedient, and their mother more 
 shiftless in her ways. Meanwhile, Mrs. Jones's 
 own people, grown impatient, ceased to visit or 
 to have anything whatever to do with her. 
 
 Whenever an added stroke of misfortune over- 
 took the Joneses, and it often did as the years 
 69 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 passed, some social agency the hospital, the 
 church mission, the family welfare society, or the 
 society to protect children from cruelty was 
 called in. Each paid little or no attention to 
 , back history and much attention to the dirt and 
 confusion amid which the dazed mother sat idle. 
 The corner grocer assured each successive visitor 
 that Mrs. Jones would always be the same a 
 point of view with which they sympathized. No 
 active steps had been taken, however, to break 
 up the home and to give separate care to its mem- 
 bers. Its condition was unchanged when Jones 
 died less than two years ago. 
 
 Too short a period has elapsed since the father's 
 death to speak with certainty of the results 
 achieved, but I tell the story here, though nec- 
 essarily briefly, not only for the contrast it shows 
 between the earlier and later approaches of social 
 agencies to a puzzling situation, but because it 
 illustrates a social worker's skill in reknitting 
 family ties that had long been broken. 
 
 The family welfare society had cared for the 
 Joneses throughout the father's prolonged illness 
 in a hospital. After his death it became necessary 
 70 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK IN BEING 
 
 to make some plan for the future. There were 
 local reasons why no widow's allowance from 
 public funds could be had. Aside from this, how- 
 ever, should the home be broken up as a protec- 
 tive measure or should the mother be encouraged 
 to keep it together? No one had at that time any 
 clear picture of Mrs. Jones's past she was reti- 
 cent about her relatives, and little or nothing 
 was known about them but the social workers 
 who had visited the home knew that Mrs. Jones 
 and her children often slept very late, that there 
 were no regular meal hours, that soiled cloth- 
 ing accumulated, that the dishes remained un- 
 washed, and that the children were not only run- 
 ning wild but were always fighting among them- 
 selves and always disrespectful to their mother. 
 Mrs. Jones said that she had not been on the 
 main street of her native city since her marriage 
 twenty years before. She had no known bad 
 habits, was fond of her children, apparently, and 
 they of her, but when there was much to be done 
 she would sit with her hands folded, and when 
 some one talked with her would seem to lose the 
 drift of the conversation at times and then with 
 71 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 difficulty bring her mind back later to the sub- 
 ject in hand. 
 
 The first attempt to get behind present symp- 
 toms was not very successful. An examining 
 specialist reported that Mrs. Jones was a moron 
 with a mental age of eleven years and eight 
 months, and advised that the children be removed 
 from her care. It is not possible to be sure, but 
 very likely this advice of the examiner was based 
 partly upon reports by social workers of the con- 
 ditions they found in the home. 
 
 As the death of Mr. Jones might influence his 
 wife's attitude toward life for the better, and as 
 no thorough social treatment had yet been given 
 a fair trial, the family welfare society decided 
 that this was no time to take the momentous step 
 of breaking up the home and separating its mem- 
 bers. The social case worker representing the 
 society adopted instead and simultaneously two 
 courses of action: first, on the assumption that 
 not all of Mrs. Jones's trouble was congenital, a 
 quiet search for the cause or causes of her inade- 
 quacy ; second, an active program of stimulation 
 and encouragement to discover how far each 
 72 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK IN BEING 
 
 member of the family would respond to better 
 physical conditions and more regular resources. 
 This program demanded a deep friendly interest 
 in their affairs, the introduction into the home of 
 those social contacts and recreational good times 
 from which mother and children had been so 
 completely cut off, and, added to these other 
 items, direct but patient suggestion which should 
 lead, if possible, to re-education of daily habit 
 for each member of the family. A regular weekly 
 allowance upon which Mrs. Jones could count 
 would not solve her or the children's troubles 
 the family dislocation was too serious for that 
 but such an allowance would be a necessary ad- 
 junct to other services on their behalf, and this 
 was obtained from special funds. 
 
 The interest of a young man who knew a great 
 deal about boys was enlisted at this stage. In 
 repeated visits he found that the two Jones boys, 
 aged twelve and ten, were "running loose," but 
 they did not impress him as hard. The problem, 
 he felt, was to supply them with wholesome 
 amusements and interests and, at the same time, 
 help them to acquire some regular habits of eat- 
 73 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 ing, sleeping, studying, and playing. The idea 
 of regular meal times was one that the social 
 worker was trying at this same period to impress 
 upon their mother. While the social worker was 
 giving the boys occasional help with their lessons 
 and carefully following the school reports of all 
 the children each month, this young man visitor, 
 for whom they developed great admiration, took 
 them to selected movies, to the museum of nat- 
 ural history, to the park, and saw that the 
 younger boy, who was naturally studious, had 
 books he could enjoy. Country vacations were 
 arranged for all the members of the family that 
 year and the next. 
 
 Meanwhile, acting upon the advice of the doc- 
 tor who had made the mental examination, the 
 social worker saw that Mrs. Jones's teeth and 
 eyes had careful attention. As she had had some 
 difficulty in finding her way about the city, the 
 worker accompanied her on the repeated jour- 
 neys which had to be made to the dentist's, and 
 was careful to follow up these painful occasions 
 by some small pleasure. The health of the next 
 to the youngest child, a little girl of eight, also 
 74 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK IN BEING 
 
 needed attention. Her school record had been 
 poor; after necessary adenoid and tonsil opera- 
 tions it continued so. 
 
 The history of this social treatment neces- 
 sarily voluminous and detailed, for visits were 
 frequent and at different hours, including the 
 evening and early morning shows no tendency 
 on the part of the social worker to lose patience 
 or to push her client unduly. Pressure was 
 steady but gentle, with frequent repetitions of 
 each suggestion made. The attempt to help 
 Mrs. Jones in the management of her children 
 was especially difficult. Remembering her own 
 childhood and the strictness of her father, she 
 inclined to overindulgence. After one item of 
 household management had been mastered an- 
 other was brought forward, explained and re- 
 explained by the social worker, while at the same 
 time every nearer approach to normal conditions 
 was noted and made much of. The emphasis of 
 the record is upon assets throughout, not only in 
 the case worker's dealings with the family but in 
 her attempts to interest others in their welfare. 
 This has been notably true in her relations with 
 
 75 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 the relatives on both sides of the house, though 
 for some months the only helpful one discovered 
 had been a brother of Mrs. Jones. 
 
 The brother was interviewed soon after the 
 new plans of treatment had been launched. He 
 had not seen or heard from his sister for years 
 and did not wish to see her then, feeling sure 
 that they would quarrel. But he at once became 
 interested in the new program explained to him 
 and offered to bear a good share of the necessary 
 weekly allowance. There were frequent con- 
 ferences with this brother. Gradually he told 
 many details of Winifred's early home life which 
 gave the social worker a better understanding of 
 her drawbacks and possibilities. It came out, for 
 instance, that she had been studious as a child 
 and that the family conjecture at that time had 
 been that she would become a teacher. 
 
 Later, a sister of Mr. Jones was seen at her 
 home in a mill town. This sister's plan, made 
 soon after Jones died, had been to move Mrs. 
 Jones and her family near the mill and put the 
 older children at work there, including the two 
 school boys during vacation. This suggestion 
 
 76 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK IN BEING 
 
 had not been adopted, but after the social work- 
 er's visit friendly relations were re-established 
 between the families, and this sister has also been 
 a valuable source of information . Quite recently, 
 other relatives have been discovered, but thus 
 far Mrs. Jones's brother has continued to be the 
 most useful one. As he did not seem to wish to 
 see his sister this was not urged, but he was often 
 given a short account of the society's plans and 
 of the progress made, not omitting the interesting- 
 things that the young man visitor and the two 
 boys were doing together. One day, of his own 
 motion, he asked the social worker to take him to 
 pay a visit to his sister. Mrs. Jones had known, 
 of course, that he was helping her regularly, but 
 she valued this visit even more than his assist- 
 ance, for it meant the renewal of personal rela- 
 tions with one of her own people. It is difficult 
 to measure an influence so subtle, but she seems 
 to have shown a desire since then to live up to 
 what her brother knew that she once was. His 
 first visit was followed by many others. Soon the 
 brother began to make suggestions of his own 
 about the boys and the oldest girl, who was six- 
 77 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 teen and had begun to earn by this time. The 
 young man who had been visiting the boys was 
 forced by change of occupation to cease any regu- 
 lar visits, and this uncle took his place to some 
 extent. At Christmas time he spent Christmas 
 Eve with the family and, as his sister phrased it, 
 "was a real Santa Claus." After that he took 
 several of the children separately on shopping 
 expeditions, and when summer came, outfitted 
 the two boys handsomely for a camping trip. 
 
 The interest of all these friends was concen- 
 trated for a while upon making the Jones's living 
 room a possible place in which the family might 
 have a good time in the evening and to which the 
 children might invite their playmates. The friend 
 of the boys had arranged for the repapering of 
 the room, the social worker provided curtains and 
 a few pictures, and the brother had some of his 
 chairs re-upholstered for this new home center. 
 Here was a point at which the children's interests 
 and their mother's could be made one. The rec- 
 ord reads : V Mrs. Jones admitted that her oldest 
 boy had often asked to bring boy friends to the 
 house in the evening, but she had never felt like 
 78 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK IN BEING 
 
 bothering with them. We had a talk about the 
 pleasure of family life. She has never had the 
 real family idea, but seems willing to begin." 
 
 So much for the program of stimulation and 
 encouragement. But what of the causes of this 
 mental condition? for the social worker, in all 
 her contacts with her client and with those who 
 used to know her in other days, had kept this 
 query in mind. Mrs. Jones still has her periods 
 of absenj^naindedness, her mental processes are 
 still slow, but she has made gains in home man- 
 agement, in control of the children, and in gen- 
 eral cheerfulness. The neighbors who used to be 
 so pessimistic about the future of the Joneses 
 have remarked upon these changes. The mem- 
 bers of the family have all gained more affection 
 for the home and for one another. Their renewal 
 of contact with the world outside the home circle 
 has contributed to this result. But a great deal 
 still remains to be done. The need of the oldest 
 girl for better outside interests has not been sat- 
 isfactorily met, and the next to the youngest, who 
 had the tonsil operation, must have more spe- 
 cialized attention than she has yet received. Mrs. 
 79 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 Jones can now be described as a good mother but 
 not as a thoroughly competent one perhaps she 
 may never become so. As time has gone on, the 
 social worker has come to feel that the lacks of 
 her client are many of them accounted for by the 
 accumulating discouragements of years of neglect 
 and misunderstanding; in the earlier history, as 
 it has gradually been revealed, is contained the 
 key. The only remedy for the results of dis- 
 couragement is encouragement encouragement 
 given with how patient a hand and how discern- 
 ing an eye. 
 
 LUCIA ALLEGRI AND HER RELATIVES 
 
 Unlike the other clients of social agencies 
 whose circumstances are described in this and 
 the preceding chapter, Mrs. Lucia Allegri, a 
 Sicilian, has been known for less than a year to 
 the social worker now interested in her. It is not 
 my purpose, therefore, to tell more of her story 
 than is necessary to explain one episode in it 
 which will serve to illustrate the group, as con- 
 trasted with the individual, character of some 
 forms of social case treatment. I shall have occa- 
 80 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK IN BEING 
 
 sion to return to the subject of group treatment 
 in a later chapter.* 
 
 Mrs. Allegri's husband had earned good wages 
 before his death nine years ago at his home in an 
 American city situated on the border of one of the 
 Great Lakes. The ease and comfort in which his 
 wife had lived was believed by a friend of the 
 family to have been demonstrated when she ex- 
 plained that, during Allegri's lifetime, Mrs. Alle- 
 gri had had her own hairdresser. By contrast, 
 the visitor from the family welfare society found 
 her in damp, dark quarters with no food and 
 little fire; she had to communicate with her 
 through the only child living at home, for Mrs. 
 Allegri spoke no English. 
 
 As this client's story, with the help of visits to 
 her married son, to his wife's people, and to an 
 occasional reference elsewhere, was developed by 
 the social case worker it became two conflicting 
 stories. 
 
 The first version was as follows: All of Mrs. 
 Allegri's children had died early but three a son, 
 Paolo, who had aided his mother in every way 
 * See pages 138 to 143. 
 6 81 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 possible but who now had a wife and three chil- 
 dren to care for; a daughter, Antonina, who had 
 behaved most undutifully, and not many months 
 before had suddenly left her excellent position as 
 forewoman in a lace factory to marry and estab- 
 lish a home in a nearby town ; and Teresa, aged 
 eleven. Antonina was reported to show little 
 interest now in her mother and young sister in 
 fact, none of the relatives knew her address. 
 
 The second version, developed a little later 
 from sources outside the family, was that Mrs. 
 Allegri had four grown children instead of two; 
 that Paolo, no matter what his earnings or his re- 
 sponsibilities, had never at any time spent his 
 money upon his own people; and that Antonina, 
 far from shirking, had really been the mainstay 
 of the home from her thirteenth birthday until 
 very recently, when, to force two married broth- 
 ers and a married sister to come forward, she had 
 stopped helping regularly at the time of her mar- 
 riage, though still visiting her mother every 
 month. The older married daughter was said to 
 live in another nearby town. 
 
 Several visits up the lake to addresses given by 
 82 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK IN BEING 
 
 different relatives for Antonina yielded no trace 
 of her. Meanwhile, there could be no doubt that 
 Mrs. Allegri needed continued help, and that her 
 ignorance of American ways and of life as lived in 
 a large city was a standing temptation to her 
 alert, pleasure-loving, street-gadding youngest 
 daughter Teresa. The child was found to be ab- 
 sent from school nearly half the time and to be 
 going with undesirable companions. No matter 
 who should or should not shoulder the financial 
 burden, the present home surroundings were bad 
 for the mother's rheumatism and worse for the 
 child's morals. The only material assistance 
 given, therefore, was temporary relief, pending 
 agreement upon some better arrangement of the 
 family affairs. 
 
 There came some confirmation of story number 
 two when an older married daughter, Carmela, 
 and her husband were actually found in a neigh- 
 boring town. Carmela's husband was not pros- 
 perous, but he became very much interested in 
 the social worker's description of his mother-in- 
 law's situation and undertook to act upon a sug- 
 gestion made by the worker that he call a family 
 83 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 council at his own home upon the first conveni- 
 ent holiday, at which all could strive to clear up 
 the many conflicting accounts and agree upon 
 some plan for their mother and Teresa. 
 
 The concreteness of this idea must have ap- 
 pealed to the Allegri clan, for when the day 
 arrived and the family was assembled, all were 
 found to be there save the oldest son, who was 
 unknown to the social worker and who had been 
 described by his relatives as a vagabond. An- 
 tonina was there and her husband and one or two 
 other "in-laws," but the social worker was the 
 only outsider invited. To mark the importance 
 of the occasion, the place had been scrubbed as 
 for a festival and supper was served. 
 
 Mrs. Allegri was the first to arrive. Her own 
 share in the proceedings was to sit back in the 
 best chair, to object to every plan proposed by 
 her family, and to rock violently throughout. 
 Antonina, it was generally agreed, had done her 
 share and more always, but she expressed herself 
 as ready to bear half the expense of whatever 
 plan was agreed upon. As the talk continued 
 and every one had his full say, it seemed evident 
 
 8 4 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK IN BEING 
 
 that she and her husband, and Carmela, their 
 hostess, and her husband were the responsible 
 members of the group. It also developed that for 
 Mrs. Allegri to continue to live alone with her 
 youngest daughter was impossible; that, as the 
 mother grew more infirm, she would need the 
 affectionate care of an adult member of her 
 family; and that Teresa should now be super- 
 vised by the most Americanized of her relatives 
 by the one, that is, who could take the most in- 
 telligent interest in her schooling, her church re- 
 lations, and her recreation. Mrs. Allegri 's objec- 
 tions had to be considered and met, of course, 
 though usually the obstacles that seemed to her 
 insurmountable were trifles. At last it was ar- 
 ranged that she was to live with Carmela, the one 
 of all her children in closest sympathy with her, 
 and that Teresa was to go to Antonina's Amer- 
 ican home with its more modern appointments 
 and smarter ways. 
 
 Unfortunately, this arrangement let the two 
 sons off in a way that it should not, but the older 
 one, who had not appeared at the conference, had 
 always failed utterly, and Paolo had left the 
 
 85 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 family meeting in anger after the truth about his 
 backslidings came out. It was his wife's sister, 
 in fact, who had brought Mrs. Allegri's needs to 
 the attention of the family welfare society in the 
 first place, and had urged the society to assume 
 the full burden of support. 
 
 This same branch of the family had suppressed 
 the fact of the existence of the two other married 
 children, had concealed Antonina's whereabouts, 
 and had induced Mrs. Allegri to confirm their 
 various misstatements. 
 
 The r61e of the social worker at the conference 
 had been, for the most part, that of a listener and 
 observer. Toward the end, however, she had 
 tried to bring the discussion to a head by point- 
 ing out the many things upon which all were 
 agreed. The story does not end here; there 
 have been various ups and downs since, but with 
 the introduction of group thinking into Allegri 
 affairs, they took a long step forward. 
 
 86 
 
IV 
 SOCIAL CASE WORK DEFINED 
 
 ^T^HE tentative definition of social case work 
 * which I am about to attempt will have no 
 safer basis than my personal experience supple- 
 mented by a habit of reading many social case 
 histories. It would have been better, of course, 
 to deduce a definition from a large number of 
 cited instances, though such an elaborate back- 
 ground could still have been challenged ; proof of 
 its representative character would have been 
 necessary. 
 
 For this merely introductory description of 
 case work, however, I have adopted the policy of 
 exclusion, rejecting first of all and without ques- 
 tion all those aimless dosings of social ills by inex- 
 perienced practitioners which are called social 
 case work but have no relation to its theory or its 
 practice.* And for the present, at least, all short- 
 
 * To the social case worker who chafes under the task of 
 protecting his profession from the indignities it now suffers 
 at the hands of the inexpert and the self-seeking, there may 
 
 87 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 term services to individuals are excluded, such as 
 tiding them over a temporary period; of stress, 
 helping them to find some agency or some pro- 
 fessional skill which they know they need, giving 
 them advice upon a question which puzzles them, 
 and so on. All of these services have social value, 
 of course, but, without more follow-up work and 
 more detailed knowledge of their clients than 
 case workers engaged in this type of work usually 
 have, the permanent values cannot well be meas- 
 ured. I am reserving for consideration in a later 
 chapter* those supplementary forms of case 
 work which are now being utilized as adjuncts to 
 the skill of other professions ; supplementary, for 
 instance, to medical service in hospitals and dis- 
 pensaries, to mental examinations and treat- 
 ments in psychiatric clinics, and to class room 
 teaching in the elementary schools. Some medi- 
 
 be some consolation in the thought that practitioners of 
 other professions have shared the experience. Not so many 
 years ago a medical degree could still be bought in these 
 United States; and well into the nineteenth century many 
 of our states relied upon judges without legal ' " " ' " 
 
 the chief justice of Rhode Island was a fan; 
 
 * See Chapter IX. 
 
 88 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK DEFINED 
 
 cal social work of this adjunct type is quite as 
 intensive . tS could be wished, but to the extent 
 that many of its details are modified by medical 
 requirements, it becomes difficult to generalize 
 about it as social case work only, just as there 
 would be difficulties in illustrating psychiatry in 
 general by the work of a psychiatrist who was 
 an officer of a court, and therefore dealt with a 
 selected group under court supervision and statu- 
 tory control. In addition to avoiding, for pur- 
 poses of definition, the social work which is sub- 
 sidiary, it has been equally important to avoid 
 work which is restricted, by an arbitrary set of 
 rules or by the nature of its support, to certain 
 ways of proceeding. Neither "the dead hand" 
 nor the whims of living donors nor the restric- 
 tions put upon some public expenditures should 
 be allowed to cripple professional discovery and 
 development. 
 
 It follows that this stage in my description is 
 limited to skilled service in the first place, to 
 long-term, intensive care of difficult cases in the 
 second place, and to service rendered under rela- 
 tively^ unhampered, independent auspices in the 
 
 8 9 
 
WHAT IS SOGIAX CASE WORK? 
 
 third place. Concentration upon this group 
 should bring to light considerations of value to 
 social treatment in general, for it is treatment of 
 the intensive and long-continuing type which 
 provides us with criticism of all our processes 
 with the most searching criticism, in fact, that we 
 now have. It is easy to be pleased with the re- 
 sults of social service when we measure them just 
 after the first changes for the better, or when we 
 see them from one angle and no more. But when 
 we dare to examine them from the point of view 
 of life as a whole, with the permanent welfare of 
 the individual and of society in mind , we are ap- 
 plying a much severer test of values. 
 
 Let me, with such a test in mind, make the 
 broadest generalization about social case work 
 that I can. ! Its theories, its aims, its best intensive 
 practice all seem to have been converging of late 
 years toward one central idea; namely, toward 
 the development of personality, What does this 
 term imply when the social worker uses it? 
 
 A Scotch metaphysician of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury wrote, "When a man loses his estate, his 
 health, his strength, he is still the same person 
 90 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK DEFINED 
 
 and has lost nothing of his personality." Few 
 social workers would agree with the italicized 
 portion of this sentence. Loss of social status and 
 health, if at the same time it revealed untapped 
 resources within and without, might possibly 
 develop a man's personality, but could hardly 
 leave it unchanged. In fact, such losses cripple 
 personality far more often than they strengthen 
 it. If for personality Thomas Reid had substi- 
 tuted individuality, few would differ from him. 
 Without attempting any close analysis of the 
 many varied and technical uses of these two 
 words by biologists, psychologists, and others, 
 there is a serviceable distinction between them 
 which has long been recognized and one which 
 ought not to be lost sight of/ If we accept that 
 definition of individuality which limits it to "the 
 uniqueness of a living being, or its difference from 
 others of its kind and from the rest oKnature,"* 1 
 
 * Century Dictionary. In the sentences immediately 
 following I may seem to overemphasize the width of the 
 separation in meaning between "individuality" and "per- 
 sonality" by holding the use of the former to very narrow 
 limits. It did not seem wise, however, in so non-technical a 
 discussion to introduce the third word "temperament," 
 
 91 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 then personality is the far more inclusive term, 
 for it signifies not only all that is native and in- 
 dividual to a man but all that comes to him by 
 way of education, experience, and human inter- 
 course. Our physical heredity, our innate quali- 
 ties transmitted and unalterable are individual, 
 but all that portion of our social heritage and our 
 environment which we have been able in day by 
 day living to add to individuality and make a 
 part of ourselves is personal ; and the whole be- 
 comes our personality. 
 
 In other words, it is our personality which re- 
 lates us closely to our human kind ; not only to 
 the socius our brother, but to all the communities 
 and institutions he has developed. There is no 
 conflict between the idea of individual differ- 
 ences, about which I shall have something to say 
 later, and this complementary idea of relatedness. 
 Difference is as characteristic of personality as of 
 the tone colors in an orchestra, but the differ- 
 ences between personalities, no two of which are 
 alike, also resemble those of orchestral instru- 
 
 now often used by psychologists for innate make-up, but 
 having a different connotation for the general reader. 
 
 92 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK DEFINED 
 
 ments in that they are attuned and related dif- 
 ferences. While a man's individuality-does not 
 
 change, his pprsnnfljjry, which inr1uck>s-hnth his 
 
 native and acquired^ualitievis-forever chang- 
 ing. If it does not expand and grow from day to 
 day by full exercise of function, it contracts and 
 even atrophies. 
 
 When, therefore, preparatory to attempting to 
 define social case work, I speak of the develop- 
 ment of personality, I am using a descriptive 
 phrase which has been assumed to belong espe- 
 cially, in turn, to teaching, reapplied psychology, 
 and to religion.* There can be no quarrel with 
 
 * My own approach to the subject has been by the way 
 of social science rather than pedagogy or psychology or 
 theology. Though I shall have to return again to this cen- 
 tral theme of my discussion, it may be well to reproduce at 
 this point a few brief passages written in quite different 
 connections and each shedding some light on the use of the 
 word personality from their various points of view. 
 
 Criticism. " If the revelation of personality unites men, 
 the stress upon mere individuality separates them, and 
 there are countless poets of the day who glory in their 
 eccentric individualism without remembering that it is only 
 through a richly developed personality that poetry gains 
 any universal values." Bliss Perry, A Study of Poetry, p. 
 342. 
 
 Religion. "What ... is our statement of human 
 
 93 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 the claims of any of these, for professionally con- 
 sidered all are forms of teaching. Social case 
 work is only one more form, though it has a his- 
 tory and a method of its own, and an approach 
 which differs from that of these other forms. In 
 
 personality? It is no several or separate thing. Its essentia 
 cannot be found in terms of distinctness. It does not, 
 ideally or practically, signify a new, independent, cen- 
 trality of being. On the contrary, it is altogether dependent 
 and relative. It is not first self-realized in distinctness, 
 that it may afterward, for additional perfection of enjoy- 
 ment, be brought into relations. In relation and depen- 
 dence lies its very essentia." R. C. Moberly, D.D., 
 Atonement and Personality, p. 253. 
 
 Psychology. -"Our personality is thus the result of what 
 we start with and what we have lived through. It is the 
 'reaction mass' as a whole." J. B. Watson, Psychology 
 from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist, p. 420. 
 
 11 Man's self or personality is the sum total of his specific 
 experiences in so far as they represent the results of organ- 
 ization. Each new experience modifies our personality. 
 It is not merely an accretion to the sum of our mental data, 
 but it alters our attitude toward the external world and 
 makes a permanent impression, small or great, upon our 
 general character." Howard C. Warren, Human Psy- 
 chology, p. 384. 
 
 Pedagogy. "The unfolding of personality is due both 
 to inner tendency and to outer influence and agency. In 
 part the work of nature, it is in part also the work of edu- 
 cation and of experience. ... So far, then, the two 
 vital considerations both for the philosopher and for the 
 
 94 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK DEFINED 
 
 the illustration given in my Introduction, Miss 
 Sullivan is a professional teacher, but one who 
 took her pupil out of the classroom into the com- 
 munity and into the world. Her habitual use of 
 social contacts as a means of developing the per- 
 
 educator are the inner potency and tendency of the individ- 
 ual and the nature and effect of environing reality." 
 Thistleton Mark, The Unfolding of Personality as the 
 Chief Aim in Education, pp. n and 22. 
 
 Biology. "Of the actual foreignness or imperfection in 
 the environment biology as such can give no account. 
 . . . We seem unable, from the purely biological stand- 
 point, to give any account of progressive evolution except 
 as the outcome of a blind struggle for existence. But for 
 conscious personality the struggle is no longer blind: the 
 future is foreseen and fore-ordained if only to a limited 
 extent; and the past is remembered and acted on. This is 
 not only so for individual persons but the traditions and 
 ideals of a race represent its memory and foresight. From 
 the standpoint of personality evolution takes on a new- 
 aspect, and is no longer a blind process." J. S. Haldane, 
 Mechanism, Life and Personality, pp. 103 and 131. 
 
 Social Science. '"Sociality and individuality are the 
 two aspects of the one reality, which is personality. Per- 
 sonality is the final value, the only thing in the world worth 
 having in itself. We do not of course mean that every kind 
 of personality is good in itself, rather that nothing but 
 personality can be good in itself. A society is best ordered 
 when it best promotes the personality of its members." 
 R. M. Maciver, The Elements of Social Science, p. 153. 
 
 95 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 sonality of Helen Keller obliterates, I confess, 
 all distinction between the social worker and the 
 teacher. 
 
 But what special approach, what means con- 
 sciously utilized distinguishes the service des- 
 cribed in my second and third chapters from 
 that of the instructor in the class room? Were 
 those who effected better adjustments for Maria 
 Bielowski and George Foster* called social 
 workers because they happened to be teaching 
 Maria and George and adjusting them to life 
 from a center which was called a social agency 
 instead of a school? Or were they called social 
 workers because Maria was at onetime delinquent 
 and George at one time dependent? Neither 
 "delinquent" nor "dependent" describes these 
 young people in social terms. As a matter of 
 fact, the so-called dependent, defective, and de- 
 linquent classes are not social classes, for the 
 reason that there is within these separate groups 
 no power of cohesion. Moreover, the specialized 
 skill of the social case worker will be found to be, 
 in its essentials, just as applicable to the rest of 
 * See Chapter II. 
 
 9 6 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK DEFINED 
 
 the world as to those who could be thus labelled. 
 Without minimizing for a moment the impor- 
 tance of such questions of temporary relief, per- 
 manent support, sources of support as enter into 
 the treatment of dependency; without ignoring 
 such details of court and reformatory manage- 
 ment as are related to the care of delinquents, 
 I cannot agree that any of these considerations,; 
 relating to what might be called the machinery 
 of different types of social work, are central to 
 the task of the social case worker. Analysis will 
 show that they fall into second place when prob- 
 lems of social relationship and of personality 
 thrust themselves forward, as they so persist- 
 ently do. 
 
 It is true that social case work has dealt and 
 will continue to deal with questions of restora- 
 tion to self-support, with matters of health and 
 personal hygiene, as well as with the intricacies 
 of mental hygiene, and that each of these things 
 has a direct relation to personality. But, in so 
 far as each is a specialty (some are specialties de- 
 manding quite other forms of professional skill) , 
 social case work will be found to be coterminous 
 7 97 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 with none of them, but to have, in addition to its 
 supplementary value in these other tasks, a field 
 all its own. That field is the development of per- 
 
 / sonality through the conscious and comprehen- 
 sive adjustment of social relationships, and 
 within that field the worker is no more occupied 
 with abnormalities in the individual than in the 
 environment, is no more able to neglect the one 
 than the other. The distinctive approach ^! the 
 
 T case worker, i n fact, is back to the individual by 
 way of his social environ men tT anr> wWpv^Tazl^ 
 
 ju stment must be effected in th ia- manner, jji - 
 
 dividual by indi vidual, instead nf in th e^ mas s. 7 
 there some form of social case work is and will 
 continue to be needed. So long as human 
 beings are human and their environment is the 
 world, it is difficult to imagine a state of affairs 
 in which both they and the world they live in will 
 be in no need of these adjustments and readjust- 
 ments of a detailed sort. 
 
 To state this in a more formal way is to arrive 
 at my tentative definition : 
 
 Social case work consists of those processes 
 which develop personality through adjustments con- 
 
 9 8 
 
A SOCIAL CASE WORK DEFINED 
 
 \sciously effected, individual by individual, between 
 men and their social environment. 
 
 What do we mean by "social environment"? 
 The dictionary defines environment as "the ag- 
 gregate of surrounding things and conditions,"* 
 but when we put "social" in front of it, it be- 
 comes evident at once that many persons and 
 things have been excluded and many substitutes 
 included ; the environment ceases to be environ- 
 ment in space merely it widens to the horizon of 
 man's thought, to the boundaries of his capacity 
 for maintaining rel ation ships, and it narrows to 
 the exclusion of all. tjiose things which have 
 no re_aj_ influence upon hfe emotional, mental, 
 and spiritual life. A physical environment fre- 
 quently has its social aspects ; to the extent that 
 it has these it becomes a. part of the social en- 
 vironment, y/ 
 
 Turning back to the six examples here given of. 
 professional case work and comparing them with 
 my definition, do they bear it out? Do they re- 
 veal a genuine growth in personality which has 
 been achieved through strengthened and better 
 * Century Dictionary. 
 99 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 adjusted social relations? In varying degrees, it 
 seems to me that they do. 
 
 Henry James has remarked, in one of his dis- 
 cussions of literary craftsmanship, that relations 
 stop nowhere, and that the problem of the artist 
 is to draw, "by a geometry of his own the circle 
 within which they shall happily appear to do 
 so."* The relationships of each one of the 
 clients of social agencies who are described in my 
 illustrations extend far beyond any social work- 
 er's ken. And, within that ken, those responsi- 
 ble for planning have had to make their perilous 
 choices, have had to decide what to strive to 
 understand and utilize, what wholly to neglect. 
 Will it not be found, however, that a marked ad- 
 vance in personality has been achieved in three 
 of the cases, that in two others good progress has 
 been made, and that in another the last one 
 cited a better adjustment has probably been 
 effected ? 
 
 But some may question whether these results 
 were achieved by a specialized form of skill, con- 
 tending that, while the service had its value, it 
 * Preface to Roderick Hudson, New York edition. 
 IOO 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK DEFlK 
 
 involved the exercise of no new technical knowl- 
 edge mastered with difficulty and pursued there- 
 after with increasing expertness, that any intel- 
 ligent person, without previous training but with 
 tact and goodwill, could have done the same 
 things. It may be well, therefore, to examine 
 what processes and what types of skill were ac- 
 tually involved in these social treatments. 
 
 Before writing this page I tried the experiment 
 of listing each act and policy of each social case 
 worker responsible, in the six cases cited, for the 
 treatment described. This gave me six long lists 
 of items, many of which were duplicates. By 
 combining the duplicates and trying to classify 
 the items, I found that they fell under the two 
 general heads of "insights" and "acts." Each of 
 these two divided once again insights to include 
 "an understanding of individuality" and "an un- 
 derstanding of environment"; acts to include 
 "direct action upon the mind" and "indirect 
 action upon the mind." Thus, rephrased, my jj 
 four divisions were: 
 
 A. Insight into individuality and personal 
 characteristics 
 
 IOI 
 
WHAT 1$ SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 B. Insight into the resources, dangers, and 
 influence of the social environment 
 
 C. Direct action of mind upon mind 
 
 D. Indirect action through the social envi- 
 ronment 
 
 As I examined the items of each list of particu- 
 lars carefully, it seemed to me that each item 
 might possibly have been thought of and carried 
 out by a non-specialist. But trained skill was 
 shown in the combination of *these. itemized acts, 
 which no untrained person, howeVer intelligent, 
 would have achieved. The writer who strives to 
 be an artist in his profession and the social case 
 worker with similar ambitions have at least this 
 in common that each is dealing with a material 
 which happens to be part of the. warp and woof 
 of everyday life. The one is an artificer in words, 
 the other in social relations. The one must con- 
 trive to give a new stamp to counters worn 
 smooth by our common speech ; the other must 
 be able to discover new meanings and possibilities 
 in those familiar situations in which all are 
 sharers, must find new stimuli in and for minds 
 worn dull by habit or circumstance. It takes 
 102 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK DEFINED 
 
 something more than a casual examination to 
 bring to light in either literature or case work the 
 originality of the new combinations effected, to 
 realize the study and drill, the self-expression and 
 self-effacement which lie behind the achieved 
 result. 
 
 This handicap of the familiar must be kept 
 in mind and allowed for in the analysis which 
 follows, of some of the case work processes 
 found in the six examples already given. The 
 items are arranged under the four heads just 
 named, and I purposely omit all details of 
 method. 
 
 A. B. The two types of insight shown into 
 individuality and into social environment 
 should be considered together, for it is only when- 
 these "are combined that the personality is re- 
 vealed. If the development of personality is our 
 task, then t{ie personality as it now is, together 
 with the wa^s in which it came to be what it now 
 is, must be discovered. The technical side of 
 these diagnostic processes, in so far as they are 
 social work processes and do not involve the 
 technique of other specialties, I have discussed 
 103 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 quite fully in another book. This side of the sub- 
 ject does not concern us here. But it should be 
 understood that to acquire skill in social diag- 
 nosis takes time, though when once acquired 
 time is saved. Failure to learn earlier the social 
 history behind Winifred Jones's folded hands, 
 vacant-minded ways, and neglected home was 
 a failure in social diagnosis, with the mistake 
 strengthened by the mental diagnosis, though 
 possibly there was a vicious circle here and the 
 decision of the mental examiner was shaped in 
 part by the imperfect picture given him of social 
 conditions. Only slowly was a clearer picture 
 obtained, but the new social worker put in charge 
 of the case about this time had the good sense to 
 suspend judgment until she had more facts.* 
 
 * See Chapter III, pp. 72 and 80. 
 
 Addressing the family welfare workers at the Milwau- 
 kee National Conference of Social Work (Proceedings for 
 1921), Dr. Wm. Healy told them that, "Valuable though 
 tests properly administered and interpreted unquestion- 
 ably are, still one of the best ways to evaluate an adult's 
 capacities is to get knowledge of him as he has been ob- 
 served in his home, at his work, in his human relationships. 
 One should always consider character tendencies or per- 
 sonality trends. It is very important to think of people 
 
 I04 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK DEFINED 
 
 The question of whether Maria Bielowski's re- 
 pellent aspect and her thieving were due to causes 
 that were innate and individual or to unfavorable 
 environment came to the fore immediately.* 
 There are few harder social questions to answer 
 than this one.f The answer was arrived at, as it 
 will always have to be in similar cases, with the 
 
 from the standpoint of truthfulness, affection, sympathy, 
 cleanliness, promptness, responsibility, stability, etc. 
 Familiarize yourselves with all of these and remember 
 that personality trends and also frequently habits estab- 
 lished by gpciajf lgaiiling have more to do witn the success 
 and failure* of adults than anything else. They often 
 have much more to do with one's ability to support and 
 bring up children and to meet the exigencies of the world 
 in general than what is learned from the bare results of 
 mental tests." 
 
 * See Chapter II, p. 32 sq. 
 
 t Dr. Bronner, speaking of mental equipment at the New 
 Orleans National Conference of Social Work (Proceedings 
 for 1920, p. 357), said: "Practically it is often difficult to 
 determine what is innate personality make-up and what is 
 the result of environment and experience. The interplay 
 of the two is great and the innate make-up can scarcely be 
 extricated from the product of circumstances. Perhaps 
 from one point of view such separation is not needed or 
 desirable, and yet for the offering of prognoses it is some- 
 times essential to know just what the individual is in- 
 nately, and what he might be like under different circum- 
 stances." 
 
 105 
 
 y 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 aid of medical and mental experts; but part of 
 the basis of decision in regard to what to do with 
 Maria was a kind of knowledge which at present 
 the social case worker is far better equipped to 
 gather rapidly and accurately than the practi- 
 tioner in any other profession. The analysis of 
 Maria's home situation, of her work and school 
 records, the discovery of the small private school 
 as a social resource these were things that 
 needed to be done not in leisurely fashion as time 
 permitted, but at once, for upon their efficient 
 doing depended the decision of the court. The 
 diagnostic processes did not end here; they sel- 
 dom end before treatment is at an end. The 
 probation officer was a social case worker whose 
 service was restricted by court conditions, so she 
 turned the task of long-continued treatment over 
 to another case worker who later became Maria's 
 guardian. This guardian, it should be noted, 
 was always using her combination of imaginative 
 sympathy and technical training to gain deeper 
 insights into Maria's attitude toward life, and 
 into the possibilities and dangers of the various 
 environments in which she lived. Insight and 
 1 06 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK DEFINED 
 
 action interplay in this fashion continually. Thus 
 the Allegri family council, called at the suggestion 
 of the social worker, was not only a means of dis- 
 covering the attitude of the various members of 
 the family toward one another and toward the 
 plight of mother and child ; it was also a way of 
 arriving at a solution of some of their difficulties 
 By giving Mrs. Allegri a more healthful and con- 
 genial home and by finding better oversight for 
 Teresa. A social worker can be quite skilful in 
 discovering, item by item, the facts of past and 
 present social environment without having the 
 insight which this worker showed in grasping, 
 among many details, the core of the difficulty. 
 In other words, it is possible to master a certain 
 technique without having had originally, and 
 without having acquired, that constructive imag- 
 ination the possession of which makes technique 
 worthwhile. 
 
 C. The treatment items classified in my list 
 under direct action begin with those services, 
 often of the humblest sort, which tend to 
 strengthen personal relations with a client. When 
 Miss Sullivan dispensed with a nurse for little 
 107 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 Helen Keller and cared for her herself, when 
 Maria Bielowski's guardian confessed to the rent 
 in her own stocking, when A. B. walked the 
 streets late at night with habit-ridden Clara 
 Vansca, when the Youngjbaby was killed and the 
 district secretary was with the father and mother 
 through all that trying time, something passed 
 between mind and mind that made for perm 
 nence of relation and of influence. Closely allie 
 to this eagerness to be of service are frankness of 
 intercourse, absence of officialism, and that habit 
 of loyally keeping faith which is emphasized in 
 several of the accounts. Patience too a pa- 
 tience born of sympathy, of trained insight and of 
 vision contributed much to the personal influ- 
 ence gradually acquired by these case workers. 
 Examine once more the accounts of Clara 
 Vansca, of Winifred Jones, and of Maria Bielow- 
 ski, and think how easily everything could have 
 been lost by impatience at critical moments. 
 Note, too, how re-education of habit was 
 achieved partly through adjustments in the en- 
 vironment and partly through the direct action 
 of mind on mind, and how the policy of encour- 
 108 
 
 er 
 e djj 
 
 ed^ 
 
\ 
 
 SOCIAL CASE WORK DEFINED 
 
 agement stands out as an important means of 
 re-education. Sometimes there must be warning 
 and discipline besides, as with Helen Keller at the 
 very beginning, and as with Clara Vansca when 
 she was about to take her sixth work place. But 
 flexibility was shown by the worker who knew 
 Clara flexibility combined with no small degree 
 of persistence, for repetition without cessation is 
 the only way in which to make an impress upon 
 the slow type of mind. 
 
 The policy of all others, however, which is val- 
 uable in developing the mind and social relations 
 of a client is the policy of assuring his participa- 
 tion in plans for his welfare. I shall have to re-/ 
 turn to this later. Maria Bielowski's trip with 
 her guardian to the music teacher's studio illus- 
 trates my meaning. I ask myself how I should 
 have met that request for a loan of #50 to study 
 voice culture by mail. Probably I should have 
 had enough presence of mind to avoid exclaiming 
 "Nonsense" on the spot, perhaps have thought 
 of offering to take the circular of the correspon- 
 dence school to an expert for his opinion of its 
 merits. But what the guardian did was so much 
 109 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 better. Not only did she seek expert advice to 
 reinforce her unexpressed opinion, but Maria par- 
 ticipated in every step of the process and in mak- 
 ing the decision. Mrs. Allegri was a participator 
 in that family council at which each spoke his 
 mind ; George Foster was induced to participate 
 in the new adjustments found necessary in his 
 last free home; Mrs. Rupert Young had some- 
 thing definite to do to control her sharp tongue, 
 that is as a part of plans for the re-education of 
 her husband. Instances multiply, but the oppor- 
 tunity to use this resource is often missed by the 
 worker who is so eager to serve that she is 
 tempted to do all the serving and all the deciding 
 herself. 
 
 D. Indirect action through many different 
 parts of the social environment through other 
 persons, through institutions and agencies, 
 through material things though not the only 
 approach of the social case worker, is more ex- 
 clusively within his field than are some of the 
 other approaches I have mentioned. "The visi- 
 tor of strong personality," writes Miss Elizabeth 
 Dutcher, "who relies on her own ability to influ- 
 
 no 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK DEFINED 
 
 ence her subnormal client will sooner or later lose 
 out; some way or other the co-operation of the 
 client's group must be obtained in suggesting the 
 same ideas that the visitor is trying to put over, 
 or the individual social worker's efforts will be of 
 no permanent value."* This warning need not 
 be confined to contacts with the subnormal. It 
 is a recurring temptation of the man or woman 
 with a strong will to substitute the direct ap- 
 proach for the indirect. But if social workers are 
 justified in their belief that by its very nature 
 personality depends in considerable part upon 
 healthy action and reaction between the totaF7 
 social environment and the individual, then J 
 many of life's tragedies can be traced to the at- 
 tempt to make some one social relationship serve 
 for all the others. The comprehensive, many- 
 sided approach through the social environment 
 is peculiarly well adapted to the end which social 
 case work has in view, and it is not exceptional 
 to find the case worker turning for guidance or 
 
 * Paper on Possibilities of Home Supervision of Moron 
 Women, p. 275, in Proceedings of National Conference of 
 Social Work for 1921, at Milwaukee. 
 
 Ill 
 
 / 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 co-operation, as in the particular instances given, 
 to physicians, psychiatrists, teachers, clergymen, 
 public officials, and relatives, and utilizing such 
 agencies as social settlements, vocational courses, 
 parks and playgrounds, summer outings, foster 
 homes, and so on. 
 
 Quite early in the diagnosis and treatment of 
 the clients we are now considering, their social 
 workers turned to hospitals and mental clinics 
 for expert service on their behalf. As soon as 
 social treatment began, such services were needed 
 for Maria Bielowski, Rupert Young, and Wini- 
 fred Jones, and they were required later for 
 George Foster. One of the duties of the social 
 workers interested was to see that their clients 
 had the best possible advice about health and 
 that they took full advantage of it. 
 
 Similarly, the schools attended by the children 
 had to be consulted about their school records, 
 and conferences held with their teachers, that 
 social and educational services might be dove- 
 tailed. 
 
 The records are not so specific with regard to 
 church attendance and religious training; there 
 
 112 
 
 4 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK DEFINED 
 
 does not appear, that is, to be the same working 
 out of a joint program, though Rupert Young and 
 Clara Vansca were urged to attend their own 
 church, and Clara's relations with it were 
 strengthened both by her stay in the convent and 
 by the careful oversight of her social worker. It 
 is worth noting, in passing, that the Austrian 
 Catholic church was the first place in which Clara 
 and her relatives were once more able to meet on 
 equal terms. A very recent entry in the case 
 history of Winifred Jones is to the effect that a 
 Methodist minister had been asked by the case 
 worker to call upon the family and invite the 
 children to join the Sunday school. The request 
 had been made with the knowledge and consent 
 of Mrs. Jones, who was a Methodist at one time, 
 but who had cut herself off from this contact as 
 from so many others. 
 
 There is often need of team play as between 
 two or more social agencies, all legitimately in- 
 terested in various members of the same family. 
 An officer of the public non-support bureau aided 
 the family welfare society both in making the 
 first tentative plans for the Rupert Youngs and 
 8 113 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 in putting the authority of the law behind these 
 plans. Education for the Vanscas in careful 
 spending was promoted by the dietitian, the 
 cooking teacher, and the sewing teacher, while 
 the savings bank became an aid in teaching 
 them to save. Teresa Allegri was encouraged 
 to attend a club at a neighboring settlement 
 house, the Jones children and the Vanscas were 
 given outings and entertainments in plenty, 
 and Maria Bielowski had a good vacation every 
 year. 
 
 Case workers are always acting as go-betweens 
 in this way; always seeking to make intelligent 
 use of those organized social resources of neigh- 
 borhood and community which, together with 
 advances in the science of health, have helped to 
 make better social case work possible. This fact 
 is responsible for some confusion of thought, and 
 it has even been assumed that the case worker is 
 a sort of social telephone operator whose sole 
 duty is (figuratively speaking) to sit at the 
 switchboard, pull out one plug and push in 
 another. In almost any profession the practi- 
 tioner who aims to do thorough work must often 
 114 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK DEFINED 
 
 act as a middleman, but when it comes to defin- 
 ing his task we must be on our guard against 
 substituting the part for the whole, the means 
 for the end. 
 
 Absence in any given community of the social 
 resources and expert services of many kinds 
 which have so enriched case work becomes a 
 double challenge to that community's case work- 
 ers a challenge to their ingenuity in developing 
 possible substitutes for needed resources and a 
 challenge to their public spirit, which should 
 push hard to secure the community agencies still 
 lacking, and should use, in the pushing, such 
 effective arguments and illustrations as their case 
 work cannot fail to yield. One relation between 
 case work and the whole varied program of social 
 advance has been suggested in this last sentence. 
 There is a network of such relations, in fact, some 
 of which I hope to describe later; for however 
 broadly we may define case work it would be a 
 mere fragment without the complete social work 
 program of which it is only a part. 
 
 All of the items given thus far from my list of 
 environmental adjustments assume no change to 
 115 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 another and entirely different environment. It 
 is not always enough, however, to attempt an ad- 
 justment between a client and his present sur- 
 roundings; change of surroundings is also an 
 important resource. Sometimes the change is 
 temporary, sometimes permanent. That the en- 
 vironment which should have been a builder of 
 personality can be actively anti-social instead is 
 illustrated in George Foster's case. Here the 
 "adjustments" of my definition, if they were to 
 assure the desired development, had to be ef- 
 fected outside his own home; the boy was re- 
 moved from his parents permanently. Probably 
 the home that Maria Bielowski's stepmother 
 maintained could not be described as anti-social 
 but, given the cumulative misunderstandings be- 
 tween the two and the fact that they had sepa- 
 rated before the case worker knew them, a per- 
 manent change for Maria seemed necessary. 
 Rupert Young and his wife needed only a short 
 period of separation and changed environment to 
 bring them together in a better mood; Clara 
 Vansca needed a longer period, followed by con- 
 tinuous and painstaking readjustment to the 
 116 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK DEFINED 
 
 responsibilities of family life ; and we have seen 
 how skilfully Miss Sullivan used this resource of 
 temporary change. It is easier to acquire new 
 habits in a new place; they are not fully tested, 
 however, until they have been successfully fitted 
 into the social matrix of the client's original sur- 
 roundings, provided a return to these surround- 
 ings is desirable or possible. This is an argument 
 for making our adjustments more slowly, if nec- 
 essary, and without removal to a new environ- 
 ment, as in Winifred Jones's case. In the Allegri 
 family the elderly un-Americanized mother was 
 returned to older and more familiar conditions, 
 while her daughter Teresa was sent to a new 
 home which was smartly American, though to 
 one in which the ties of kinship were fully rec- 
 ognized. 
 
 Another aspect of changed environment is 
 presented by the needs of those clients of dif- 
 ferent national and racial backgrounds in which 
 the change had been made before they became 
 known to the case worker and through immigra- 
 tion to the United States. Usually it has been 
 assumed that adjustments in the process of 
 117 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 Americanization should all be made on the side 
 of the immigrant, who is to learn our language, 
 study our institutions, accept our ways, without 
 any modifications in our own plans and pur- 
 poses. But the case worker's attitude toward 
 this problem is one which recognizes the need of 
 adjustments on both sides. Even so, the social 
 adjuster cannot succeed without sympathetic un- 
 derstanding of the Old World backgrounds from 
 which his clients came. A portion of that older 
 civilization actually emigrated when the Allegris 
 took passage for America, and when Clara 
 Vansca's and Maria Bielowski's parents came 
 over. 
 
 Ties of kinship have so many implications that 
 I must refer to them again. Let it serve at pres- 
 ent to note that Rupert Young and his wife were 
 more heartily agreed about their little girl than 
 about any other one thing; it was the thought of 
 her future and of their responsibility for it which 
 brought and kept them together again. Clara 
 Vansca's whole conception of a home centered 
 around her children, and the conception grew as 
 the two girls developed toward womanhood. In 
 118 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK DEFINED 
 
 her case, the recognition of the children by her 
 kindred and the consequent enrichment of their 
 social background had a further bearing upon 
 her development. This sense of belonging once, 
 more, of having a past, a present, and a futurel 
 that bear some relation to one another, is best 
 illustrated, perhaps, in Winifred Jones's his- 
 tory, though with her these different time aspects 
 are not yet welded into a completely unified 
 whole. Certainly Mrs. Jones was stirred as she 
 had not been for many years by her brother's 
 re-entrance into her life, and it has meant a great 
 deal to her children in a new sense of social con- 
 nections and backing. As regards the Allegris, 
 though developments here are still very recent, 
 it is evident that the solution must be found, if 
 found at all, through the relatives. 
 
 This analysis of outside resources is not ex- 
 haustive. Its most serious gap is that it records 
 no very effective use of occupational resources 
 and of employers. Working homes were found 
 for Maria Bielowski, one of Clara Vansca's em- 
 ployers was co-operative and helpful, and the 
 employer of Winifred Jones's oldest girl was 
 119 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 induced to keep her on during a slack time in his 
 factory. But these few items give little idea of 
 the varied things that case workers can do in ad- 
 justing a worker to the occupation for which he 
 seems best fitted, in assuring better training for 
 it, and in interesting employers in the personality 
 problems of individual workers. This weakness 
 in the illustrative material that I have employed 
 is accounted for, in part at least, by the fact that 
 these illustrations were gathered just after a 
 period of unusual industrial prosperity. Rupert 
 Young was earning at last accounts from $40 to 
 $60 a week; Antonina Allegri had been earning 
 $37 a week before her marriage. The many- 
 sided relation of case work to the problems of in- 
 dustry is not indicated here, but I shall have 
 something to say about it in another connection. 
 Another gap in my material could be filled by 
 cases in which more radical changes in housing 
 conditions had been a part of the social treat- 
 ment. But here again there has been a house 
 famine in many parts of the United States during 
 the last few years and few people have moved 
 who could stay in their present quarters. Rupert 
 120 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK DEFINED 
 
 Young has moved into four rooms instead of two, 
 and the social worker has been able to get Mrs. 
 Allegri out of the damp place which was so bad 
 for her rheumatism ; but the housing of Winifred 
 Jones's family is not what it should be, and Clara 
 Vansca's street could be better, though her rooms 
 and her landlord are satisfactory. Naturally, in 
 any aspect of family life so important as housing 
 the case worker makes every endeavor to improve 
 conditions. 
 
 Here we have such details of these four proc- 
 esses as I have been able to recognize and to 
 name briefly. | They are suggestive merely of the 
 beginnings of a new kind of specialized skill 
 which has for its aim the effecting of better ad- 
 justments between the individual human being 
 and the world in which he must live. No scale 
 has yet been devised by social workers for meas- 
 uring such gains in personality as are the result 
 of their case work. Dr. Healy suggests a few of 
 the qualities for which social case workers should 
 look when they gather data about individuality.* 
 * See footnote to p. 104. 
 121 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 Some of the qualities he enumerates are applica- 
 ble to personality also such as, for example, 
 truthfulness, affection, sympathy, and responsi- 
 bility. In the long run, personality must be 
 measured by the social qualities, by loyalty to 
 one's fellows, by courage for and interest in a 
 game of life which is no mere game of self-seek- 
 ing. But development can be measured along 
 every step of the way toward these qualities. 
 There is nothing static about personality it may 
 become weakened as our bodies do; it may be 
 restored to health again as they often are. 
 
 I have said that any single item of service in 
 the long list of items enumerated in this chapter 
 might have been accomplished by an intelligent 
 person with tact and goodwill, but that the 
 combination of these services would have been 
 beyond him unless he had had previous training 
 for the task. Consider, for a moment, what that 
 combination involved in just one of the given 
 cases. 
 
 Maria Bielowski's probation officer had to 
 know which facts in her probationer's past were 
 most likely to reveal the innate make-up of the 
 
 122 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK DEFINED 
 
 girl, and which would show the effects of environ- 
 ment upon her personality. She also had to know 
 how, setting appearances aside, to get evidence 
 bearing upon these points from relatives, teach- 
 ers, and employers ; and how, after discarding ir- 
 relevant testimony, to draw the correct inferences 
 from the relevant. It was important, moreover, to 
 find the right home for Maria to live in, since her 
 own seemed to be the wrong one, and to induce 
 those in charge of that home to receive her. Fur- 
 ther, the probation officer had to report all these 
 facts and procedures to the judge, doing this so 
 concisely, clearly, and without bias that he would 
 be able to arrive promptly at a just decision. 
 Omitting all mention of the training given to 
 Maria at the school during the next eight months, 
 consider also what her guardian had to know 
 about the use of medical and mental specialists, 
 about the careful selection of working homes for a 
 difficult girl, about co-operation with her teachers, 
 and the discovery of suitable recreational oppor- 
 tunities. None of this specialized experience was 
 any more important, however, than were the 
 skill, insight, and patience required in dealing 
 123 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 with the girl herself. It was necessary to know 
 what Maria was doing without discouraging her 
 own initiative. It was necessary to win her ac- 
 tive participation in all plans without, however, 
 slipping into that easy compliance with the girl's 
 whims which would only have lost her respect. 
 It was necessary to have an alternative plan 
 ready promptly a new working home, a change 
 of occupation, a different recreational program 
 whenever earlier plans were no longer yielding the 
 best results. And the combination of all these 
 services, leading at last to marked growth in 
 Maria's personality, constituted intensive social 
 case work of professional grade. 
 
 In all of the six cases reviewed, sixteen people 
 were directly concerned. Are they, unforeseen 
 accident aside, assured of a better relation to 
 their world, a stronger personal development be- 
 ! cause of the social case treatment they have re- 
 ceived? Given the facts as here set down, and 
 given the mental attitudes and external condi- 
 tions of these clients when case workers first 
 found them, has there or has there not been a 
 degree of growth for all of them and marked 
 124 
 
SOCIAL CASE WORK DEFINED 
 
 development for considerably more than half of 
 the sixteen? I do not attempt to give a categor- 
 ical answer to my question. Let each one of 
 my readers give his own. 
 
 125 
 
V 
 HUMAN INTERDEPENDENCE 
 
 A I ^HE hero in Johan Bojer's The Face of the 
 A World a hero whose mind had been pre- 
 occupied with systems, theories, and gospels 
 finally learned to say to himself, "Don't despise a 
 single human being ! He is made of the same ma- 
 terial as mankind in general. The infinite world 
 is mirrored in the small. You, who want to take 
 every one with you on the way to the great dawn, 
 help that man!" I quote this conclusion of 
 Harold Mark's at the beginning of a chapter on 
 the relation of the individual to society because, 
 in any attempt to find an underlying philosophy 
 of case work the personal side of it is so easily lost 
 sight of. Case workers must not forget that 
 there can be neither discovery nor advance with- 
 out a spirit of devotion to the human element in 
 which they are working. 
 
 Writing, in a personal letter, of the least hope- 
 126 
 
HUMAN INTERDEPENDENCE 
 
 ful and most depressing of all forms of institu- 
 tional work, a social case worker in a certain alms- 
 house said recently, "Anyone who loves books 
 sees something in an old leather-bound copy of a 
 half-forgotten story that is totally lacking in a 
 nice, fresh, cloth-bound best seller, and it is a 
 
 little the same way about the patients at J . 
 
 These obscure people with their lonely trage- 
 dies get a tremendous hold on every one who 
 comes to know them." This is the spirit which 
 destroys stratification, and when one finds some 
 social workers advocating one type of social case 
 work for those below what they call "the poverty 
 line," and another and presumably higher type 
 for those above it, the old habit of making un- 
 necessary class distinctions seems to be reassert- 
 ing itself in a strange place. The conscientious 
 physician does not use one type of practice for 
 the poor and another for the well-to-do. Huxley 
 said a word which should help to set the strati- 
 fiers straight when he wrote: "I sometimes wonder 
 whether people who talk so freely about extir- 
 pating the unfit, ever dispassionately considered 
 their own history. Surely one must be very ' fit ' 
 127 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 indeed not to know of an occasion, or perhaps 
 two, in one's life when it would have been only 
 too easy to qualify for a place among the unfit."* 
 
 A reviewer of an earlier book of mine on social 
 work was good enough to remark that its pages 
 were "nothing if not concrete." At the risk of 
 seeming* to go to the other extreme in this book, 
 I wish to push the definition attempted in my last 
 chapter a few steps further by striving to relate 
 social case work to the other conscious attempts 
 to adjust the life of man in society. The case 
 worker has his specialized skill, but back of that 
 must lie a philosophy. If we would understand 
 what social case work is we must realize why.it is, 
 and push that why beyond the accidents of civili- 
 zation to its main stream of advance. If social 
 case work has a place in the world order not 
 only a part today, important as that is, but a 
 permanent part in making this world a better one 
 to live in what is that part and what that place? 
 
 I approach this division of my subject not in 
 
 * Huxley, Thos.: Evolution and Ethics, p. 39. (Quoted 
 by Edwin G. Conklin in The Direction of Human Evolu- 
 tion.) 
 
 128 
 
HUMAN INTERDEPENDENCE 
 
 the most logical way perhaps, but in the way in 
 which its significance was gradually brought 
 home to a social worker whose interest in philos- 
 ophy had to develop out of the day's work. I 
 grew up in a world which held very romantic, 
 "solitary horseman" views of the individual. He 
 had been trapped into the social contract, we used 
 to think, and should protect himself against its 
 encroachments as best he could. I still remem- 
 ber the sense of shock with which I came upon 
 the theory that society had existed before man,* 
 and it was many years after that discovery be- 
 fore the concepts of modern psychology brought 
 home to me a realization of the way in which a 
 human being's knowledge of his very self is pieced 
 together laboriously out of his observations of the 
 actions and reactions of others. James Mark 
 Baldwin was one of the first psychologists to 
 illustrate this discovery. He says in his Social and 
 Ethical Interpretations, 
 
 The development of the child's personality could not go 
 on at all without the constant modification of his sense of 
 
 M 
 
 * In Prince Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, a Factor of Evolu- 
 tion? 
 
 9 129 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 himself by suggestions from others. So he himself, at 
 every stage, is really in part someone else, even in his own 
 thought of himself. 
 
 And in a section on social heredity, Baldwin adds : 
 
 He is born into a system of social relationships just as 
 he is born into a certain quality of air. As he grows in 
 body by breathing the one, so he grows in mind by ab- 
 sorbing the other. The influence is just as real and as 
 tangible. . . * 
 
 Royce develops the same point of view in a 
 number of passages, of which the following one is 
 fairly typical : 
 
 In brief, then, I should assert here, as a matter of 
 psychology, what I have elsewhere worked out more at 
 length, that a child is taught to be self-conscious just as he 
 is taught everything else, by the social order that brings 
 him up. Could he grow up alone with lifeless nature, 
 there is nothing to indicate that he would become as self- 
 conscious as is now a fairly educated cat.f 
 
 Professor George M. Mead, of the University 
 of Chicago, has advanced this position a step 
 
 * Baldwin, James Mark: Social and Ethical Interpreta- 
 tions in Mental Development, p. 30 and p. 70. New York, 
 The Macmillan Co., 1902. 
 
 f Royce, Josiah: Studies of Good and Evil, p. 208. New 
 York, D. Appleton and Co., 19 10. 
 
 130 
 
HUMAN INTERDEPENDENCE 
 
 further by taking the view that society is not 
 only the medium in which personality is devel- 
 oped but its source and origin. Unfortunately he 
 has published little, and that little is not very 
 accessible to the general reader. 
 
 This explanation of man's mental life and 
 growth has sometimes been called the theory of 
 the wider self. It is one of the foundation stones 
 of social case work. We all need to get rid of 
 whatever vestige of an idea still remains with us 
 that a man's mind is somewhere in his head, or 
 that it has any location in space whatever. At 
 any given time a man's mental make-up is the sum 
 of his natural endowment and his social experi- 
 ences and contacts up to that time. Fortunately 
 for the social case worker, the human mind is not 
 a fixed and unalterable thing, unless it be defec- 
 tive or hopelessly diseased. On the contrary, it is 
 a living, growing, changing, highly suggestible 
 thing, capable of receiving strong impressions 
 from without, of forming new habits, of respond- 
 ing to opportunity, of assimilating the good as 
 well as the bad. "Of all animals," says Pro- 
 fessor Hocking, "it is man in whom heredity 
 131 
 
 ^ 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 \ counts for least and conscious building forces for 
 J most. Consider that his infancy is longest, his 
 power of habit making and habit changing most 
 marked, his susceptibility to social impressions 
 keenest, and it becomes clear that nature has 
 provided in him for her own displacement. 
 . . . Other creatures nature could largely 
 finish: the human creature must finish himself."* 
 It follows that case workers can know a very 
 important part of a client's life and can under- 
 stand his difficulties and his possibilities far bet- 
 ter when they have succeeded in getting a fairly 
 clear picture of his social relationships when 
 they know, for example, the attitude of his home 
 
 I folks, cronies, shop-mates, political associates, 
 church associates toward him and his toward 
 them ; when they know, moreover, his relation to 
 his work, his recreation, his neighborhood or com- 
 munity institutions, and to his country. 
 
 When I happened to tell a single incident from 
 the story of Maria Bielowskif in a classroom, one 
 
 * Hocking, William Ernest: Human Nature and Its Re- 
 making, pp. 9-10. New Haven, Yale University Press, 19 18. 
 f See Chapter II. 
 
 132 
 
HUMAN INTERDEPENDENCE 
 
 of my auditors afterwards ventured the opinion 
 that Maria's guardian must be a psychiatrist, 
 while another asked whether she was not a 
 teacher. Still another might well have asked 
 whether she was not a physician or a public 
 health nurse, for as a matter of fact social case 
 work and each of these other professions occupies 
 not only its own special field but a wide space of 
 ground in common. That each has its own task? 
 however, is illustrated by the psychiatrist and 
 the social worker. Beginning near the center of 
 a problem of diseased personality, the psychia- 
 trist bores in and in, while the social worker's 
 sphere of action radiates outward along all the 
 lines of a client's social relations. Where a mal- 
 adjustment proves to be predominantly individ- 
 ual and mental, one form of skill is needed ; where 
 it is predominantly environmental and social the 
 other; while both are probably indispensable 
 where there is a disturbed personality in an un- 
 favorable and complicated social situation. 
 
 The particular approach by way of man's 
 social relations, though no substitute for that 
 of any of the other professions just named, 
 133 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 becomes increasingly indispensable as the char- 
 acter of human evolution changes from the pre- 
 dominantly physical and individual to the social. 
 There is no such thing as a "self-made man," and 
 the phrase, once so popular, has fallen into disuse. 
 It may happen to any one of us at any time and 
 has already happened to every one of us more 
 than once, to fall out of adjustment with our 
 world through some failure to meet our opportun- 
 ities, some temporary shock from without, or 
 through irreparable loss. The more complicated 
 the mechanism of society and the more highly 
 organized the individual, the more delicate, under 
 any of these circumstances, does the task of re- 
 adjustment become. 
 
 A sense of frustration cannot be overcome by 
 cheerful and vague general advice. For this type 
 of social treatment it is necessary for a worker to 
 learn the art of discovering the major interests of 
 the individual, and of utilizing them to reknit a 
 broken connection or to supply a motive lacking 
 before. To illustrate: 
 
 A former student of mine, working in a part of 
 the country where organized medical-social work was un- 
 
 134 
 
HUMAN INTERDEPENDENCE 
 
 known, found herself often called upon, as secretary of the 
 family welfare society of the town, to help the local physi- 
 cians in pellagra cases. As soon as these doctors discov- 
 ered what her social case work skill could accomplish, they 
 began to seek her aid in cases which were uncomplicated 
 by economic need or family maladjustment. At one stage 
 of this disease the patient suffers from a horrible depres- 
 sion of spirits. Aggressive cheerfulness in the nurse or 
 caretaker only increases the depression, whereas one who 
 knows how to fill in the social backgrounds and foregrounds 
 of the patient's past can often find in them some interest 
 to be revived, some taste to be cultivated, and can thus 
 supply the one thing which makes life seem worth living. 
 
 Two college mates of my acquaintance became, after 
 their graduation years ago, volunteer assistants in the 
 family social work societies of their separate cities. One 
 of them made the acquaintance, in the course of her work, 
 of a deserted wife and her three small children. The home 
 conditions were pitiable, and she set to work at once to 
 improve the health and material welfare of the family, 
 while seeking to discover at the same time the where- 
 abouts of the missing husband and father. He was found 
 in the city in which her classmate lived. Accordingly, 
 this college friend was asked to make his acquaintance. 
 He had travelled there in search of work, had found it, 
 and had gradually drifted into ignoring his absent family 
 altogether, spending his money instead upon his own 
 pleasures. 
 
 These two earnest women began to devise various plans 
 to bring him back to a sense of his responsibilities, 
 
 135 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 with such happy results at last that not only was the fam- 
 ily permanently reunited but more prosperous than it had 
 ever been before. When, long after, I asked the second 
 volunteer what, in her opinion, had been the secret of 
 success in this particular social venture, she replied, "I at- 
 tribute its beginnings, at least, to the fact that I dis- 
 covered the man's one serious interest in life and was able 
 to build on that. He was ardently devoted to his trade- 
 union and, when he found that I too was a unionist and 
 knew a good deal about the details of the movement, we 
 had a common meeting ground. It was in this way that 
 he became increasingly willing to attend to what I had to 
 say about his children and their future." 
 
 J In other words, a genuine interest in any seri- 
 ous or any wholesome thing has within it the 
 latent power of radiation, of making connection, 
 that is, with other interests of equal or greater 
 value, provided we are at all skilful in clearing a 
 pathway along which the separate ideas can meet 
 and join. 
 
 When I have to sit in conference where such 
 cases of social maladjustment as the one last des- 
 cribed are under current discussion, I am always 
 grateful to the reporter of the particular situation 
 when he does not confine himself too closely to 
 the bald statement of the immediate difficulty 
 
 136 
 
HUMAN INTERDEPENDENCE 
 
 in which his client finds himself. The way out, 
 when one is found, is more likely to come from 
 consideration of the nearest approach to normal 
 living in the past, or from a realization of what 
 the client's genuine interests are and what past 
 experiences have molded him for better or for 
 worse. Unfortunately, many decisions, involving 
 the whole future of a client in some cases deci- 
 sions about physical care, mental health, voca- 
 tional training, change of occupation, and so on 
 are still made without any such sense of the value 
 and significance of background, of natural inter- 
 ests and natural ties. Here is the client and here 
 the person in a position to make decisions and 
 plans. The assumption is that the situation pre- 
 sented involves one person or one family on a 
 desert island /whereas each of us is surrounded by 
 a network of relationships some no longer ac- 
 tively operating, some now active but easily dis- 
 arranged or destroyed by careless interference, 
 others certain to remain active no matter what 
 decision is made. 
 
 In making any decision affecting the welfare of 
 another (and such decisions will have to be made 
 137 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 under any social order yet conceived of) the desert 
 island theory of responsibility to our fellows is 
 no longer a tenable theory, no longer tenable in 
 the extreme instance even of the foundling on the 
 doorstep ; he too, by the mere fact of his existence, 
 bears witness to human relations which the re- 
 sponsible members of society cannot ignore. 
 
 In earlier days, when social case treatment may 
 be said to have had only one dimension, there was 
 just the case worker and his client, and in theory 
 at least, the client, save for the social agency then 
 dealing with him, was assumed to be utterly re- 
 sourceless. Then the social worker looked abroad 
 somewhat and tried to master a routine of seeing, 
 one by one, his client's relatives, teachers, em- 
 ployers, and others who knew him, with a view to 
 getting their experiences with the client and pos- 
 sibly their assistance in his treatment. This fur- 
 ther stage may be said to have added a second 
 dimension to case work. No longer was it linear 
 only; it had breadth. But the fact that social 
 relationships are dynamic suggests that the next 
 stage of development is to bring the client and 
 those to whom he is socially related together, or 
 
 138 
 
HUMAN INTERDEPENDENCE 
 
 to bring him in contact with some of these associ- 
 ates at least, and then to observe the relationship 
 "in being," instead of merely gathering a report 
 of it at second hand. These observations should 
 be made, of course, in order to be acted upon. In 
 some places the study and use of actual group re- 
 actions are already giving case work this third di- 
 mension. The Allegri family council described in 
 Chapter III is a case in point. The interviews 
 one by one with different relatives and friends 
 prepared the way for this council, but only after 
 all had been brought together in one place and 
 had actually participated in deciding upon a plan 
 did it assume proportions and solidity. 
 
 Years ago an English colony of button makers settled 
 in a New England city. One of the men in the colony, 
 himself the son of a button maker, had several sons of his 
 own who entered the same trade. One of these sons, the 
 subject of the present illustration, married the daughter of 
 a button maker, and her brothers had established a 
 button factory. This married couple had six children, all 
 of them delicate and some with serious physical handicaps. 
 
 The particular branch of the industry with which 
 the whole family connection was so closely identified had 
 long periods of irregular work; the conditions of the work 
 in the past, moreover, had often been unwholesome. 
 
 139 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 Without attempting to unravel in this short summary 
 that interplay of cause and effect which is so character- 
 istic of social as distinguished from natural phenomena, 
 it must suffice to record here that the man took to drink, 
 and that, in milder fashion, his wife did the same. Their 
 relatives became estranged from them and their home 
 miserable. It was at this stage that a social case 
 worker found them. She was still able to recognize, be- 
 neath the dirt and squalor, marks of refinement. Soon 
 it was discovered, by physical examination, that the man 
 had tuberculosis, but go to a sanatorium he would not. 
 He and his wife were induced to take a journey of inspec- 
 tion to the sanatorium with the social worker, but still he 
 resisted. Then inquiry was made quietly as to which one 
 of his shopmates had the most influence over him. This 
 fellow-workman was induced to intervene and actually 
 accomplished the desired result. 
 
 Arrangements were then made to keep the home to- 
 gether and improve its living conditions during the man's 
 absence. The varied details of this part of the social 
 worker's program do not concern us here. But it should 
 be noted that relatives living in several states were all seen, 
 the intercourse broken off years before was renewed, and 
 each relative, as well as the family's church, became an 
 active participator in the new plans. 
 
 Details of the button business appear and reappear 
 throughout this record. After the head of the family had 
 been away a few months, the brother-in-law manufac- 
 turer, who formerly had had no interest in his sister's 
 husband, offered the man a chance to do less exacting work 
 
 140 
 
HUMAN INTERDEPENDENCE 
 
 at fairly good pay. In great excitement the wife had 
 written to her husband, forwarding this offer and urging 
 him to come home at once. But after writing she sought 
 out the case worker and told her what she had done. 
 Then followed telegrams to the head of the sanatorium, 
 for the patient was not yet cured, and it was most impor- 
 tant that he should remain where he was. An under- 
 standing was next arrived at with the prospective em- 
 ployer the brother-in-law -that the same work would 
 be offered a few months later, and the case worker was au- 
 thorized to dispatch a second message to the sanatorium 
 stating that, for the present, the place had been rilled. 
 
 Meanwhile the question of the health of the children 
 had been taken vigorously in hand. Several were found 
 to be pre-tubercular and one to have first-stage tubercu- 
 losis. For the latter, long-term treatment in a country 
 place was provided; for the former, a period of observa- 
 tion in a state institution. Another child had home care 
 for a serious eye condition. It was no small task to re- 
 pair the neglect of years, and the youngest child, a baby, 
 did not survive its second summer. The other children 
 are all in excellent condition now. When the father re- 
 turned cured and able to do a full day's work, he found a 
 real home awaiting him. 
 
 In addition to the social agencies, four groups had par- 
 ticipated in this improvement. As all knew just how the 
 change was accomplished and all were likely to be in con- 
 tinuous relation with the family, it is improbable that the 
 services of a social worker will be needed again. To use 
 the expression of the social worker who is responsible for 
 
 141 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 this result, the relatives, the family's church, the man's 
 fellow-employes, and his employer have all "learned the 
 game." The family have learned it too. 
 
 Case work of this intensive sort takes time and 
 skill, but, building as it does upon the social re- 
 lations of a whole group, it has a permanence 
 and a social significance that more than justify 
 the effort. As practical guides in such work, the 
 social psychologists have thus far been of very 
 little help. Perhaps one reason for this is that 
 the social psychologists have been dealing chiefly 
 with mass reactions, and of these accurate ob- 
 servation and reporting is almost impossible. 
 For the most part, therefore, they have taken 
 refuge in the discussion of abstractions. One 
 bases his thesis upon a single instinct, another 
 attempts to classify the instincts, others study 
 the psychology of crowds.* Why not reverse the 
 process and begin the study of social psychology 
 
 * Walter Lippmann in The New Republic for December 
 15, 1920, says, ". . . one can safely assert that no col- 
 lective psychology will go far or go deep which starts from 
 the group as a whole rather than from the disposition of 
 individuals to form groups." See also references to Pro- 
 fessor Dewey's criticisms of present day social psychology 
 in American Journal of Sociology, Vol. XX VI, p. 454. 
 
 142 
 
HUMAN' INTERDEPENDENCE 
 
 with the smallest social groupings into which men 
 have formed themselves? The laboratory meth- 
 od could not be used, but the method of trained 
 and accurate observation remains ; and an exten- 
 sion of the present case work method, still far 
 from perfect it is true, but yet having a technique 
 which is steadily advancing, would supply the 
 social psychologist who approached his subject 
 by way of the small group with a supplementary 
 tool ready to his hand. 
 
 We are all familiar with the kind of sixth sense 
 of neighborhood standards and backgrounds 
 which we are accustomed to find developed in the 
 residents of a good social settlement. Between 
 this and the careful case work analysis of individ- 
 ual situations there is a field, almost unexplored 
 as yet, which might profitably engage more of the 
 social psychologist's attention. With feet still 
 upon solid earth, he might then extend his re- 
 searches to those larger groups which have been 
 developed by genuine integration from the smaller 
 ones. But for the present, at least, should not more 
 time be devoted to the study of the normal reac- 
 tions of groups of two or three or more, under con- 
 ditions which make expert observation possible? 
 143 
 
VI 
 
 INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES 
 
 f HAVE said that the central aim of social 
 case work is the maintenance and develop- 
 ment of personality, and that it shares this pur- 
 pose with a number of other forms of service. 
 But the fields of education, medicine, psychiatry, 
 religion, and social case work are not identical; 
 that each of these disciplines can and should learn 
 from the others does not establish'identity either 
 of method or of achievement. Civilization will 
 advance farther with less breakage by the way if 
 it does not put too many of its eggs in one basket ; 
 if it encourages the teacher, physician, minister, 
 social worker, each to do what each knows best 
 how to do. 
 
 We have seen that the approach of the social 
 
 case worker to his task is by way of the study 
 
 and better adjustment of man's social relations. 
 
 Every such relation has two poles, one in the 
 
 144 
 
INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES 
 
 mind of the case worker's client and the other in 
 his environment in the minds, that is, of other 
 beings or groups of beings with whom he is in re- 
 lation. No one can draw a straight line and place 
 with definiteness upon one side of it a man's in- 
 herited traits, and upon the other those of his 
 characteristics which are the result of environ- 
 ment. Life is not so simple as all that. But the 
 social worker, deeply concerned as he is with the 
 group relations of which I have just been writing, 
 must not ignore the other aspect. His client's na- 
 tive endowment, his capacity, his personal handi- 
 caps and idiosyncrasies, the special ways in which 
 he differs from other human beings these things 
 influence, in turn, the social environment by and 
 through which he himself is to be influenced. 
 "It is not insignificant," says Miss Follett, 
 "that a marked increase in the appreciation of 
 social values has gone hand in hand with a grow- 
 ing recognition of the individual."* And the dual 
 nature of the case worker's task is suggested in 
 the statement already quoted from Professor 
 
 Follett, M. P.: The New State, p. 162. New York, 
 Longmans, Green and Co., 19 18. 
 
 10 145 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 Maciver that sociality and individuality are the 
 two aspects of one reality.* 
 
 This brings us to the subject of heredity versus 
 environment. I must leave the philosophers here 
 and seek the guidance of biologists and eugenists 
 on the one hand and of psychologists and sociolo- 
 gists on the other. One of the best authorities in 
 the former group states the situation as follows : 
 
 It is plain that environment and education play a greater 
 part in the development of man than in that of other 
 animals, whereas heredity plays the same part; but it is 
 difficult if not impossible tf determine the relative im- 
 portance of these three factors. In the field of intellect 
 and morals most persons are inclined to place greater 
 weight upon the extrinsic than upon the intrinsic factors, 
 but this opinion is not based upon demonstrable evidence. 
 So far as organisms below man are concerned there is 
 general agreement that heredity is the most important 
 factor, and this opinion is held also for man by those who 
 have made a thorough study of heredity." f 
 
 But our practical difficulty is that those who 
 have made a thorough study of heredity have 
 seldom made an equally thorough study of the 
 
 * See footnote, p. 95. 
 
 f Conklin, Edwin Grant: Heredity and Environment, 
 pp. 366-67. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 19 16. 
 
 146 
 
INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES 
 
 mental and social life of man. In fact, the more 
 one reads on both sides of this subject the more 
 evident it is that the relative importance of hered- 
 ity and environment as factors in human welfare 
 is still an unsettled question. Dr. Myerson, in 
 his study of patients at the Taunton (Mass.) 
 State Hospital for the insane, suggests that the 
 laws of Mendel do not apply to human inherit- 
 ance for the reason that such conditions of in- 
 breeding as were carefully observed in the 
 Medelian experiments do not prevail among 
 human beings. "The laws of Mendel," he ex- 
 plains, "have not been shown to apply for any 
 single normal human character of simple type, 
 except perhaps eye color."* It is only upon phys- 
 ical heredity, moreover, that the eugenists speak 
 with authority; social inheritance, with which 
 physical inheritance is often confused, is a quite 
 different thing. 
 
 Graham Wallas gives us some illuminating 
 pages upon the latter in his new book, Our Social 
 
 * Myerson, A.: "Psychiatric Family Studies," The 
 American Journal of Insanity, Vol. LXXIII, p. 360. Balti- 
 more, The Johns Hopkins Press, 19 1 7. 
 
 147 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 Heritage. Social inheritance belongs not to man 
 alone but to any animal species in which the 
 young remain a comparatively long time with 
 their parents. Thus fishes and some insects have 
 no social heritage, whereas birds, which are longer- 
 lived than certain other species and remain 
 with their parents a longer time, do have it. 
 What this social heritage means as a factor in 
 survival is interestingly set forth in Wallas's 
 introductory chapter.* The effects upon man of 
 this great body of social tradition, so potent in 
 habit formation, have not the unalterable charac^ 
 ter of traits transmitted through the germ plasm. 
 It is an inheritance, however, in the sense that 
 man is born into it, and, in addition to this in- 
 heritance, all the environmental effects of educa- 
 tion, religion, government, and social intercourse 
 upon the life of the freely moving and participat- 
 ing individual, are still to be reckoned with. The 
 outlook is not so gloomy as some eugenists would 
 have us believe, when they advocate the abolition 
 of social work activities and the turning over of 
 
 * Wallas, Graham: Our Social Heritage, pp. 14-23. New 
 Haven, Yale University Press, 1921. 
 
 148 
 
INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES 
 
 moneys thus saved for the prosecution of further 
 eugenic research. 
 
 At the same time, the fundamental message of 
 the eugenists is not one to be ignored. Social 
 workers have the great fact of ineradicable in- 
 dividual differences in human beings to face. 
 Democracy must face it, education must never 
 lose sight of it. The assertion that folks are dif- 
 ferent seems the veriest truism, for not only have 
 we their inherited and unchangeable differences 
 to reckon with, but to these are added all the dis- 
 similarities which result from varying social expe- 
 rience and varying responses to the same experi- 
 ence. Nevertheless, there are few obvious truths 
 more habitually neglected by statesmen, by pub- 
 lic administrators, by the man on the street, and 
 even, I regret to say, by the rank and file of social 
 workers themselves. The correlative truth of 
 man's common nature is the one still emphasized 
 and rightly so, where only mass action and mass 
 treatment can achieve the desired result. 
 
 Our first vigorous reactions against the auto- 
 cratic state led us to insist not only upon equality 
 among men but upon their resemblances and 
 149 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 even upon their uniformity. Equality, as Felix 
 Adler has noted, comes to be 
 
 mistakenly taken to mean likeness in the sense of same- 
 ness, not in the sense of that fundamental likeness on the 
 background of which the desirable unlikenesses stand 
 forth. . . . The differences are to be stressed; they 
 are the coruscating points in the spiritual life of mankind. 
 ^That every man is the equal of his fellows means that he 
 has the same right as each of the others to become unlike 
 the others, to acquire a distinct personality, to contribute 
 his one peculiar ray to the white light of the spiritual 
 life.* 
 
 As a matter of fact there is more than a trace of 
 autocracy left in our traditional public policy of 
 the "same thing for everybody." I called atten- 
 tion to its autocratic trend in an address before 
 the National Conference of Social Work in 1915.! 
 Three years later, Gertrude Vaile carried the idea 
 further before the same body J in a paper on "The 
 Contribution of Social Case Work to Democ- 
 
 * Adler, Felix: An Ethical Philosophy of Life, p. 142 sq. 
 New York, D. Appleton and Co., 19 18. 
 
 f Then the National Conference of Charities. See Pro- 
 ceedings for 19 1 5, "The Social Case Worker in a Changing 
 World," p. 43. 
 
 t Proceedings for 1918, p. 263. 
 150 
 
INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES 
 
 racy," maintaining that equal right to oppor- 
 tunity was what our forefathers meant when they 
 declared that "All men were created free and 
 equal." In evidence, she quoted that pregnant 
 saying of Plato's that the essence of equality lies 
 in treating unequal things unequally.* If we are 
 agreed that the state exists for the highest good 
 of its members, we must also agree that there is 
 no lesson democracy needs to take more to heart 
 today than this lesson in sound administration; 
 namely, Treat unequal things unequally. 
 
 I have sometimes illustrated the popular habit 
 of assuming differences and of ignoring them at 
 one and the same time by the way in which our 
 minds tend to act when confronted with the prob- 
 lems of an unfamiliar group of people a group of 
 Chinamen, for example. Our temptation is to 
 assume their lack of any broadly human resem- 
 blances to ourselves; to treat them as a class 
 apart, and then to ignore altogether the varia- 
 
 * Miss Vaile used, and so do I, Dr. Henry Van Dyke's 
 striking paraphrase of Plato's words. The passage will be 
 found in Book VI of the Laws, pp. 273-74 of Jowett's 
 translation, edition of 187 1. 
 
 151 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL GASE WORK? 
 
 tions within the membership of the group itself. 
 To our unaccustomed eyes these Orientals look 
 alike and seem alike, and we are betrayed by our 
 ignorance into treating them alike. Any honest 
 sharing of reality with them would bring out im- 
 mediately their individual differences, for with 
 each examination into the details of their lives, 
 social stratifications would be washed away and 
 the infinite diversity of gifts, of characteristics, 
 become apparent. Only after such a plunge has 
 been made repeatedly, however, do we arrive at 
 an even profounder truth ; only then do we begin 
 to realize in any complete sense the fundamental 
 likenesses of our human kind in their primary re- 
 lations and experiences in their struggles and 
 mistakes, their need of guidance, their right to 
 opportunity, to fuller development, to diversity. 
 During the first year of federal woman's suf- 
 frage, a determined effort was made to break 
 down the legal safeguards which social work had 
 gradually thrown around the conditions of wom- 
 en's industrial employment. In the name of an 
 equality which meant no more than uniformity, 
 many well-intentioned women sought the aboli- 
 152 
 
INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES 
 
 tion of all this protective legislation. Plato's 
 formula was never more applicable. Never had 
 it been more important for the sake of both the 
 race and the individual to treat unequal things 
 unequally. 
 
 It is encouraging to find a seasoned radical like 
 Graham Wallas urging the full recognition of in- 
 dividual differences upon democracy. In the 
 field of education he imagines the teacher asking 
 himself whether he shall treat all his pupils alike 
 or base his treatment of them on their differences, 
 and says in this connection, 
 
 No perfectly simple answer to this question will be 
 possible until our powers of psychological testing are in- 
 creased, and until social equality has sufficiently advanced 
 to make the differences at any moment between children 
 depend much more than they do at present upon "nature," 
 and much less upon the "nurture" of rich and poor, or of 
 educated and uneducated homes. But, broadly speaking, 
 I am convinced that social progress already lies on the 
 line of recognized difference.* 
 
 Here are suggested the two sides of a genuinely 
 
 democratic program: It equalizes opportunity 
 
 by intelligent mass action; it recognizes diver- 
 
 * Our Social Heritage, p. 98. 
 
 153 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 sity by establishing forms of public administra- 
 tion which do different things for and with dif- 
 ferent people at every turn. 
 
 In its gradual unfolding, case work method has 
 followed very closely the stages that have just 
 been described. In the past it has assumed at 
 once the absence of universal traits in a human 
 group and the presence there of a rigid group 
 uniformity. It has treated unequal things 
 equally. We have only to name a few of the 
 familiar classifications the unemployed, family 
 deserters, recent immigrants, and so on to 
 realize that this habit still persists and to rec- 
 ognize its dangers. Necessary as a starting point, 
 the classification must not be transformed into a 
 goal. Some of the follies lately committed in the 
 name of Americanization are directly traceable to 
 the practice of thinking of all immigrants as 
 essentially alike and to be treated alike. 
 
 Similarly, the beginning of wisdom in dealing 
 with the problems of unemployed men, as dis- 
 tinguished from the problems of changing eco- 
 nomic and social conditions, will be the recogni- 
 tion that no uniform program of procedure for all 
 154 
 
INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES 
 
 within the group of unemployed can succeed, 
 because members of the group will differ essen- 
 tially even in the one characteristic of their rela- 
 tion to industry. Some may be skilled workers, 
 accustomed to continuous occupation; some un- 
 skilled but usually fully employed ; others casual 
 workers; and still others, a small minority, may 
 be unemployable. 
 
 The error of assuming that all family deserters 
 are alike is so well refuted in another volume of 
 this series* that I need not mention it here. 
 
 An increasingly courageous plunging beneath 
 the surface of things by the social case workers of 
 our own day has convinced the more progressive 
 of them, at least, of the wonderful diversity 
 within each possible social grouping diversity 
 against that background of our common nature 
 which more and more commands their reverence 
 and is the unifying element in a program of many 
 details, demanding no small degree of skill for its 
 mastery. Confronted by any omnibus term or 
 general remedy for a social situation, their minds 
 
 * Colcord, Joanna C: Broken Homes. New York, 
 Russell Sage Foundation, 19 19. 
 
 155 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 begin to seek at once for dissimilarities within the 
 given grouping, and for corresponding modifica- 
 tions in the suggested social treatment. The old 
 dead-and-alive entries of former days in social 
 case records, such as "woman tells the same old 
 story," are disappearing, making way in the case 
 histories of many social agencies, though not in 
 all, for clear and faithful pictures of well-dif- 
 ferentiated people and situations. A former stu- 
 dent of mine writes, " I find that social case work 
 is a living, growing thing, just as is democracy, 
 and that it has within itself the capacity for 
 revolution. In fact, there can be no true democ- 
 racy without it." 
 
 I had occasion some time since to look over a 
 number of pamphlets issued more than forty 
 years ago, when the charity organization move- 
 ment was beginning to take root in America. 
 One of the early leaders of the movement then 
 wrote, "When we fairly settle down to the ad- 
 ministration of charity on a judicial system, it 
 will be seen that nearly all cases naturally dis- 
 tribute themselves into a few leading classes, and 
 
 156 
 
INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES 
 
 the application of a just law to each case would 
 soon be obvious and easy." 
 
 The social case worker of today deals with a 
 more varied group his service is no longer re- 
 stricted to the relatively small class of recipients 
 of charitable relief, but even within that re- 
 stricted group the "application of a just law to 
 each" has proved, after forty years of trial and 
 error, to be anything but obvious and easy. The 
 fact is that people in like circumstances are 
 never so much alike as they appear to be. Never- 
 theless, that mistaken generalization of years ago 
 will be repeated many times, though in varying 
 forms, in the years immediately ahead of us. For 
 this reason the subject needs to be emphasized. 
 
 The problem now, however, is not so much one 
 of demonstrating the need of differential social 
 treatment as of developing the special social 
 skill which it demands and of multiplying the 
 trained minds and hands needed to make such 
 treatment a reality. There is danger that in pub- 
 lic departments and in many other places the 
 task of social case work will come more rapidly 
 than the essential skill which it requires; in 
 157 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 which case there will be more motions many 
 more, and little accomplished. 
 
 Success in the particular form of endeavor 
 known as social case work demands a high degree 
 of sensitiveness to the unique quality in each 
 human being. An instinctive reverence for per- 
 sonality, more especially for the personality least 
 like his own, must be part of a case worker's 
 native endowment. To set up any one pattern 
 of excellence and require conformity to it is not 
 his aim. It is his privilege, rather, to discover 
 and release the unduplicated excellence in each 
 individual to care profoundly for the infinitely 
 varied pattern of humanity and to strive, with an 
 artist's striving, to develop the depth and rich- 
 ness of its color tones. 
 
 158 
 
VII 
 
 THE BASIS OF PURPOSEFUL ACTION 
 
 T)ROBABLY the most important single re- 
 **- striction put upon social work of any kind is 
 the delimiting fact that w^canjiojLlreaLeeople, 
 individually or uxgrnnps, as if thpy were -depen- 
 dent and domesticable animals without crippling 
 them. Governments and legislatures to the con- 
 trary, it is not possible to play special Provi- 
 dence to any particular group of people without 
 handicapping them cruelly. This applies not 
 merely to the relation of the social worker to his 
 clients, of the statesman to his constituents, it 
 applies to social relations of every kind.* I have 
 dwelt upon the formative power of such relations, 
 
 * In so far as social insurance applies to every one instead 
 of to a particular group to a group of people qualifying on 
 the basis of destitution, for example my argument does 
 not hold. The gradual establishment of reasonable mini- 
 mum standards for all the people is one way of equalizing 
 opportunity without ignoring differences. 
 
 159 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 but that power can be exerted in opposite ways 
 it may develop personality or it may cripple it. 
 Consider the relation between parent and 
 child, or teacher and pupil, or doctor and pa- 
 tient, or friend and friend. (The first and most 
 difficult lesson of parenthood is to acquire proper 
 respect for the developing personality of the 
 child. YThat personality is devastated, too often, 
 by a parental affection which cannot refrain 
 from dominating and protecting at those very 
 points at which the growing mind should be en- 
 couraged to find its way out by conquering its 
 own difficulty. The converse is true also. Who 
 has not seen parents made old before their time, 
 so padded about were they by the anxious and 
 fussy affection of their sons and daughters? In 
 teaching, of course, the ability to release the 
 unique individuality of the taught keeps step 
 with whatever is best in modern education. The 
 genuine teacher seeks to train not disciples but 
 observers. So with the doctor; at his best he, 
 too, is a teacher who helps the sick to heal them- 
 selves. As between friends the same truth holds. 
 All of which is obvious enough, save that in the 
 160 
 
THE BASIS OF PURPOSEFUL ACTION 
 
 service of any particularly unfortunate one we 
 always have to remind ourselves that it is so. 
 The intolerable character of the handicaps under 
 which our human kind are often found to be suf- 
 fering, and the realization of this intolerableness 
 which some of the contacts of case work bring, 
 may betray the case worker into adding one 
 more handicap to all the rest; namely, the 
 handicap of an unnerving pity. 
 
 Those who have done most to improve the con- 
 dition of the blind and to prevent blindness, tell 
 us that the instinctive and pitying reaction of 
 family, friends, and general public is the greatest 
 single handicap that the blind have to contend 
 with. Two who have borne such witness, blind 
 themselves, are Dr. F. J. Campbell and Sir 
 Arthur Pearson: 
 
 When I lost my sight, I was between four and five years 
 of age. My father said to the other members of the fam- 
 ily, "You must do everything for him." My mother took 
 me by the hand, led me into another room, and said, 
 "Joseph, you can learn to work as well as the other chil- 
 dren, and I will teach you." .... I love and re- 
 vere the memory of that mother, who encouraged her 
 blind boy to do his full share of the work and have his 
 
 " 161 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 full share of the fun. To the courage and independence 
 gained during those twelve years on a mountain farm in 
 Tennessee I owe chiefly whatever I have accomplished 
 in after life.* 
 
 It seemed to me that blind people had in the past 
 been generally treated entirely in the wrong manner. 
 Sweet kindly folk had talked to them about their afflic- 
 tion and the terrible difficulties that beset them. If 
 you tell a man often enough that he is afflicted, he will 
 become afflicted and will adopt the mental and physical 
 attitude befitting that soul-destroying word. 
 
 .... When I found my sight was doomed I arrived 
 at various decisions of greater or lesser importance, and 
 one of the lesser ones was that I had better dispense with 
 the services of the personal attendant who had looked 
 after me for many years, as otherwise he would probably 
 become a stumbling-block in the path of blind proficiency. 
 The great secret of success in learning to be blind is to in- 
 sist upon doing everything possible for oneself. f 
 
 New light is thrown upon this fundamental 
 principle of social treatment by psychologists in 
 the analyses of animal and human behavior. 
 "The peculiar feature of the life of animals," says 
 Stout, "which prevents progressive develop- 
 ment, is the existence of instincts, which do for 
 
 * Campbell, Dr. F. J. : Outlook for the Blind, Vol. I, p. 99. 
 f Pearson, Sir Arthur: Victory over Blindness, pp. 15 and 
 71. New York,^Doran, 19 19. 
 
 162 
 
THE BASIS OF PURPOSEFUL ACTION 
 
 them what the human being must do for him- 
 self."* 
 
 There is no compelling reason why one should 
 refrain from becoming a special Providence to an 
 animal (always provided one sees it through its 
 disabilities and does not drop it in the ditch when 
 one grows tired of being kind), but there is every 
 reason why we cannot treat a human being in 
 this fashion. In fact, social workers, like those 
 who seek to serve their fellows in any other way 
 more or less skilled, should be pretty humble- 
 minded about their calling, for the plain truth is } 
 that what aman does ^ fojrjiiin^ejfjxujiits^ar moreO 
 
 tn-^rrjjTJg^ pprrnanpnf- wpll-hping ufc hnn tho thin gs ( 
 that are donft for him . 
 
 Thereason for this will be found in an examina- 
 tion of the way that men's minds work. The , 
 baby seems to have an equipment far less ade- v 
 quate to its needs than that of the kitten, the \ 
 puppy or any other young animal, and his mental 
 development is far slower. The relatively auto- 
 
 * Quoted by Mrs. Bernard Bosanquet in The Standard 
 of Life, p. 118 (Macmillan and Company), to which book 
 I am also indebted for some of the deductions that follow. 
 
 163 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 matic responses of the animal to outside stimuli 
 follow well- worn paths and are what are known 
 as instinctive responses. This means that, with 
 the animal, mental progress is always within a 
 circle which so circumscribes him that he is 
 incapable of acquiring progressive and higher 
 wants. With man there is no such circle; it is 
 replaced by a spiral. His response is so much 
 slower because, very early in his career, he is 
 forced by sheer pressure of need to compare one 
 concept with another and to deduce a third in 
 other words, to reason. The reasoning and the 
 habit-forming processes lead him out of any nar- 
 row circle of instinctive responses into an ever- 
 widening spiral of new combinations which en- 
 large his horizon and render him capable of 
 communion with both the seen and the unseen. 
 The difference between the circle and the spiral 
 is the difference between routine and purposeful 
 action, between the domestic animal and the 
 pioneer discoverer.* 
 
 * As regards instincts versus habits, note, for example, 
 this passage from Watson's Psychology from the Stand- 
 point of a Behaviorist, p. 254 (Lippincott Company, 1919): 
 
 "No fair-minded scientific observer of instincts in man 
 
 164 
 
THE BASIS OF PURPOSEFUL ACTION 
 
 It is true that a man can become so weighed 
 down by unfavorable conditions by ill-health, i 
 unfair dealing, lack of opportunity that it is 
 impossible for him to want progressively. Under 
 these circumstances an estimate of his native 
 
 should claim that the genus homo possesses anything like 
 the picturesque instinctive repertoire of the animal, 
 . . . Instinct and the capacity to form habits, while 
 related functions, are present in any animal in inverse ra- 
 tio. Man excels in his habit-forming capacities. So quickly 
 are habits formed upon the basis of whatever instinctive 
 activity is present, that man is usually accredited with as 
 long a list of instincts as the animals." 
 
 Or take the following passage from Arthur George 
 Heath's The Moral and Social Significance of the Con- 
 ception of Personality, p. II (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 
 1921): 
 
 "Not merely to be a self, but to have a developed con- 
 sciousness of self: to realize definitely the existence of our 
 outer world against which the self acts and reacts: to form 
 deliberate plans in which memory serves to guide, and 
 rational criticism to control the will; powers such as these 
 would seem inseparable from personality, and yet it appears 
 very doubtful whether such autonomy of interest and pur- 
 pose against the surrounding world is realized in the life 
 of any animal but man himself." 
 
 Nothing said here, however, should be interpreted to 
 mean that a great leap was made as between man's mind 
 and that of the other animals. The differences have come 
 not by leaps but by a very long series of short steps. 
 
 165 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 powers or future possibilities which does not take 
 the circumstances into account can be as unfair 
 as a judgment on the thrift of a plant that has 
 always been kept in the dark. Here the removal 
 of obstacles from his path, a changing of the op- 
 pressive condition, is a most important part of 
 advance, but an equally important part is stimu- 
 lation of wants of wants that his own exertions 
 alone can supply. 
 
 Sympathy in the case worker musl-be-made to 
 breed ^nmpthinc better thnn ^elf-pity in his 
 clients. The remark of a volunteer engaged in 
 war service has been reported to be, "I do like 
 the So-and-so's; they'll do anything that I tell 
 them to do!" This is not the social worker's 
 ideal of helpful relations. It is true that he must 
 often use reiteration with patience and persist- 
 ence in such situations as Winifred Jones's, where 
 the level of possible participation on her part 
 had yet to be discovered and allowed for. This 
 is very different, however, from becoming a spe- 
 cial Providence to one's client. [The true case 
 work attitude takes full account of man's great- 
 est asset the asset which distinguishes him 
 1 66 
 
THE BASIS OF PURPOSEFUL ACTION 
 
 from all other animals, in that he can acquire pro- 
 gressive and higher wants and they cannot] He 
 can acquire these, the case worker realizes^ only 
 through action which is not automatic but pur- 
 poseful. To step between a man and the spur to 
 purposeful action is to do something a good deal 
 worse to him than what we meant when we used 
 to talk about the danger of "pauperizing" him. 
 That term had always a materialistic slant. 
 What we really were in danger of doing was not 
 merely pushing him down by the careless giving 
 of alms, but cutting him off from further social 
 development at some one or more points. This 
 danger has never been confined to the giving of 
 material relief ; many who have never lacked for 
 material things as well as the destitute have been 
 exposed to the more subtle dangers of other forms 
 of service to all forms, that is, which are with- 
 out reverence for the recipient's own powers and 
 latent possibilities. Nevertheless, the two errors 
 are closely related ; unwise relief-giving and un- 
 wise service can be ill distinguished in the fol- 
 lowing illustration, for example: 
 
 A stranger to me, a former teacher who had 
 167 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 become one of the visitors of a large relief soci- 
 ety, sought my advice a few years ago about her 
 new work. She appeared to have entered upon 
 it in a genuine spirit of service, but had been 
 shocked and disillusioned by what seemed to her 
 the effect of relief upon the families she had 
 visited. Was it true that relief was an evil al- 
 ways? Did it lead inevitably to the cringing, un- 
 erect attitude that she had observed? She was 
 unable to imagine any effective future for the 
 work with which she was identified, or to dis- 
 cover any good result in its present activities, 
 other than a merely temporary material benefit. 
 When a concrete instance of the harm that my 
 questioner referred to was demanded, she cited 
 the case of a father and mother with one child, a 
 boy of eleven. The father was so hopelessly in- 
 valided that the mother had to be at home to 
 care for him. She had seemed a cheery, self- 
 helpful person at first, but as time had gone on 
 under the influence, apparently, of the regular 
 relief that was so much needed she had become 
 more and more complaining, more and more 
 grasping and disingenuous. 
 1 68 
 
THE BASIS OF PURPOSEFUL ACTION 
 
 Further queries revealed that this puzzled 
 visitor, though a woman of more than ordinary 
 thoughtfulness, had never attempted to work 
 out with the mother whom she was helping any 
 real plan of campaign for her family. What, I 
 asked, were the relations between mother and 
 child? They were affectionate and normal. 
 What of the boy's school record? It had not 
 been inquired into. What were the mother's 
 own plans for the boy's future? The visitor did 
 not know. 
 
 Note here the power of an occupational inhibi- 
 tion. This teacher must have known far better 
 than I the successive steps by which a mother 
 could be helped to help her boy in turn to be- 
 come the head of the household later on and a 
 good citizen besides; but my questioner's new 
 task had been mistakenly labelled "relief only," 
 and accordingly her attention had been fixed too 
 exclusively upon making the relief adequate to 
 the family's immediate needs. If her own esti- 
 mate of her client's character was the correct one, 
 the woman, though thrown temporarily out of 
 adjustment by her misfortunes, was by no means 
 169 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 socially bankrupt. On the contrary, she was the 
 mother of a growing boy with a future before 
 him; she was able to give affection and to com- 
 mand it. What she needed, after the shock and 
 discouragement of her recent experiences, was a 
 ^ partnership plan a program of participation 
 ] would be a better description in which she and 
 the visitor together could share the responsibility 
 of the successive steps to be taken, all looking 
 toward assuring the future success of her home. 
 In other words, what the client needed was an 
 open window, an outlook. It seemed to me that 
 this was what the agent of the relief society most 
 needed too. The level of participation adapted 
 to this client's capacity should have been dis- 
 covered and a program devised to fit it.* 
 
 * I have hesitated to use the word "motivation" in this 
 and the earlier examples of case work given in this book 
 because the psychologists are not agreed as to its exact 
 meaning, but here at least we have an illustration of the 
 way in which the discovery and acceptance of a motive 
 must precede any genuine participation by the client in the 
 social treatment. "Motive" is defined by Baldwin and 
 Stout as "anything whatsoever which, by influencing the 
 will of a sensitive being, is supposed to serve as a means of 
 determining him to act, or voluntarily to forbear to act, 
 
 170 
 
THE BASIS OF PURPOSEFUL ACTION 
 
 As regards the mother's loss of morale: Human 
 beings are ill-fitted to play a passive part; in 
 every walk of life they deteriorate under it. One 
 test of the success of any social treatment is the 
 degree to which all the persons involved in it 
 have been able, to the limit of their ability, to 
 take an active part in achieving the desired re- 
 sult. It is perilously easy for case workers to 
 assume a rather selfish, autocratic r61e, to occupy 
 the center of the stage in performing acts of 
 seeming unselfishness in which they are forcing 
 others to do all the receiving. To contrive some- 
 how to give that mother a new vision of her im- 
 portant share in mending the family fortunes, to 
 supply her with an adequate motive (adequate to 
 her, that is) for doing her part, puts relief in its 
 right place right not only in our scheme of 
 things but in hers. For all of us it becomes a 
 mere tool and not the most important one at 
 that in the development of personality.* 
 
 upon any occasion." (See Dictionary of Philosophy and 
 Psychology, edited by James Mark Baldwin.) 
 
 * Dr. Felix Adler, in An Ethical Philosophy of Life, 
 describes the characteristics of egocentric philanthropy, of 
 
 171 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 It may not come amiss to add at this point a 
 few words about material relief, for the subject is 
 one upon which the public mind vibrates at pres- 
 ent between attraction and repulsion. Relief 
 as largess is so hopelessly undemocratic that its 
 disgrace attaches to giver and to receiver it 
 curses both. But at the very time that the pub- 
 lic is feeling this most keenly, it is turning to a 
 wider distribution of relief the same thing for 
 everybody as a sort of left-handed substitute 
 for justice. In so far as this new development 
 puts any faith in the beneficence of relief only, it 
 is going to be as unsatisfactory in result as the 
 
 altruism, and finally of his own ethical philosophy which, in 
 a word, is "so to act as to elicit the unique personality in 
 others" and thereby in oneself. " Incontestably, in the 
 attempt to change others we are compelled to try to change 
 ourselves. The transformation undergone by a parent in 
 the attempt to educate his child is an obvious instance." 
 As an illustration of the typical error of altruism, he names 
 the wife or mother "who slaves for her husband or children, 
 obliterating herself, never requiring the services due her in 
 return and the respect for her which such services imply, 
 degrading herself, and thereby injuring the moral character 
 of those whom she pampers." Egocentric self-sacrifice is 
 described in a brilliant passage (p. 212 sq.) too long to be 
 reproduced here but well worth more than one reading by 
 social workers. 
 
 172 
 
THE BASIS OF PURPOSEFUL ACTION 
 
 charity of an earlier day; ^relief in and of it self 
 has no moral qualitie s, and least of all is it ca- 
 pable of achieving the quality of democracy. Its 
 right place is a subsidiary one. If- the main plan 
 of action adopted in any given case of personal 
 maladjustment is sound and fits the true situa- 
 tion if it is based upon genuine insight, and if, 
 moreover, the interest and co-operation of the 
 person or persons most concerned have somehow 
 been won then it is possible to ignore the popu- 
 lar superstitions against relief and the popular 
 superstitions in its favor. The process of under- 
 standing a client and of developing, in conference 
 with him, a program of participation is in essence 
 a democratic process. Patronage has no place in 
 it, nor can the "same thing for everybody" ideal 
 have any place. 
 
 I have long suspected that there is no such 
 specialty in social work as the specialty of relief- 
 giving. It can be handled generously and fear- 
 lessly so long as its administrators have a clear 
 grasp of the principles that underlie social case 
 treatment and are applying these in their daily 
 work. If that work is releasing energy in chan- 
 173 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 nels which will develop personality in their 
 clients, if these clients are beginning to acquire 
 higher wants by a purposeful action which is in- 
 creasingly self-directed, if they are not being 
 forced into any one pattern but are achieving 
 the diversity which naturally follows upon self- 
 directed activity, and if, above all, they are be- 
 coming more closely related to the various com- 
 munity groups to which each naturally belongs, 
 then we need not worry about the^relief side of 
 our program or about any other merely secondary 
 consideration. 
 
 174 
 
VIII 
 
 THE HOME 
 
 'T^URNING from the more abstract considera- 
 -*- tions of these other intermediate chapters, 
 from the interdependence of men and their strug- 
 gle toward self-expression and diversity, it is now- 
 time to discuss the readjustments between hu- 
 man beings and their social environment from a 
 quite different angle. It has seemed worth while 
 to take the longest view that I could of case 
 work in its relation to future social develop- 
 ments, but strengthened and adjusted social rela- 
 tions in our own day and time are even more 
 worthy of attention. Our own world as we find 
 it, our own world as we can better it, is the only 
 possible gateway to a better future. Within the 
 small space remaining to me, therefore, I should 
 like to pass in quick review some of the concrete 
 forms of social case work in present use, and to 
 consider each one in relation to certain outstand- 
 175 
 
 x~ 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 ing and permanent social institutions. These are 
 the home, the school, the workshop, the hospital, 
 and the court a list which could be somewhat 
 extended. Finally, as already suggested, no 
 description of case work, not even so brief a one, 
 should omit some account of the interplay of all 
 the different forms of social work with one an- 
 other. This, too, must precede my summing up. 
 For purposes of definition it was necessary to 
 narrow the application of the term "social case 
 work" in Chapter IV to the long-continued and 
 intensive care of difficult cases. Let me now 
 broaden its use to include once more all those so- 
 cially useful adjustments which are made with 
 and for individuals, whether or not they lead 
 directly to the development of personality. The 
 intensive case work about which I have been 
 writing the type which directly concerns itself 
 with personality in its social relations may come 
 to bear a separate name in time (a name of not 
 more than one word, let us hope), but at this 
 stage the one term is used to cover all genuinely 
 social services for individuals dealt with one by 
 one. 
 
 i 7 6 
 
THE HOME 
 
 First, the home. What relation does case work 
 bear to the life of the present-day family? 
 
 I have spoken before of the embarrassments 
 which come to the case worker owing to the fact 
 that the relationships with which his task has to 
 deal are the warp and woof of daily life. This is 
 especially true of family case work and of child 
 welfare work. Every aspect is a personal matter 
 to every citizen. One who examines current lit- 
 erature and the periodical and newspaper press 
 for discussions not only of marriage and divorce, 
 but of parental responsibility and other phases of 
 family life, is struck by the personal note. People 
 born into real homes and privileged to have 
 founded real ones are likely safe in their haven 
 to assume that the subject of family life is too 
 sacred a one to be discussed. On the other hand, 
 much of the literature of revolt against the family 
 as now constituted bears internal evidence of the 
 unhappy personal experiences of the individual 
 critics. Surely the questions involved are too 
 big, they have roots running too far back, to be 
 settled by personal bias. 
 
 Case workers have their predispositions too, no 
 12 1 77 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 doubt, based largely upon the kind of home in 
 which they grew up, but those who care most for 
 their subject and their task learn to set predis- 
 positions aside, or at least to make allowance for 
 them in forming a judgment. I have seldom 
 known a thorough case worker whose views about 
 the family, whether conservative or radical, had 
 not been considerably modified by the contacts 
 of his work. I recall, for example, the remark of 
 a woman engaged in case work on the west side 
 in New York soon after taking post-graduate 
 work in sociology at a woman's college. "When 
 I was in college," she explained, "I belonged to 
 the group of extreme feminists who accepted 
 Cicely Hamilton's views and had no use for 
 family life; but over here on the west side I find 
 that my theories do not fit the family situations 
 with which I am confronted. I am coming to see 
 that, when the world is remade, something more 
 than the experiences of a small coterie of intel- 
 lectuals will have to be taken into account." 
 
 There is an attitude toward family life and the 
 home which is so exclusive as to banish all larger 
 forms of social consciousness from consideration. 
 
 i 7 8 
 
THE HOME 
 
 We have only to remember how completely, at 
 certain periods of history, the power of the family 
 has overridden the power of the state to under- 
 stand that the inte rest of s ocial workers in the 
 institution of the home should not be in the in- 
 stitution for its own sake but for the sake of 
 the individual and of society. They must learn 
 to recognize in any given home which is in 
 need of their services certain potential sources of 
 strength and probable sources of weakness. To 
 what extent is this home a product of bad social 
 conditions which need to be remedied by mass 
 action? Or to what extent is it markedly anti- 
 social and a source of contagion? Are its mem- 
 bers bound in subjection to the strongest of the 
 family group or is each one encouraged to develop 
 initiative? It is easier to ask these questions than 
 to answer them ; the answer was not easy in the 
 case of George Foster's parents, probably, or in 
 Clara Vansca's demoralized household, or in 
 Winifred Jones's.* One difficulty is that when 
 the clients of social workers live in families they 
 are so accessible to visitors. Many people come 
 * See Chapters II and III. 
 179 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 and go on one social work errand or another, each 
 one influencing to some extent the life of the fam- 
 ily as a whole, though often doing this quite un- 
 consciously. This difficulty is referred to in an 
 imaginary dialogue written by a case worker, in 
 which "Jane," a beginner in social work, replies 
 to her friend, "the Philanthropist." 
 
 "I understand. You mean that in a few years the 
 specialized agencies will have entirely decentralized the 
 family the truant officer will deal with the boy, the 
 friendly society with the girl, the child hygienist with the 
 child, and the baby welfare with the baby; the different 
 nurses will have visiting days, while the industrial clinic 
 will follow up the man. There will be psychiatric special- 
 ists for middle and old age and a budget specialist for re- 
 lief. Everyone will have a different plan for the family " 
 
 "Dear me, what a lot of specialized persons there seem 
 to be," said the Philanthropist. There was a pause. 
 "What are you thinking about now?" he asked. 
 
 "Oh, I was just thinking about the family," said Jane. 
 
 In all probability, Jane would have been the 
 last person to wish to see any of these specialties 
 abolished, but the specialists, in so far as they are 
 dealing either with families or members of fam- 
 ilies, should know a good deal about the facts of 
 family life and should keep this knowledge in 
 1 80 
 
 i 
 
 
THE HOME 
 
 mind in all their work. Without attempting to 
 dogmatize, I should like to inquire what some of 
 these facts are. 
 
 I am aware, of course, that many regard the 
 family as an outworn social institution, incapable 
 of further adjustment to the present needs of 
 society. Those who lead well-protected lives 
 scarcely realize how many "homeless" people 
 there are in the world today homeless in the 
 sense that they have lost, or never had, "the 
 background of the hearthstone." But none of 
 the proposed substitutes for this background, in 
 so far as they have been tried, seem to work very 
 well. All question of legal sanctions aside, it 
 would seem that children have ^a right to two 
 parents and that thevJiave-arTfght to them per- 
 manently. Unless these parents are able to main- 
 tain a genuine partnership, their children suffer 
 cruel loss. Speaking broadly, children do not 
 prosper without fathers and mothers who love 
 them and love one another. If this is true, then 
 we have a certain definite goal to work toward, no 
 matter how far the institution of marriage may 
 now lag behind. 
 
 181 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 A colleague says that much of the disturbance 
 in family life today is due to the struggle within 
 the family for greater democracy. She quotes 
 Professor Tufts, "Democracy in national life 
 steadies as it grows older. So will democracy in 
 family life." I heartily agree, but we must al- 
 ways remember that democracy in the family is 
 not possible if either husband or wife is markedly 
 abnormal. The marriage of the unfit will con- 
 tinue to perpetuate either anarchy or autocracy 
 within the family until a way of preventing such 
 marriage is found. 
 
 Nowhere in the field of public administration is 
 the state treating unequal things with a blinder 
 equality than in its enforcement of our present 
 marriage laws diverse it is true, but not ra- 
 tionally so. Thoughtful people agree that, while 
 marriage should be made easy for all who are 
 competent to found real homes, there should be 
 proper safeguards against the marriage of those 
 too young to marry, of those who are being 
 coerced into marriage, and of those who will in- 
 evitably or even probably communicate or trans- 
 
 182 
 
THE HOME 
 
 mit disease or mental defect through marriage.* 
 The social casej&orkexsjo f the country s hou M not 
 only kqojK ir pres^f marriage laws and their 
 lacks, but should realize the supreme^imftort- 
 ance of the way in whic h these law s, are*admin- 
 istered. Practical adaptation of the intent of 
 the law to the individual circumstances will 
 probably have to develop certain case work 
 features in time.f 
 
 Clashes of tastes and ambitions, varying re- 
 sponses to sudden external change, refusal to 
 abandon an outgrown adjustment all these play 
 their part in marital unhappiness. The mere 
 lack of flexibility is a fruitful source of trouble 
 and one which always brings to my mind George 
 Meredith's description of a married pair: 
 
 * For necessary modifications of this too briefly expressed 
 principle, see "The Right to Marry" by Dr. Adolf Meyer in 
 The Survey for June 3, 1916. 
 
 t As an illustration of the close relation between social 
 case wdrk and social reform, it may be mentioned in passing 
 that the studies made by the Russell Sage Foundation, first 
 of American Marriage Laws and now of marriage law ad- 
 ministration (this latter still in process), have grown 
 directly out of my relations with family case work. 
 
 ' 183 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 Lovers beneath the singing sky of May 
 
 They wandered once; clear as the dew on flowers: 
 
 But they fed not on the advancing hours: 
 
 Their hearts held cravings for the buried day. 
 
 To resist change and fail of adjustment to it is 
 to lose everything in a human relation that is 
 best worth keeping. There can be no per- 
 manence, that is, with the extreme of rigidity. 
 This law of growth by modification can be mis- 
 applied, of course, in discussions of the family. 
 Dr. Felix Adler makes a very noble application of 
 it to the family threshold, to marriage itself, 
 when he maintains that, instead-iiL-marcying 
 with the full determination to have our own way 
 more than ever, we should accept marriage as the 
 greatest opportunity which will ever come to us 
 to subject our selves to modifying influences.* 
 Education for marriage is probably the most neg- 
 lected part of the whole social program of our 
 time. As Professor Ross says, we must learn "to 
 make the social atmosphere frosty toward foolish 
 and frivolous ideals of marriage," and must fix 
 
 * Adler, Felix: Marriage and Divorce, p. 35 sq. New 
 York, McClure, 1905. 
 
 184 
 
THE HOME 
 
 sound ideals of marriage and the family "every- 
 where in social tradition, so that the young shall 
 meet them at every turn."* The content of this 
 teaching will have to be provided in part by 
 family case work experience. 
 
 In many of the foreign families in America, 
 especially in those best known to case workers, 
 autocracy is a tradition. Here is an opportunity 
 to build a bridge over which both parents and 
 children may cross to democracy without loss of 
 family solidarity, as, for example, in the Allegri 
 family situation described earlier. We hardly 
 realize the demoralization that can come to the 
 family in America solely through the fact that 
 foreign parents suffer the full shock of sudden 
 change in a new environment and are unable to 
 adapt the training of their children to New 
 World institutions. 
 
 One case worker found her ingenuity taxed to reconcile 
 an Italian father's social conventions with American ways 
 of restoring a dangerously ill girl to health. An operation 
 was needed and the hospital in which it could be performed 
 had been found. But no entreaties moved the father, 
 
 * Ross, E. A.: Principles of Sociology, p. 590. New 
 York, Century Co., 1920. 
 
 185 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 determined that his child should not leave her home. At 
 last the case worker discovered that he regarded a young 
 unmarried woman as permanently disgraced who spent a 
 night away from the protection of the parental roof. The 
 adaptation made was an arrangement by which father 
 could accompany daughter to the hospital and stay there 
 long enough to assure her restoration to health without 
 blasting her reputation. 
 
 In this incomplete enumeration of inequalities 
 having their origin within the home we have to 
 reckon with that con flict of the generation s which 
 is the conflict of youth in taking on definite 
 personal relations with the outside world re- 
 lations independent of the family. Sometimes 
 the home nest has been so over-protected that 
 the nestlings have never learned to fly. This 
 is a situation now much dwelt upon by the men- 
 tal hygienists. Children fail to grow up emo- 
 tionally, they do not develop the power of pur- 
 poseful action and are no better, on some sides, 
 than the domesticated animals to which refer- 
 ence was made in the last chapter. In other 
 words, their homes have failed, in dealing with 
 these younger members, to reconcile the two prin- 
 ciples of interdependence and of purposeful, inde- 
 186 
 
i THE HOME 
 
 pendent action. It is seldom that the principles 
 become wholly complementary in the later life of 
 one in whose early life they have failed of recon- 
 ciliation. But the other side of the picture must 
 not be ignored . Warping may come in quite other 
 ways, such as in lack of sensitive response to social 
 obligations, one of which is the obligation to par- 
 ents. There are few more appealing figures in 
 imaginative literature than the widowed father 
 of Arkady and the old parents of Bazarov in 
 Turgenev's masterpiece, Fathers and Children. 
 Arkady, it will be remembered, brings back from 
 the university a scorn of his father's favorite poet, 
 Pushkin, which he does not hesitate to reiterate, 
 and Bazarov's mother must give him her blessing 
 by stealth, so emancipated is he. 
 
 Of course we have to reckon with the fact that 
 not everything which calls itself a family is one. 
 There is such a thing as a "sham family," and 
 the case worker must learn to make the distinc- 
 tion between sham and real, invidious though it 
 seem, if he is to face his task with courage. 
 Something more than the mere ceremony which 
 legalizes a relation must constitute the family 
 
 i8 7 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 bond, and a sham family is one in which this 
 something more is not only absent but lacking 
 past all human power to restore or create. Where 
 there are children, the test is this: Can the chil- 
 dren of this pair, left where they are, grow up to 
 be decent heads of families later? If this is not 
 either probable or conceivable, then the breeding 
 place of contagion and social disruption must be 
 broken up, when this can be achieved legally. 
 The breaking up will be in the interests of family 
 life and in no sense disregardful of its claims. 
 Probably the only people who still hold that 
 parental rights are absolute are those who have 
 never seen the misery and injustice which the ap- 
 plication of this theory can manufacture. They 
 have never learned from experience with our 
 courts (though there has been some real improve- 
 ment in them) that right for right, justice for 
 justice parents still have better standing in the 
 court than the child has. 
 
 It would seem that the preceding catalogue of 
 
 difficulties to be overcome in family life almost 
 
 constitutes an indictment of the family, and 
 
 makes it clear that man could better get his first 
 
 188 
 
THE HOME 
 
 lessons in individuality and sociality somewhere 
 else. But that somewhere else has not been 
 found. One who has observed the devastating 
 effect of the large congregate institution or of the 
 crowded classroom upon the personality of chil- 
 dren begins to understand somewhat better the 
 relation of natural ties, of affection and undivided 
 attention to the normal development of the hu- 
 man being, even when the attention is relatively 
 unskilled. 
 
 If it were possible for all my readers to know 
 the originals of the case records from which I 
 have drawn the stories given earlier, they would 
 realize this truth even more fully. Thus, George 
 Foster bitterly regretted leaving each of the two 
 free homes in which he had been placed before 
 going to his present one. He had the normal v 
 child's passionate desire to belong to some one in 
 particular, to have a background of his very own. 
 The external conditions in the Winifred Jones 
 home might well have made any one hesitate to 
 regard it as a good home for small children, but a 
 lively sense of the available alternatives probably 
 influenced the case worker's decision to keep the 
 189 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 home together as long as possible, and gave her 
 an added reason for doing everything by which it 
 could become a better one. There are some 
 things that cannot be turned out at wholesale, 
 and a man or woman who can be counted an 
 asset to society is one of them. It is true that the 
 school, the club, the workshop, the trade or pro- 
 fessional organization, and organized political 
 activities come in succession to exercise those 
 sides of character, those needs of contact, of 
 struggle upon equal terms with one's peers, which 
 the family cannot supply; but the protective and 
 benevolent instincts have their genesis in the 
 home and, throughout life, this cradle of loyalty 
 and of service supplies a trustworthy measure 
 for man's other activities. 
 
 I believe that study of the published biog- 
 raphies of distinguished men and women would 
 supplement and help to enrich the experience 
 gained of home life by social workers, many of 
 whom are likely to see it under abnormal condi- 
 tions. Let me give only two examples of what I 
 mean, the first of which is taken from the Letters 
 of William James. It throws a suggestive light 
 190 
 
THE HOME 
 
 upon that intimate mingling of successive genera- 
 tions which is more characteristic of the home 
 than of any other social institution. The letter 
 quoted from is the last one that William James, 
 then in England, wrote to his father, dangerously 
 ill in this country: 
 
 In that mysterious gulf of the past into which the pres- 
 ent soon will fall and go back and back, yours is still the 
 central figure. All my intellectual life I derive from you; 
 and though we have often seemed at odds in the expres- 
 sion thereof, I'm sure there's a harmony somewhere, and 
 that our strivings will combine. What my debt to you 
 is goes beyond all my power of estimating, so early, 
 so penetrating and so constant has been the influ- 
 ence. . . . 
 
 As for myself, I know what trouble I've given you at 
 various times through my peculiarities; and as my own 
 boys grow up, I shall learn more and more of the kind of 
 trial you had to overcome in superintending the development 
 of a creature different from yourself, for whom you felt re- 
 sponsible. I say this merely to show how my sympathy 
 with you is likely to grow much livelier, rather than to 
 fade and not for the sake of regrets.* 
 
 My second example from biography is taken 
 
 * The Letters of William James. Edited by his son. 
 Vol. I, p. 219 sq. Boston, The Atlantic Monthly Press, 
 1920. The italics are mine. 
 
 191 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 from the Life of Pasteur. It seems to me to illus- 
 trate not only, as my first did, the bond between 
 the generations, the continuity of family life, but 
 to show how, through ties of affection, the widest 
 ran^e of cultural anajnrnents can be held to- 
 gether in r elations of mutual h elpfulness in one 
 small home. That home, a little tannery in the 
 Jura, not far from the Swiss border, consisted of 
 the two parents, their one son and two daughters. 
 The father was of peasant stock, but had been 
 one of Napoleon Bonaparte's soldiers. It was a 
 great struggle to send the only boy away to 
 school, and through the lad's intense homesick- 
 ness the first such venture failed. When at last 
 young Pasteur's studies were well under way, he 
 contrived to carry the home folks along; then 
 and later he was careful to see that each member 
 of the family shared in the intellectual adventures 
 of the student. He made careful drawings 
 large, that the father might see them with his 
 failing vision of the crystal formations which 
 were his first important discovery. "Tell me 
 about your studies," wrote the elder Pasteur, 
 "about your doings at Barbet's. Do you still 
 192 
 
THE HOME 
 
 attend M. Pouillet's lectures, or do you find that 
 one science hampers another? I should think 
 not; on the contrary, one should be a help to 
 the other." The principle of co-ordination ap- 
 plies not to science alone, as this shrewd tanner 
 in the hills, with mind keyed by affection to its 
 farthest reach, probably conjectured. It applies 
 to the family as well; unity in diversity helps. 
 Years after these parents had gone to their 
 rest, the citizens of that region made a holiday 
 and dedicated a bronze tablet affixed to the small 
 house in which Pasteur was born. He was there, 
 this man whose work in chemistry had revolu- 
 tionized the scientific thinking of Europe, and he 
 was deeply moved. I cannot better illustrate the 
 relation between the "first practical syllogism" 
 of father, mother, and child, and the life of the 
 nation or of the still larger world of thought and 
 feeling, than by quoting Pasteur's own words to 
 his old neighbors upon that occasion. He said in 
 part, 
 
 Oh! my father, my mother, dear departed ones, who 
 lived so humbly in this little house, it is to you that I 
 owe everything. Thy enthusiasm, my brave-hearted 
 
 J 3 193 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 mother, thou hast instilled it into me. If I have always 
 associated the greatness of Science with the greatness of 
 France, it is because I was impregnated with the feelings 
 which thou hast inspired. And thou, dearest father, 
 whose life was as hard as thy hard trade, thou hast shown 
 to me what patience and protracted effort can accomplish. 
 It is to thee that I owe perseverance in daily work. Not only 
 hadst thou the qualities which go to make a useful life, but 
 also admiration for great men and great things. To look 
 upwards, learn to the utmost, to seek to rise ever higher, 
 such was thy teaching. I can see thee now, after a hard 
 day's work, reading in the evening some story of the bat- 
 tles in the glorious epoch of which thou wast a witness. 
 Whilst teaching me to read, thy care was that I should 
 learn the greatness of France. 
 
 Be ye blessed, my dear parents, for what ye have been, 
 and may the homage done today to your little house be 
 yours! * 
 
 * Vallery-Radot, Rene: The Life of Pasteur, Vol. II, 
 p. 155. London, Constable and Co., 191 1. 
 
 194 
 
IX 
 
 SCHOOL WORKSHOP HOSPITAL 
 COURT 
 
 T HAPPEN to live in a city in which one of the 
 A leading issues of several successive municipal 
 campaigns has been the financing, housing, and 
 general administration of the school system. The 
 local schools are charged with the education of 
 more than 900,000 children. One of the New 
 York newspapers devoting most attention to edu- 
 cational matters comments editorially: "Our 
 educational system was planned in 1898 by au- 
 thorities who studied the subject too academic- 
 ally. As Matthew Arnold said of the French 
 schools, at a given hour it was certain that every 
 child in the same grade was opening the same 
 text to the same page and memorizing the same 
 facts."* One can imagine the jealous guardians 
 of our democracy laying down the law about the 
 
 *New York Evening Post for October 13, 192 1. 
 195 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 importance in America of doing the same thing 
 for everybody in the same way without fear and 
 without favor. Gradually, of course, there have 
 come some variations of method for the phys- 
 ically ailing, for the backward, for training the 
 hands, and so on, with the result that a much 
 larger proportion of all the children now pass on 
 from the elementary to the secondary schools. 
 It is still difficult, however, as Miss Abbott re- 
 ports of Chicago also,* for the community to 
 realize that the problems of the school are not 
 wholly educational, that they are, in part, social. 
 Behind standard measurements, standard cur- 
 ricula, and imposing totals, professional conser- 
 vatism has been well entrenched in many of our 
 school systems, and it was not until 1906 that the 
 first tentative introduction of social case work 
 ideas was even attempted. These ideas and 
 methods were introduced by home and school 
 visitors, or visiting teachers, financed at first by 
 private agencies and still fostered by them, but 
 
 * Abbott, Edith, and Breckenridge, S. P.: Truancy and 
 Non-Attendance in the Chicago Schools, p. 227. University 
 of Chicago Press, 19 17. 
 
 196 
 
SCHOOL WORKSHOP HOSPITAL COURT 
 
 now taken over in part by the school administra- 
 tions. The new venture, as one educator phrases 
 it, was an effort "to rescue the child from the 
 children and the teachers from the school." If 
 ever a huge problem needed to be separated into 
 its constituent parts and each part analyzed, it 
 was the problem of public elementary education 
 in this country at the beginning of the twentieth 
 century. 
 
 Even now the visiting teacher movement has 
 made no more than an encouraging start. It is 
 closely related, of course, to medical inspection 
 and mental testing in the schools, to vocational 
 guidance, and to the various other individualizing 
 aspects of school work, but more than any of the 
 others it occupies that strategic ground between 
 home and school over which there is still no well 
 used path. There are five school hours in a 
 child's day and nineteen other hours; obviously, 
 a valuable approach to the school child is through 
 his social relationships in those out-of-school 
 hours. I am indebted, for the most part, in the 
 brief account of visiting teaching which follows, 
 to a pamphlet recently published by the Public 
 197 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 Education Association of New York, which gives 
 the results of correspondence with 60 visiting 
 teachers in 28 cities. 
 
 A visi ting tea cher is a social worker, preferably 
 one with some classroom experience of teaching. 
 She undertakes, for a given number of pupils re- 
 ported to her by the sc hool for poor s cholarship, 
 bad h pr 1th, miscondnrt^lateness, irregular atten- 
 dance, or for what appear to be adverse home 
 conditions, to discover the causal factors in the 
 difficulty and then tries to work out a better ad- 
 justment. It is not astonishing to find that, 
 among the measures she most frequently em- 
 ploys, are the exercising of personal influence, 
 winning the _co-opera jon of parents, seeking the 
 advice and assistance_oi_medical and mental ex- 
 perts, seekirj^the_ajgLof the various social agen- 
 cies, utilizing recreational facilities, and changing 
 the child's environment. We have seen repeat- 
 edly that these are the measures most frequently 
 used by all social case workers. "Change of 
 environment" may mean a change outside any 
 school, within the present school, or to another 
 school. Such changes within the present school 
 198 
 
SCHOOL WORKSHOP HOSPITAL COURT 
 
 as a promotion, a demotion, and a transfer to a 
 special class, are based on information brought 
 back to the teachers after a study of the individ- 
 ual child in his neighborhood environment and in 
 that of his home. The analysis of replies to in- 
 quiries sent out shows that 
 
 Even in schools where the children have been reclassi- 
 fied on the basis of mentality, visiting teachers report 
 having found children whose scholastic attainments did 
 not tally with their intelligence quotients, and whose 
 "physical condition," " out-of -school influences," "family 
 history," " character disabilities," etc., had to be taken 
 into account in interpreting their failures. Adjustment 
 of the adverse home conditions, whatever they were, re- 
 sulted in bringing these children up in lessons to the 
 level where their intelligence showed they should be. 
 The following history illustrates this type of child: A boy 
 of nine with an intelligence quotient of 120 was doing very 
 poor work, in the 4th grade. The visiting teacher found 
 that he read till n at night "any books he found in the 
 library." He rarely went out "not in this neighbor- 
 hood!" The visiting teacher correlated his reading with 
 his lessons; interested him in outdoor athletics; and with 
 the mother worked out a vigorous daily program which 
 left him at night physically tired and mentally satisfied, 
 and ready to retire early. Interest and oversight brought 
 this child up to the standard which his ability warranted, 
 
 199 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 and in addition changed him from a dreamer and laggard 
 into an energetic boy and pupil.* 
 
 There is one discouraging aspect of this new 
 development in social case work. Those engaged 
 in the task, some under public auspices and some 
 under private, are often overburdened with more 
 work than they can possibly do well. A visiting 
 teacher who has to deal with more than 200 chil- 
 dren a year is not doing social case work or very 
 much else of a socially productive character. In 
 many school Systems the annual load for each 
 worker is from 300 to 500, and some report a 
 case-load of 1,000. Even the figure of 200 chil- 
 dren is altogether too high; if the work is to 
 yield needed insights and to make its full con- 
 tribution to the remolding of school policies, it 
 might well be cut in half. As it is, the figures sub- 
 mitted in the report published by the Public 
 Education Association show that in some of the 
 
 * The Visiting Teacher in the United States, p. 33 sq. 
 A Survey by the National Association of Visiting Teachers 
 and Home and School Visitors. New York, Public Educa- 
 tion Association, 192 1. 
 
 20O 
 
SCHOOL WORKSHOP HOSPITAL COURT 
 
 28 cities replying to inquiries they have the term 
 "visiting teaching" without the service. 
 
 No one of the organized forms of social life can 
 be studied save against a background of all the 
 others. Consider, for example, the network of 
 relations existing between the home and the 
 workshop. More than thirteen years ago, at a 
 meeting of social workers, I ventured to take the 
 position, then sharply challenged, that all the 
 larger adjustments of industry, finance, inter- 
 national relations, government itself, could be 
 tested in the long run by their effect upon family 
 life; that they must conform finally to the needs 
 of the home or else be scrapped or reorganized.* 
 Some of my hearers felt that tnese other social 
 institutions rather than the family were likely to 
 be the winners in what seemed to them an un- 
 equal contest. But I must have failed to make 
 my meaning clear; at least, I have seen no rea- 
 son to change my mind on this point. If, for 
 example, the railroad trainman cannot see his 
 
 * Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities 
 and Correction (now the National Conference of Social 
 Work) for 1908, p. 77. 
 
 201 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 children often enough really to know them and 
 for them to know him; if it be true that long 
 working hours, or low wages, or sudden transfers 
 of large bodies of workmen to a distant point are 
 destructive of a sound family life, then industry 
 itself cannot fail to be crippled by the inevitable 
 reaction against such social blindness, and a re- 
 organization of industry becomes inevitable if 
 civilization is to survive. 
 
 It is possible, of course, to turn this illustration 
 about and demonstrate that some of the bases of 
 family life itself had their roots in economic and 
 labor conditions. Thus Vinogradoff, in his brief 
 review of tribal law, shows how often both tribal 
 organization and marital customs were shaped by 
 the surrounding physical and industrial condi- 
 tions.* The two views are not irreconcilable; 
 one relates to origins, the other to possible future 
 developments. 
 
 Mention of some very recently organized rela- 
 tions between industry and social case work may 
 
 * Vinogradoff, Sir Paul: Outlines of Historical Juris- 
 prudence, Vol. I, pp. 163-212. Oxford University Press, 
 
 202 
 
SCHOOL WORKSHOP HOSPITAL COURT 
 
 suggest what certain trends in industry now are. 
 One of the first contacts of case work with indus- 
 try came about through the child labor cam- 
 paigns, but I am reserving any account of these 
 and of some other relations with industry for a 
 separate chapter, because they will serve to illus- 
 trate the interplay of all the types of social work 
 in effecting certain important social reforms. 
 
 The actual entry of case work into the admin- 
 istrative side of industry is very recent. Changes 
 in methods of production which account for this 
 new departure were indicated by the late Frank- 
 lin K. Lane when he wrote, at the end of his 
 term of service in the Department of the Inter- 
 ior, "We are quickly passing out of the rough- 
 and-ready period of our national life, in which 
 we have dealt wholesale with men and things, 
 into a period of more intensive development in 
 which we must seek to find the special qualities 
 of the individual unit, whether that unit be an 
 acre of desert, a barrel of oil, a mountain canyon, 
 the flow of a river, or the capacity of the humblest 
 of men." 
 
 It is not possible to dwell here upon the details 
 203 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 of "personnel work," as it is called, but it should 
 be evident that not only this service, as now 
 developed in factories and workshops, but the 
 specialized division of it which has to do with the 
 mental hygiene of industrial workers will have to 
 utilize the qualities and technique which belong 
 to the social case worker. 
 
 Another interesting application of case work to 
 industrial problems is in the workmen's com- 
 pensation field. The New York State Industrial 
 Commission has employed two trained case 
 workers to collect the social facts which will be 
 helpful to the Commission in making individual 
 decisions about cases of workmen's compensa- 
 tion. Their services also include such tasks as 
 selecting proper guardians (where the benefi- 
 ciaries of the award are children), following up 
 the award by some specialized service which will 
 render the compensation more effective (securing 
 training, work for cripples, medical service, and 
 so on) , and making connection with the social re- 
 sources of the community wherever difficulties 
 are brought to light with which the Commission 
 cannot possibly deal. Miss Frances Perkins, to 
 ?Q4 
 
SCHOOL WORKSHOP HOSPITAL COURT 
 
 whom the state owes the inauguration of this 
 service, gives the following illustration, among 
 others, of its value: 
 
 The father of the Hogan family was burned to death 
 in 1 916. The mother was already dead. The Com- 
 mission at that time had the children's uncle, Mr. Craig, 
 assume the guardianship of the children and receive the 
 money for their support. Some time in 1920 it was 
 noted that Mr. Craig no longer signed receipts for the 
 money and a letter brought the response from Mrs. 
 Craig that her husband was not home and that she was 
 receiving the money instead. The After-Care Service 
 was later asked to look into the case, chiefly because 
 the Commissioner remembered the unusual beauty and 
 charm of the Hogan children and wondered how 'they 
 were getting along. 
 
 The family was found living in wretched surround- 
 ings. Mr. Craig was serving a five years' sentence for 
 "burglary. Mrs. Craig was doing work by the day and 
 Mary Hogan was kept out of school to care for the small 
 children. Tom Hogan, the eighteen-year-old boy, was 
 found to be badly crippled as a result of a street acci- 
 dent, and much in , need of medical care. It proved to 
 be easy to secure a grant from the widow's pension fund 
 for Mrs. Craig which, with the Hogan children's com- 
 pensation and help from some of the Hogan relatives 
 who were visited, enabled Mrs. Craig to remain at home 
 and care for the children. Mary Hogan was sent to 
 school, Tom was placed under the care of a good ortho- 
 
 205 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 paedic clinic and is just recovering from an operation 
 which will straighten the twisted leg to nearly normal. 
 In this case our advice to the Commission was to con- 
 tinue payments for the children in the Craig home, but 
 it was only after considerable work that conditions were 
 such as to warrant this recommendation.* 
 
 Probably there are many other points in- 
 volving the relation of the economically stronger 
 to the economically weaker in which a law, how- 
 ever well drawn, or the usual routine of adminis- 
 tration, however orderly, will fall short of achiev- 
 ing essential justice unless administration can 
 include these case by case adjustments. But I 
 pass on to the one other question under this gen- 
 eral heading of the workshop that I can attempt 
 even to mention; namely, rinding work. The 
 phrases "vocational guidance" and "vocational 
 education" have been in every one's mouth this 
 long while, but the actual working out of a 
 sound technique of procedure looking to the best 
 welfare of each individual dealt with has arrived 
 very slowly. To this delay may be traced some 
 
 * Perkins, Frances: "An Experiment in the Application 
 of Case Work Methods to a New Problem," in The Family 
 for April, 192 1. 
 
 206 
 
SCHOOL WORKSHOP HOSPITAL COURT 
 
 of the serious breakdowns of our after- the-war 
 vocational program. 
 
 The public employment bureaus of the war 
 period, necessary as they were, had some of the 
 same drawbacks. In theory, they had only one 
 task : to bring together the man in need of work 
 and the man in need of a worker. But the as- 
 sumption that these two parties to a bargain 
 meet on equal terms is not always borne out by 
 the facts. Here, too, in time, must come the 
 social adjustments which are already being made 
 in some of the juvenile departments of state em- 
 ployment bureaus where, as one official expresses 
 it, they are trying, in placing a young person, to 
 take into account the applicant's special apti- 
 tudes, training, physique, home environment, 
 and personality. After placing him, they are also 
 careful to get some idea of the result of place- 
 ment. No employment bureau can make deci- 
 sions for either worker or employer, but it can 
 strengthen the basis of decision for both by 
 putting at the disposal of each a clearer picture 
 of the concrete situation. 
 
 This is not the place in which to attempt a de- 
 207 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 tailed account of social case work in periods of in- 
 dustrial depression, though the temporary care of 
 the unemployed and their families has always 
 been a case^work burden at these times, and the 
 fact of unemployment has been a fruitful cause of 
 other maladjustments demanding social treat- 
 ment for years after the period of depression was 
 over. Violent fluctuations between times of great 
 scarcity of workers and times of great scarcity 
 of work are due to causes over which the social 
 agencies of the country have little control. 
 They realize this, and the very agencies that 
 have done most to mitigate the disastrous effects 
 of hard times are the ones that have most per- 
 sistently urged preventive measures upon gov- 
 ernment and upon industry. "When people are 
 sick," to quote from a report of mine written 
 after the panic of 1907-08, "we can cure them; 
 when they are bad, we can try to reform them; 
 but when they are out of work there is only one 
 effective remedy for their troubles and that is 
 real work at real wages." 
 
 Certain aspects of the situation, however, will 
 continue to need the technique of the case 
 208 
 
SCHOOL WORKSHOP HOSPITAL COURT 
 
 worker. In an earlier chapter mention was 
 made, in passing, of the varied types of the un- 
 employed and of the importance of differentia- 
 tion in their treatment.* The more varied and 
 flexible the measures taken by employers and by 
 the public, the more surely will the worst evils 
 of business cycles disappear. Meanwhile, the 
 social agencies are far from being indifferent to 
 the tragedy of the unemployed man or woman. 
 Such remedial measures as they are able to take 
 they do take, preserving intact, in so far as pos- 
 sible, their policy of diversified service. To quote 
 again from the 1908 report, they "make a loan 
 to one, send another to the woody ard to work for 
 all he gets, stave off the landlord's eviction notice 
 for a third, find a chance of work outside for a 
 fourth, place the fifth in a hospital, send the 
 sixth and his whole family to the country, pro- 
 vide cash for the exceptionally provident buyer 
 who is the seventh, relieve the improvident 
 eighth sparingly with supplies plus a work-test, 
 and, instead of doing work twice over, turn the 
 
 *See Chapter VI, p. 154. 
 14 209 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 ninth over to the charity that is already caring 
 for him." 
 
 But, just as after a public disaster all disabili- 
 ties are in danger of being credited to the earth- 
 quake, or flood, or fire, so in a time of industrial 
 depression social agencies are in danger of assum- 
 ing that their clients are in need of nothing but 
 employment, when in fact their most serious mal- 
 adjustments may be quite other. This blindness 
 of the preoccupied might have wrecked the treat- 
 ment of Rupert Young and his family, as will be 
 explained in the next chapter.* 
 
 I have just been discussing a failure in indus- 
 trial organization which periodically thrusts upon 
 social case work the handling of a mass problem 
 with which it is ill fitted to cope. In sharp con- 
 trast to this industrial breakdown is the strong 
 organization achieved in this generation by medi- 
 cine and the hospital. Not only have the won- 
 derful advances of medicine and surgery and 
 public sanitation supplied the family agencies 
 and those engaged in children's social work with 
 
 *See p. 239 sq. 
 210 
 
SCHOOI^-WORKSHOP HOSPITAL COURT 
 
 a whole battery of new resources, but they have 
 also developed within the hospital itself a new 
 and most valuable adaptation of social case work 
 to the needs of patients in the dispensary and the 
 wards. 
 
 Social service in the hospital had its begin- 
 nings in the desire of forward-looking physicians 
 to achieve better and more lasting results. They 
 found that social insights strengthened their 
 diagnosis, and social adjustments their therapy. 
 Here, in medicine, note again the line of develop- 
 ment to which I have called attention more than 
 once in other connections: first, in the long, slow 
 progress there was promiscuous dosing, then a 
 dogmatic same-thing-for-everybody, then the 
 more or less scientific classification of diseases and 
 a standardized treatment for each. Now, how- ( Y 
 ever, socialized medicine begins to treat not only 
 the disease but the patient in his individual en- % 
 vironment a marriage, as it were, of medicine 
 and social work. Preventive medicine owes its 
 vitality and its continuing advance not only to 
 laboratory experimentation and new discoveries, 
 but to the application of such discoveries to life, 
 
 211 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 to the adaptations and new problems presented 
 by the medical clinician, and by the reports of 
 social workers upon environmental obstacles and 
 end results. 
 
 About three hundred and fifty hospitals in the 
 United States now have social service depart- 
 ments. This development has sometimes out- 
 stripped the supply of competent medical-social 
 workers. Progress has also been delayed, in some 
 hospitals, by the tendency to overload the social 
 case workers with administrative duties which 
 could be as well performed by others. But all 
 types of social case work owe a great debt to 
 modifications in method worked out in dispen- 
 sary and hospital by the case workers there who 
 have been doing their work under new conditions 
 and in close co-operation with the highly skilled 
 practitioners of another profession. The trained 
 case worker interprets the community to the hos- 
 pital and the hospital to the community. In the 
 matter of hospital admissions and discharges, the 
 social worker can make a whole series of adjust- 
 ments that are time-saving and life-saving. At 
 
 212 
 
SCHOOL WORKSHOP HOSPITAL COURT 
 
 the same time, however, Miss Ida Cannon's 
 warning should be heeded when she says: 
 
 At present, the administrative function of the social 
 worker in the clinic is crowding out her social case work. 
 She is too busy to get into the homes, to keep fresh and 
 clear before her the social situation in the background. 
 Thus she becomes an institutionalized person and loses 
 the biggest contribution she has to give to the hospital, 
 that of never thinking in routine, of keeping fresh always 
 the community's and patient's point of view.* 
 
 A branch of medical-social case work which 
 has developed quite rapidly since the war is what 
 is known as psychiatric social work. It is only 
 when such social work is undertaken in close col- 
 laboration with a thoroughly competent psy- 
 chiatrist that it concerns us here. The value of 
 collaboration must be apparent, since, in the 
 mental field even more than in the physical, thor- 
 ough diagnosis must depend in part upon social 
 evidence, and the treatment which follows is so 
 
 * Cannon, Ida M.: Address before the American Hos- 
 pital Association, October, 1920. See also Miss Cannon's 
 book, Social Work in Hospitals, of which a revised edition, 
 to be published by the Russell Sage Foundation, is now in 
 press. 
 
 213 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 largely a matter of better adjustment to the en- 
 vironment.* 
 
 Probably every one would agree that tradition 
 and precedent are more heavily weighing down 
 and clogging the daily procedures of courts than 
 of hospitals. Both, however, are under the con- 
 trol of long-established professions, and to the 
 extent that these professions are highly organized 
 and class-conscious the social worker in the court 
 or hospital is often at a certain disadvantage. It 
 is important, therefore, for the social case worker 
 who enters hospital or court service to be thor- 
 oughly well grounded in the principles and tech- 
 nique of social work in advance. "We read, in- 
 deed," says George Eliot, "that the walls of 
 Jericho fell down before the sound of trumpets; 
 but we nowhere hear that those trumpets were 
 hoarse and feeble." 
 
 The court is the last of the social institutions 
 that I can here consider, and by court I must 
 be understood to mean the whole machinery of 
 justice, including its functions of interpretation 
 
 *See footnote, p. 104. 
 214 
 
SCHOOL WORKSHOP HOSPITAL COURT 
 
 and of enforcement. In the old days these func- 
 tions were perverted by our blind desire to punish 
 and to avenge. Later came the attempt to make 
 the punishment fit the crime. Now we are only 
 just beginning to realize that we should make the 
 punishment (the treatment rather) fit the crimi- 
 nal. Dean Roscoe Pound tells us that 
 
 The nineteenth century was hostile to individualization 
 and to administrative discretion, which is the chief agency 
 of individualization, seeking to reduce the whole adminis- 
 tration of justice to abstractly just, formal, rigid rules, 
 mechanically administered. This was true the world over. 
 It was specially true, and true to an exaggerated degree, 
 in America. . . . Hence, we got rigid detailed pro- 
 cedure and hard-and-fast schemes of penal treatment, lest 
 prosecutor or court or prison authorities do something 
 spontaneous in view of the exigencies of a particular 
 case.* 
 
 Modern courts are turning to certain groups of 
 specialists no longer as expert witnesses, sum- 
 moned by the prosecution and the defense to 
 prove that black is not so black and white not so 
 white after all, but as disinterested advisers of 
 the court itself, serving neither side of the con- 
 
 * Pound and Frankfurter: Criminal Justice in Cleveland. 
 Cleveland Foundation, 1922. ft 
 
 215 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 troversy or cause but seeking the point at which 
 the best interests of society and of the individuals 
 involved may be said to meet. With the gradual 
 development of probation, of the suspended sen- 
 tence and parole, and of the indeterminate-Sen- 
 tence, there has come the opportunity of the 
 physician, the psychologist, the psychiatrist, and 
 of the social worker to suggest different things 
 that should be taken into consideration in judg- 
 ing a man, and certain other things that may be 
 done different things for different people in 
 placing his life under the temporary guidance 
 and control of the state. 
 
 The plan of juvenile and adult probation is 
 probably the most important single agency 
 through which social work now enters the courts. 
 Juvenile probation originated with a private 
 child-helping agency in the '6o's, but even now its 
 use by the courts is far from being thoroughly 
 effective. In this field of fixed traditions and 
 formal judgments changes come slowly. Thus, 
 probation is still used in some courts as a substi- 
 tute for an unpopular and difficult decision; it is 
 still used, moreover, in cases in which probation 
 216 
 
SCHOOL WORKSHOP HOSPITAL COURT 
 
 is bound to be ineffectual.* It follows from these 
 misapplications of a good method that con- 
 scientious probation officers are burdened with 
 more cases than they can possibly treat effec- 
 tively, and again we find a form of case work 
 laboring under the disadvantage of unwieldy 
 numbers. This is very far from being universally 
 true in the probation field, where some excellent 
 case work has been done, but it is truer than it 
 should be. In Maria Bielowski's story is re- 
 corded the good work of a probation officer who, 
 it will be remembered, gathered the social evi- 
 dence in the case before sentence was pro- 
 nounced. 
 
 The best of the lawyers and judges look for- 
 ward to many changes in court procedure. When 
 I was preparing the manuscript of a book on 
 Social Diagnosis, I asked a well-known authority 
 on the law of evidence to read and criticize some 
 of my chapters. He was good enough to do this, 
 and many of his criticisms were wholesomely 
 
 * See, for example, Bulletin 2 of the Seybert Institution 
 of Philadelphia on the Handling of Cases by the Juvenile 
 Court and Court of Domestic Relations in that city. 
 
 217 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 severe. But he added that he had not realized 
 before what a rich field of usefulness there could 
 be for evidence outside the court room. "The 
 great thing," he continued, "is that in the court 
 of the next generation, with its staff of social 
 workers, these materials and methods will be the 
 main ones, and some large part of our present 
 technical rules will have gone by the board." 
 
 There is a long road to travel before any of us 
 can lay claim to such a knowledge of the elements 
 of social evidence, to such skill in effecting better 
 adjustments between men and their social en- 
 vironment, as will even begin to justify this 
 prophecy, but the goal is worth striving for, and, 
 meanwhile, every stage of the journey is full of 
 interest and instruction. 
 
 It must not be inferred that the home, the 
 school, the workshop, the hospital, and the court 
 are the only places in which social case work has 
 already proved of service, or in which it will have 
 to bear an important part in shaping future 
 policies. Even in these five social institutions, 
 only a few of the case work developments al- 
 218 
 
SCHOOL WORKSHOP HOSPITAL COURT 
 
 ready achieved have here been indicated. Thus 
 nothing has been said of the combination of 
 domestic science and case work in improved 
 household management, and nothing of the tech- 
 nique now well developed for that rehabilitation 
 of homes which must follow public disasters. 
 The protection of children from cruelty and neg- 
 lect is one branch of child welfare service, while 
 special case work with difficult children and with 
 those placed out in foster homes form two other 
 well denned child-helping specialties. Another 
 field not yet developed might be the application 
 of the principles of family and child welfare to the 
 administration of trust estates, where financial 
 institutions now responsible as administrators of 
 small annuities and the like which go to minors 
 and to maladjusted adults could incidentally 
 serve the social as well as the material welfare of 
 their clients. 
 
 Nothing has been said in connection with 
 schools about the possible social developments in 
 their attendance departments, though the at- 
 tendance officer's task, rightly understood, is a 
 social one. The issuers of working papers to 
 219 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 school children and those who attempt voca- 
 tional guidance should have some knowledge of 
 case work technique. 
 
 Shop management, and responsibility for em- 
 ploying, classifying, and promoting workers in- 
 volves many of these same processes. Commis- 
 sions for the blind, societies for the care of 
 cripples, agencies for the re-education of the 
 handicapped, find social case work an important 
 adjunct. In the prisons and reformatories of the 
 country this way of dealing with inmates in- 
 dividually is not yet well established save in the 
 exceptional institution, but at least parole officers 
 and after-care agents should be case workers. 
 Legal aid societies were organized by lawyers, 
 but a number of their promoters are now seeking 
 closer relations with family welfare societies in 
 order to combine, in such service, the social with 
 the legal point of view. A recent development 
 has been the application of social case work to 
 the better care and disposition of stranded travel- 
 ers. The immigrant just arriving at an American 
 port might be supposed to stand more in need of 
 skilful individualized guidance than any one else. 
 
 220 
 
SCHOOL WORKSHOP HOSPITAL COURT 
 
 As a matter of fact he does. But this particular 
 responsibility has been left in unskilled hands too 
 often or has not been discharged at all, so that 
 there is no adequate development of case work at 
 our national gateways today, though public atten- 
 tion has been called to this serious lack, and there 
 is reason to hope that it may soon be supplied. 
 
 Every month or so, some new and beneficent 
 application of social case work to human welfare 
 often from an entirely unexpected quarter 
 comes to my attention. Sometimes the new 
 development is far removed from the types of ser- 
 vice in which case work originated. One of these, 
 for example, comes in the private practice of 
 physicians and psychiatrists, who, after seeing 
 what case work can do in their free clinics, are 
 seeking the services of case workers for their 
 well-to-do patients. How rapidly social case 
 work will develop a private practice of its own 
 cannot be predicted, but it should be evident 
 from the examples given in this book that thfe 
 skill here described can be utilized quite as well 
 in the homes of the rich as in those of the poor, 
 that, in the one as in the other, personality can be 
 thwarted and retarded, developed and enriched. 
 221 
 
THE FORMS OF SOCIAL WORK AND 
 THEIR INTERRELATIONS 
 
 O AINTE-BEUVE tells of a surgeon in the time 
 ^ of Louis XIV who once said to Chancellor 
 Daguesseau that he wished to see an impassable 
 wall of separation erected between surgery and 
 medicine. The Chancellor replied, "But, mon- 
 sieur, on which side of the walL will you place the 
 patient?" The Chancellor's question is still a 
 pertinent one in most professions. Everywhere 
 the specialist is in danger of developing an insular 
 habit of mind, and the phenomenon does occur 
 occasionally even within the boundaries of social 
 work. We have seen that a certain specialized 
 form of skill has been taken by the social case 
 worker into our homes, courts, schools, medical 
 institutions, and industries. But quite as im- 
 portant as this skill and quite as much needed in 
 these institutions is the case worker's sense of the 
 
 222 
 
THE FORMS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 whole of social work and of the relation of each 
 part to that whole. 
 
 The other forms of social work, all of which 
 interplay with case work, are three group work, 
 social reform, and social research. Case work 
 seeks to effect better social relations by dealing L 
 with individuals one by one or within the inti- 
 mate group of the family. But social work also 
 achieves the same general ends in these other 
 ways. It includes a wide variety of group activi- 
 ties settlement work, recreational work, club, 
 neighborhood and local community work in 
 which the individual, though still met face to 
 face, becomes one of a number. By a method 
 different from that employed in either case or 
 group work, though with the same end in view, 
 social reform seeks to improve conditions in the f- 
 mass, chiefly through social propaganda and so- 
 cial legislation. Whether the immediate object 
 be better housing, better health, better working 
 conditions, better use of leisure, or a long list of 
 other objectives, the main purpose in these dif- 
 ferent social reforms still is to advance the 
 development of our human kind by improving 
 223 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 social relations. Finally, social research, with 
 its precious freight of original discovery in all 
 the fields covered by social work, has also the 
 secondary task of assembling known facts in 
 order to re-interpret them for use in social reform, 
 in group work, and in case work. 
 
 I have said earlier that social case work would 
 be only a fragment if separated from the much 
 larger field occupied by social work in general. 
 It is not enough to say this, however; the inter- 
 dependence of all the parts of social work, or 
 rather the dependence of case work upon these 
 other parts and of these others upon case work, 
 must be illustrated. 
 
 As regards the relation between social work 
 with individuals and social work with groups, it 
 should be evident to any one who has read the 
 story in these pages of Miss Sullivan's work with 
 Miss Keller and the six case illustrations follow- 
 ing that story, that the intelligent use of com- 
 munity resources, of recreational, educational, 
 and co-operative associations, is the case worker's 
 best indirect means of developing personality. 
 The isolated individual or family is never the 
 224 
 
THE FORMS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 normal individual or family. Note, for example, 
 how many community resources were summoned 
 to the assistance of Winifred Jones and her chil- 
 dren before that home began to assume a more 
 attractive aspect to its members. There is also a 
 field halfway between case work and group work 
 which, as suggested at the end of Chapter V, 
 might well provide, when better cultivated, new 
 data for social psychology. 
 
 No better advice could be given to family 
 case workers, I believe, than to study and 
 develop their work at its point of intersection 
 with social research, with group activities and 
 with social reform or mass betterment. This 
 does not mean that they should drop their work 
 or slight it in order to make special studies or 
 to engage in legislative campaigns, but it does 
 mean that they should be more scientifically pro- 
 ductive than they now are, that they should be 
 making social discoveries as a by-product of 
 successful case work (to borrow a phrase of Mrs. 
 Sheffield's), and that they should be bearing 
 faithful witness to the need of social reforms 
 wherever their daily work reveals the need. They 
 *5 225 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 should supply the pertinent details necessary 
 during the preliminary period of public educa- 
 tion, and help later to make any new legislative 
 measures workable by applying them in their 
 case work. 
 
 Two years ago I had occasion to examine a 
 number of outlines of sociology intended as 
 textbooks for college students. Each devoted at 
 least one chapter to the family, but each handled 
 the subject with a polite caution and an absence 
 of first-hand observation which was depressing. 
 The lack of substance in this initial portion of 
 the subject matter of sociology is due not so 
 much to timidity in the authorities as to the al- 
 most total absence of case studies which bear 
 upon family life. Here, in this oldest of human 
 institutions, still center the unsolved problems of 
 physical and social heredity and of physical and 
 social environment. Case work cannot solve 
 these problems, of course, but it can develop a 
 fruitful method of approach to their study, and 
 should provide, in time, a body of social data to 
 aid in their solution. 
 
 Social discovery is already indebted to family 
 226 
 
THE FORMS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 \ 
 
 case work for certain housing reforms and for the 
 
 first tuberculosis campaigns. It has also had a 
 share, to be indicated later, in child labor re- 
 form. But with reference to the internal organi- 
 zation of the family itself, its best work is still to 
 be achieved, though at present there are certain 
 studies in process which should prove helpful, 
 such as the study of marriage laws and marriage 
 law administration previously referred to; such, 
 also, as inquiries bearing upon household manage- 
 ment and upon illegitimacy. To these should be 
 added the already published studies of desertion 
 and non-support. There can be no question that 
 family case workers are in an exceptional position 
 to make valuable observations upon family life 
 at first hand where they are protected, as they 
 should be, from too large a case-load, and where 
 they have had the kind of theoretical training in 
 social science and practical training in social 
 work which supplies them with the necessary 
 background. "The interplay," says Professor 
 Park, "of the attractions, tensions, and accom- 
 modations of personalities in the intimate bonds 
 of family life have up to the present found no 
 227 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 concrete description or adequate analysis in 
 sociological inquiry."* For example, the very 
 phrase "democracy in the family" lacks defini- 
 tion at present, and will continue to lack it until 
 the case method can supply the more specific 
 observation and detail which will develop its 
 meaning. 
 
 But what relation can the highly individualized 
 work of the visiting teacher have to social work in 
 general? In the first place, visiting teachers are 
 interpreters of the intent of a whole group of 
 laws, including more especially those for the pro- 
 tection of minors, such as the school attendance 
 and child labor laws. Their service to social re- 
 form, like the service of the family case worker, is 
 a reciprocal one, for their work could not go very 
 far without the aid of social legislation. More- 
 over, "the replies," to quote again from the re- 
 port published by the New York Public Educa- 
 tion Association, "show that visiting teachers 
 have not been content to end their work with the 
 
 * Park and Burgess: Introduction to the Science of 
 Sociology, p. 216. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 
 1921. 
 
 228 
 
THE FORMS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 adjustment of individual children, but have 
 drawn conclusions from case work as to general 
 underlying causes and basic changes which 
 should forestall certain maladjustments."* 
 
 Again, the child is a social animal, and there is 
 no better way to discover neighborhood condi- 
 tions and deal with them than to see them first 
 in their effect for good or ill upon some one small 
 person who is responding to them to the very top 
 of his bent. David H. Holbrook tells in The 
 Family how the work of a visiting teacher brought 
 new life into those neighborhood activities of a 
 certain district which centered within the school 
 itself. When the mothers, especially the foreign 
 mothers, came to school parties, it was this 
 social worker who knew them and could make 
 them feel at home in the school. Mr. Holbrook 
 asks why such linking together of home and 
 school should be confined to poorer neighbor- 
 hoods. "When the teachers and patrons of so- 
 called ' better ' schools discover what advantages 
 the boys and girls of [other] schools really have 
 through their visiting teachers there will be a 
 
 * Opus cit., p. 61. 
 229 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 stampede similar to the rush that finally swept 
 manual training from its early position in classes 
 for mental defectives to an integral part in every 
 school curriculum."* 
 i The hospital social worker is in a peculiarly 
 favorable position, through close association 
 
 (with the medical profession, to aid social reform 
 and social research. The two clinicians the 
 social and the medical have their part to play 
 in the prevention of disease and in education for 
 health. Here, too, as in so many other places, 
 prevention, which is sometimes written about as 
 if it were a patent medicine, is neither a thing 
 apart nor a thing substituted, but a most val- 
 uable product of the whole process. There is new 
 legislation, for example, designed to control the 
 regulation of communicable and industrial dis- 
 eases. The practicing physician and the social 
 worker will discover any weaknesses in these new 
 laws by trying to utilize them to the utmost. 
 Gradually they can be amended and, by steady 
 pressure from clinicians, will become a part of the 
 standard of the community. 
 
 * The Family for February, 1921. 
 230 
 
THE FORMS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 Relations between the judicial function of the 
 presiding officer of a court and the socially inter- 
 pretative function of the case worker engaged in 
 court service make it especially important that 
 the court worker should know the history of 
 social work and should have a clear grasp, not 
 only of his own special technique, but of its rela- 
 tion to all the other forms of social work. No 
 narrow specialization, no coaching for cfvil ser- 
 vice examinations, can possibly fit him for his 
 responsible task. In fact, it would be difficult to 
 discover the case work field in which the full-time 
 professional worker could fittingly serve without 
 good all-round social work training. 
 
 It is natural, I suppose, that closer relations 
 than existed formerly between social work and 
 industrial reform should have begun with the at- 
 tempt to prevent the premature employment of 
 children. The earlier child labor reform cam- 
 paigns in this country gave me, as it happens, my 
 first insight into the share that every kind of 
 social work has to take in a genuine and perma- 
 nent social advance, for progress in the child 
 labor field has been striking, despite the fact that 
 231 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 some of our states still lag behind and that the 
 labor of children on farms remains unregulated. 
 The original national program of child labor re- 
 form, adopted later in outline, had its inception 
 in the mind of a woman a social worker belong- 
 ing to the social and legislative reform group. It 
 won hospitable support at once from neighbor- 
 hood and settlement workers, and from the social 
 case workers of the country. Sometimes one of 
 these two groups, sometimes the other helped to 
 gather the detailed facts necessary to arouse the 
 public, for such facts were needed, locality by 
 locality. Using in this part of the process what- 
 ever elementary knowledge of the technique of 
 social research they happened to have at com- 
 mand, neighborhood and case workers supplied 
 material for pamphlets, leaflets, and newspaper 
 articles. These by-products of individual and 
 neighborhood service would have been of little 
 use, however, without the skill of the social 
 workers specializing in social reform, who pro- 
 vided at this stage the knowledge of how to edu- 
 cate the public, how to draft workable laws, how 
 to conduct legislative campaigns. At the propa- 
 232 
 
THE FORMS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 ganda stage all the different social work groups 
 helped, sometimes against pressure from power- 
 ful interests. The social reform group, however, 
 furnished the leadership, and also much of the 
 watchful oversight which has since been nec- 
 essary. 
 
 An important part was borne by the case work- 
 ers again just after the new child labor measures 
 became law. I know from personal experience 
 in a certain state where there was, at the time, 
 greater industrial demand for the labor of children 
 than in any other, how easily the new child labor 
 law might have been a dead letter save for the 
 devoted service of the case work agencies. For 
 awhile many employers and parents were ac- 
 tively hostile to enforcement, while the adminis- 
 trators of the law were indifferent. The case 
 workers who were my colleagues had to bear 
 more abuse in a good cause than I have known 
 them to be subjected to before or since. But 
 when they undertook to work out, case by case, 
 a reasonable substitute plan for dealing with 
 every instance of alleged hardship every in- 
 stance, that is, in which parents claimed that 
 233 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 they must have the earnings of a child under 
 fourteen they were able in co-operation with the 
 local education association to render non-enforce- 
 ment unnecessary and inexcusable. Wherever, 
 in any state which had passed a child labor law, 
 there were workers in children's societies and fam- 
 ily workers " familiar with the homes of the people, 
 habituated to detailed educational processes in 
 those homes, and with the patience to make adjust- 
 ments, there the assimilation of a new standard 
 [went] forward unchecked."* Where there is no 
 such detailed work going forward quietly from 
 day to day, it often happens that a law upon the 
 statute books which has potential social value is 
 yet no better than a dishonored promissory note. 
 After this experience I learned to watch for a 
 relation between case work and any given social 
 reform. It has happened again and again, 
 though not always, that case work has preceded 
 and led up to the mass movement by supplying 
 pertinent observations and recorded data. Then 
 
 *See a paper of mine, "The Social Case Worker in a 
 Changing World," in the Proceedings of the National Con- 
 ference of Charities (now National Conference of Social 
 Work) for 1915, p. 48. 
 
 234 
 
THE FORMS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 later it has followed after the mass movement, 
 and has applied the new standard in individual 
 cases at a stage when the application was still 
 difficult. There is a still later stage, as in child 
 labor law enforcement, when social research must 
 be called in to study special phases of the sub- 
 ject the street trades, for example, or the labor 
 of children in the beet fields. This study must 
 often be undertaken by an agency which con- 
 tinues its work long after the first strongholds of 
 prejudice and inertia have been overcome. Such 
 work is still continued in the national and state 
 Child Labor Committees today, and it must not 
 be assumed that any case work society can be- 
 come a substitute for such social reform bodies. 
 It is sometimes claimed that social case work- 
 ers are not as much interested in bettering the 
 working conditions of adults as they have been 
 in preventing the employment of children. It is 
 true that the direct application of their particular 
 form of skill to adult industry is very recent, but 
 for many years they have been striving to apply 
 the broader principles of industrial justice to 
 their daily tasks. Their attitude toward "relief 
 235 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 in aid of wages" is an example, as shown in the 
 following passage from an address by Shelby M. 
 Harrison on Social Case Workers and Better In- 
 dustrial Conditions: 
 
 I was recently told of the case of a bricklayer who had 
 come to one of the charitable societies in New York for 
 aid. He was a foreigner, and at the time was not working 
 at his trade, but was employed as a porter in one of the 
 large downtown buildings. He had a large family, and, 
 since his pay was only $12 a week, the children were not 
 getting enough to eat. The question before the commit- 
 tee was what to do. Four alternatives emerged from the 
 discussion: First, the society could supplement the man's 
 wages by a regular weekly allowance to the family and let 
 him continue at work where he was; second, the society 
 might try to get his employer to pay him more wages and 
 let him still stay where he was; third, it might try to get 
 him back into his trade of bricklaying where he could earn 
 a larger wage, the society underwriting the family's needs 
 until he should become re-established; fourth, it might 
 find him better paying work outside his trade. 
 
 It will be seen that any one of the other courses would 
 be better than the first. . . . Instead of taking the sim- 
 ple and easy course involved in supplementing the man's 
 wages, the only course that some of the committee would 
 have thought of, it was far more serviceable to the family, 
 and impressed an important principle upon that part of 
 the committee, when the rule was followed which de- 
 clared in effect that ''industrial conditions and personal 
 
 236 
 
THE FORMS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 capacities are far from being as inelastic" as most of us 
 suppose. 
 
 The careful consideration of this case brought out other 
 lessons also. It showed that social case workers must be 
 interested in the general mobility of labor; in getting 
 workers into jobs where they can do their best, into 
 places where wages for them are highest relatively or 
 the cost of living lowest. The case worker must think of 
 cases in terms of the whole state or the whole country and 
 consequently must be interested in the many agencies es- 
 tablished for the efficient exchange of labor. There may 
 have been still other lessons, but this case will illustrate 
 some of the reasons for urging that the treatment must be 
 on a broad scale and for believing that in so treating them 
 fundamental industrial principles will be taught.* 
 
 In his paper Mr. Harrison suggests some of the 
 ways in which case workers can advance public 
 education on industrial questions. They can do 
 this by bearing in mind the industrial facts in 
 cases under treatment, by using single cases to 
 illustrate important industrial principles in the 
 classroom, and by proper emphasis given to the 
 subject in case committees, in the press, and on 
 the platform. Social case records in numbers can 
 also furnish industrial research with clues to be 
 
 * Harrison, Shelby M., in Proceedings of the National 
 Conference of Social Work for 1918, p. 305. 
 
 237 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 followed up, and can serve as a basis for industrial 
 studies made by case work agencies themselves. 
 The public official charged with the enforce- 
 ment of a law in the successful operation of which 
 no politically influential group in the community 
 is interested, will often find his best backing in a 
 case work agency, whether the law is a new or an 
 old one. Miss Edith Abbott writes: 
 
 On two successive committee days in the old West Side 
 office [of the Chicago United Charities] we had the diffi- 
 cult problem of providing for the family of a tubercular 
 man who was doing " light work." One, I remember, was 
 a flagman on the elevated railroad. It occurred to some 
 one to ask for the industrial histories of these men in the 
 hope that some former employer might be found who 
 would assist. Both men had had a history of intermittent 
 light jobs since their physical breakdown, but it appeared 
 when a report was made at a later meeting of the commit- 
 tee that both men had contracted tuberculosis during 
 their employment in the same West Side foundry, where 
 both had worked for a series of years. This interesting 
 fact was promptly reported to a new chief in the Depart- 
 ment of Factory Inspection, who promptly investigated 
 this place and found a large number of violations of the 
 so-called "Health, Safety and Comfort law." * 
 
 Abbott, Edith: Paper on "The Social Case Worker 
 and the Enforcement of Industrial Legislation." Proceed- 
 ings of National Conference of Social Work for 1918, p. 315. 
 
 238 
 
THE FORMS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 No better service could be rendered by a case 
 work agency than this co-operation with com- 
 petent but hard pressed public officials. Miss 
 Abbott also gives illustrations in her valuable 
 paper of the useful things that can be done by 
 case workers when public officials are inert and 
 evasive. 
 
 It is not so stated in my story, but Rupert 
 Young's original application to a family welfare 
 society* had been made during the panic winter 
 of 1 9 14-15, when he was out of work and had 
 applied for material relief. After consultation 
 with former employers, some assistance was 
 given. A little later Rupert found part time work 
 and, in the stock phrase of social agencies, "the 
 case was closed." The true situation in the 
 Young family and the causes of maladjustment 
 operating at that time which were sure to lead to 
 further trouble later, were not discovered. The 
 failure is fully accounted for. The size of the 
 society's task had increased so rapidly during the 
 panic that it was engaged for the most part in 
 disaster relief work of a necessary but (to the 
 * See Chapter III. 
 239 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 real case worker) most unsatisfactory sort. After 
 that winter was over, industrial conditions, owing 
 to the artificial demand for labor created by the 
 war, changed for the better far more rapidly than 
 is usual after a panic. The plight of Rupert and 
 his wife was again reported to the society in June, 
 19 15, and real social treatment then began. 
 Meanwhile, business had revived and the number 
 of families under the society's care had fallen off 
 they fell off nearly fifty per cent in the next 
 two years. Judged by totals alone the work that 
 it continued to do might have seemed fifty per 
 cent less necessary, but any one who knows case 
 work also knows that its best and most construc- 
 tive services were rendered possible by this 
 change to better times. As already stated, none 
 are more eager to see employment regularized 
 than are the case workers. They know better 
 than most that the best remedial service to an 
 unemployed man, absolutely necessary though it 
 is, can be only a poor substitute for his getting 
 real work at real wages; whereas many of the 
 most valuable services of case work, such as 
 those actually achieved in the Young family, 
 240 
 
THE FORMS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 have, for lack of time, to be set aside during 
 periods of irregular employment. 
 
 Just before the Armistice a distinguished pub- 
 licist closely identified with various social re- 
 forms wrote the following letter, which is quoted 
 by Miss J. C. Colcord in the Proceedings of the 
 National Conference of Social Work for 19 19: 
 
 For four years we have been without immigration and 
 for two without unemployment, other than seasonal. I 
 hope you are planning a survey which will tell us: 
 
 1. How much charity organization work [social case 
 work with families] has been reduced thereby. 
 
 2. How much further reduction we may expect from 
 the coming abolition of the liquor traffic. 
 
 3. How much additional reduction could be effected by 
 other social and industrial reforms now under considera- 
 tion. 
 
 4. What the irreducible minimum (for the near future) 
 of charity organization work is. * 
 
 A fitting reply would have been to submit the 
 summary of Rupert Young's case and of all the 
 cases in Chapter III. It might be argued that, 
 as Rupert was a drinking man, a prohibition 
 amendment was all that was needed to solve his 
 troubles. But, given the conditions of law en- 
 * See Proceedings, p. 317. 
 16 241 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 forcement as we find them today in Rupert's own 
 city, it is certain that the amendment alone 
 could not have kept him sober, nor would strict 
 enforcement have met his need, though undoubt- 
 edly it would have helped. Moreover, it is a mis- 
 take to apply the quantitative test, to ask "how 
 much" in connection with case work, until we 
 know what case work is and why it is, and until 
 we realize fully both its limitations and its pos- 
 sibilities. With regard to the "other social and 
 industrial reforms now under consideration" to 
 which the publicist refers, I can only say with 
 Miss Colcord, "the more the better." Case 
 work is not the rival of any of them or a substi- 
 tute for any. 
 
 This topic of the interplay of different forms of 
 social work deserves fuller treatment than I have 
 been able to give it, but that all forms are inex- 
 tricably interwoven in the great task of further- 
 ing social advance should be evident. A colleague 
 of mine who was examining a group of applicants 
 for certain positions complained that too many of 
 them were oversupplied with slogans and under- 
 supplied with the technical details of the task to 
 242 
 
THE FORMS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 be done. As a matter of fact, there can be no 
 solid advance without patient attention to detail 
 or without respect for workmanship. Unhappily 
 a certain contempt for technique often lurks be- 
 hind a glib use of catch-words and high-sounding 
 phrases. On the other hand, the professional 
 worker who, in any field, has imagination enough 
 to deal effectively with concrete things, to scruti- 
 nize them and "put them together without ab- 
 straction," is also likely to be the one who can be 
 trusted to see their larger relations. The great 
 technicians, like Osier in medicine and Pasteur in 
 chemistry, have been men highly sensitive to the 
 relations of the part to the whole. 
 
 As one of the newest of the professions, social 
 work should strive to hold an even balance be- 
 tween the specializing and the generalizing ten- 
 dencies. In its training schools, it must develop 
 a sound technique under instructors who know at 
 first hand the practice of its different specialties. 
 In a strong professional organization, national in 
 scope, it must be able to hold all the forms of 
 social work together and steadily enlarge that 
 well-cultivated field which is occupied by all in 
 common. 
 
 243 
 
 / 
 
XI 
 
 CASE WORK AND DEMOCRACY 
 
 TN MIDDLEMARCH, Dr. Lydgate expresses 
 A this view of his work: "I should never have 
 been happy in any profession that did not call 
 forth the highest intellectual strain, and yet keep 
 me in good warm contact with my neighbors." 
 Social case workers have this same feeling about 
 their task. Their profession is an arduous one, 
 but it puts upon each practitioner the highest in- 
 tellectual strain of which he is capable, while his 
 contacts with the human side of life are warm, 
 continuous, and richly rewarding. 
 
 Those who began years ago, in some of the fam- 
 ily welfare agencies and children's aid societies, 
 to develop a method of dealing with disadvan- 
 taged families and with dependent children a 
 method which took personal and social possibili- 
 ties more fully into account than had previously 
 been the case entered upon their task with the 
 244 
 
CASE WORK AND DEMOCRACY 
 
 courage and devotion of pioneers. They had no 
 other end in view, however, than to do their best 
 for clients A and B and C ; their sole purpose was 
 to give these socially handicapped individuals a 
 square deal. Working out faithfully this legiti- 
 mate and necessary aim, they did not realize that 
 they were also helping to build some of the 
 foundations of essential justice for the democ- 
 racy of the future. 
 
 The earlier case work, in the light of our accu- 
 mulated experience, often seems crude, but mod- 
 ern case workers should realize that their own 
 labors, while aiding new discovery now, may some 
 day make a like impression upon their successors. 
 Not any more devotedly, but more clear-sight- 
 edly, perhaps, than formerly, they can attack 
 each new difficulty against a background of total 
 social purpose. That sense of the whole of so- 
 cial work to which I have referred more than once 
 can now be an ever-present reality. 
 
 An important part of that whole is the service 
 which social work can render in the field of public 
 administration. It must be evident from my dis- 
 cussion of individual differences in Chapter VI 
 245 
 
LX 
 
 WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 and from the brief outline in the chapter preced- 
 ing this one, describing the different fields of social 
 work, that the strengthening of public adminis- 
 tration seems to me one of the great ends which 
 every form of social endeavor must have in view. 
 But it is possible to move toward that end and 
 transfer the special contributions of social work 
 into government keeping with such ill-considered 
 haste that, when they arrive at their destination, 
 the label minus the contents is all that remains. 
 As this preliminary examination of case work 
 draws to its close, I should like to add a few 
 words to what has already been said about the 
 relation of social work, and of case work more 
 especially, to democracy. 
 
 Every few years, inspired in part by some reali- 
 zation of the present day weaknesses of public 
 administration and in part by a narrow view 
 of what constitutes democracy, some one makes 
 the discovery that all the activities of social 
 work should be absorbed by the state. Others 
 of us, who feel that the state is only one of the 
 desirable forms of association in a free society 
 and that the right of voluntary association is a 
 246 
 
CASE WORK AND DEMOCRACY 
 
 safeguard against autocracy, are not enthusiastic 
 about placing under the state every item in so 
 wide and varied a group of functions, though 
 we recognize that the auspices under which 
 any given form of social work case work, for 
 example continues to make headway will 
 have to change from time to time. Whether or 
 not these changes mean, as they probably will 
 and should, that certain casework tasks initiated 
 privately and still under private management are 
 to become public functions later, all will agree 
 that the important thing is for social work to be 
 ready for changes to governmental control before 
 they arrive. Sometimes, as we have already seen 
 in these pages, public departments and institu- 
 tions have adopted case work policies in name 
 only, because it was not possible at the time 
 to supply the necessary skill for their execution 
 or possible to control the size of the task. Lack- 
 ing that control, pressure of numbers meant low 
 standards of service and no permanent results. 
 This has not always been the outcome, but those 
 who believe most sincerely in the extension of 
 case work and its extension under both public 
 247 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 and voluntary control are most anxious to see 
 each advance effected under conditions that as- 
 ' sure something better than failure. 
 
 Under whatever auspices case work is destined 
 to go forward, a respect for personality will be 
 essential. Such respect implies a democratic 
 point of view. Social case work cannot progress 
 under those who have the autocratic spirit. But 
 is that spirit to be avoided by transforming all 
 our social agencies into government bureaus over 
 night? Not the one or the other, but both public 
 and private auspices will continue to be neces- 
 sary, though there is the third possibility that 
 some social case workers will develop a private, 
 independent practice of their own. The pub- 
 lic agency must be able to assure some degree 
 of continuity of policy, free from political party 
 control, before case workers will enter its service 
 gladly and in large numbers. When this con- 
 dition is fulfilled, certain forms of case work may 
 well make greater advances and certainly serve a 
 larger clientele under public management than 
 under private. The privately supported agency, 
 on the other hand, which already gives fair assur- 
 248 
 
CASE WORK AND DEMOCRACY 
 
 ance of continuity of policy, must make itself 
 more attractive to skilled social workers by giv- 
 ing staff members a larger measure of represen- 
 tation upon its administrative committees. 
 
 Democracy, however, is not a form of organi- 
 zation but a daily habit of life. It is not enough 
 for social workers to speak the language of democ- 
 racy; they must have in their hearts its spiritual 
 conviction of the infinite worth of our common 
 humanity before they can be fit to do any form of 
 social work whatsoever. Life itself achieves sig- 
 nificance and value not from the esoteric things 
 shared by the few, but from the great common 
 experiences of the race from the issues of birth 
 and death, of affection satisfied and affection frus- 
 trated, from those chances and hazards of daily 
 living that come to all men. Unless these con- 
 ditions common to all humanity strongly appeal 
 to us, or until they do, we are not ready to adopt 
 social case work as our major interest. 
 
 For the last eleven years it has been my privi- 
 lege to conduct every spring an informal institute 
 of members selected from among the professional 
 case workers in some of the family welfare soci- 
 249 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 eties of the country. As these groups have been 
 chosen throughout the whole period on the same 
 basis, changes in institute personnel during the 
 eleven years have been a rough but fair index of 
 what is happening to case work in the family 
 agencies. The best element in the institute of 
 1 92 1 was no better than the best in the institute 
 of 19 10 ; but no longer is there a wide gap between 
 the most and the least able. In recent years, the 
 spirit and ability of the whole group has been ex- 
 cellent, and their leader can testify that there is 
 no lack of democracy among them. 
 
 Another interesting fact to be observed in the 
 field of professional social work is the increasing 
 demand for well trained case workers, whether in 
 the children's, the family, or the medical field. 
 In some branches of social work there have been 
 fluctuations in the demand, dependent upon 
 whether times were good or bad, or the period 
 was one of war or peace. But for social case 
 workers who can do their work well the demand 
 has continued to be far greater than the supply. 
 
 The supremely important question today is not 
 250 
 
CASE WORK AND DEMOCRACY 
 
 the extension of case work activities to larger 
 fields, though extension is undoubtedly a goal, 
 and not whether such work should be publicly or 
 privately supported at present, but whether it 
 can be assured freedom of growth freedom to do 
 good work and freedom to make new discovery 
 through intensive service. It is the intensive, 
 long continued case work of which I have tried 
 to give a few examples in this book that holds 
 within itself the seeds of future development, the 
 seeds of greater knowledge of the human material 
 with which it so venturesomely deals and greater 
 knowledge of the true relation of man to society. 
 The widest possible applications of case work to 
 life can only follow, they cannot precede, the find- 
 ings of its best practitioners; and these findings, 
 valuable as they have already become, are only 
 the first fruits of what promises to be a bountiful 
 harvest. 
 
 It follows that one of the great, unused oppor- 
 tunities to serve humanity and further social prog- 
 ress lies in the endowment of special ability in 
 this particular field. I would not plead for any 
 permanent endowment, but for a large sum to be 
 251 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 expended in our own day and time in releasing 
 thoroughly tested and exceptionally gifted case 
 workers from pressure of overwork, and thus en- 
 able them to render a better grade of service. A 
 small band of students (not more than four at any 
 one time) might serve under these selected lead- 
 ers, who would be making careful note of the re- 
 sults of one method and another, and of the con- 
 ditions under which each had been tried. 
 
 The six women who did the work described in 
 Chapters II and III live in different cities. Most 
 of them do not know and hav.e never even heard 
 of one another. They have no adequate time at 
 present in which to think, to study, or to discover 
 what people are doing in other places. All their 
 time is given to keeping abreast of the arduous 
 day's work. To release earnest, devoted people 
 such as these from some of the details of their 
 task, to double their usefulness by cutting the vol- 
 ume of their present work in half, would enable 
 them to build a solid foundation of skill and de- 
 tailed knowledge for the whole profession, would 
 enrich the social resources of the world at a 
 strategic point. 
 
 252 
 
CASE WORK AND DEMOCRACY 
 
 The gains already made in case work are sig- 
 nificant and inspiring. They have been made 
 against heavy odds, and the faith and courage that 
 have gone into them deserve the kind of recogni- 
 tion here suggested a kind which in medicine 
 has already brought such rich returns. It is fully 
 recognized that endowment of special ability in 
 the fields of scientific research and of education 
 has been a way of advancing public welfare from 
 which every one has been the gainer. Similar 
 endowments in the field of the study and practi- 
 cal adjustment of, social relations would serve 
 not alone certain socially disadvantaged groups, 
 but all humanity. 
 
 We are told that the law is no respecter of 
 persons. Be that as it may, we are slowly 
 realizing that administrators of the law not in 
 courts alone but in a hundred places where it 
 is a question of carrying out the intent of the 
 law must learn to interpret that intent through 
 respect for personality. Wherever these admin- 
 istrators ignore the things that help and hinder ^ 
 personality, wherever they fail to study and allow 
 for individual differences, treating unequal things 
 253 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 equally instead, the intent of the law and its 
 actual achievement become so little related that 
 they often appear to glide by one another like 
 ships that pass in the night. Social advance 
 could not be better served than by such a series of 
 discoveries and training processes as would give 
 this country a new generation of administrators 
 a generation skilled in adapting the public intent 
 to the individual circumstances. 
 
 254 
 
XII 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 TET ME now attempt to sum up in a few para- 
 *"* graphs the ground which has been covered in 
 the preceding pages of introductory description. 
 
 Examples of social case work show that, by 
 direct and indirect insights, and direct and indi- 
 rect action upon the minds of clients, their social 
 relations can be improved and their personalities 
 developed. 
 
 Insights imply a knowledge of innate make-up 
 and of the effects of environment upon the indi- 
 vidual. The failure of a case worker to learn his 
 client's social and personal background usually 
 means failure to effect any permanent adjust- 
 ment, but these diagnostic processes interplay 
 with those of treatment, and no sharp line can be 
 drawn between them. 
 
 Action ranges from the humblest services, 
 guided by affection, patience, and personal sym- 
 255 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 pathy, to such radical measures as complete 
 change of environment, the organization of re- 
 sources where none existed before, and the reknit- 
 ting of ties long broken. Officialism is to be 
 avoided. The most successful case work policies 
 are encouragement and stimulation, the fullest 
 possible participation of the client in all plans, 
 and the skilful use of repetition. Sometimes 
 there must be warning and discipline; always 
 there must be direct action of mind on mind. 
 One of the most characteristic methods of case 
 /work is its many-sided approach, its assembling, 
 1 binding together, and readjusting processes. The 
 "social case worker is not, however, a sort of be- 
 nevolent middleman. It is true that he acts 
 through other specialists, other agencies, and 
 through his client's own social group, but, in 
 bringing people together, he is far from washing 
 his hands of the consequences of the contacts 
 effected; on the contrary, he is deeply concerned 
 to discover, with all these others, a joint program 
 ^ which shall achieve the desired social result. It is 
 the combination of all these enumerated services, 
 or of most of them and not of any one or two, 
 256 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 which constitutes social case work of professional 
 grade. 
 
 No case worker is bound to accept the philoso- 
 phy of any other, but a philosophy of some kind 
 he must have. The foundation stones of such a 
 philosophy are suggested in this book ; they are 
 given, however, with the fullest realization that 
 other and even more fundamental ones may soon 
 be revealed. These suggested foundations, to 
 restate them informally, are as follows : 
 
 (i) Human beings are interdependent. There 
 is a spiritual unity about this conception which 
 means a great deal to those who have grasped its 
 full meaning and are trying to live by it. Pro- 
 fessor Maciver tells us that "society is best 
 ordered when it best promotes the personality of 
 its members." The converse is also true. We 
 achieve personality through right relations to 
 society and in no other way. The art of social 
 case work is the art of discovering and assuring to 
 the individual the best possible social relations. 
 
 (2) Human beings are different. A genuinely 
 democratic social program equalizes opportunity 
 by intelligent mass action, and provides at the 
 '? 257 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 same time for an administrative policy which 
 does different things for and with different 
 people. 
 
 (3) Human beings are not dependent and 
 domestic animals. This fact of man's difference 
 from other animals establishes the need of his 
 participation in making and carrying out plans 
 for his welfare. Individuals have wills and pur- 
 poses of their own and are not fitted to play a 
 passive part in the world ; they deteriorate when 
 they do. 
 
 Perhaps this is why men and women who are to 
 become assets to society must have had a careful 
 preparation for that network of interrelations 
 which we call life. They cannot be turned out at 
 wholesale. In recognition of the fact that the 
 making of a social person takes time and detailed 
 attention, the home is the social institution 
 to which is usually entrusted the beginnings of 
 this task, and it is in the home that the first 
 case work adjustments were attempted. The 
 workshop is another place in which the case 
 work method is destined to effect beneficent 
 changes, though its introduction there is recent 
 258 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 and not yet fully developed . Wherever case work 
 becomes a serviceable adjunct of some other and 
 older profession, as in the social institutions of 
 the school, the hospital, and the court, it is even 
 more important than elsewhere that its practi- 
 tioners should be thoroughly grounded in their 
 own specialty before attempting to supplement 
 the work of other specialists. 
 
 The whole of social work is greater than any 
 of its parts. All parts serve personality, but in 
 different ways. Case work serves it by effecting 
 better adjustments between individuals and their 
 social environment ; group work serves it by deal- 
 ing with people face to face but no longer one by 
 one; social reform serves it by effecting mass 
 betterment through propaganda and social legis- 
 lation; and social research serves personality by 
 making original discoveries and re-interpreting 
 known facts for the use of these other forms 
 of social work. The case worker should know 
 something of all forms the more knowledge he 
 has of all the better and should c?arry through 
 his special task in such a way as to advance all of 
 the types of social work just enumerated. 
 259 
 
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? 
 
 Finally, the highest test of social case work is 
 growth in personality. Does the personality of 
 its clients change, and change in the right direc- 
 tion? Is energy and initiative released, that is, 
 in the direction of higher and better wants and 
 saner social relations? Only an instinctive rev- 
 erence for personality, and a warm human inter- 
 est in people as people can win for the social case 
 worker an affirmative answer to this question. 
 But an affirmative answer means growth in per- 
 sonality for the case worker himself. The service 
 is reciprocal. 
 
 260 
 
INDEX 
 
 Abbott, Edith, 196, 238 
 
 Action, direct, of mind on mind, 
 
 102,107-110; indirect, through 
 
 the social environment, 102, 
 
 110-121 
 Adjustment: between the indi- 
 * vidual and his social environ- 
 ment will always be necessary, 
 
 98; out of, 134 
 Adler, Felix, 150, 171-172, 184 
 Administrators of the law, 253- 
 
 254 
 Aimless dosings of social ills, 87 
 Allegri, Lucia: story of, 80-86; 
 
 case of, cited, 107, 109, 114, 
 
 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 139 
 Allowance, regular weekly, 73 
 Almshouse worker quoted, 127 
 Americanization, 118, 154 
 American Marriage Laws, 183 
 
 (footnote) 
 Analysis of acts and policies in 
 
 six case illustrations, 101-121 
 Applicant, term not used in case 
 
 work, 28 (footnote) 
 Arbitrariness avoided, 40 
 Arnold, Matthew, 195 
 Associated Charities. See Family 
 
 Welfare Societies 
 Atonement and Personality. R. C. 
 
 Moberly, D.D., 94 (footnote) 
 Attendance officers, 219 
 Autocracy: in the policy of the 
 
 same thing for everybody, 150; 
 
 case work cannot progress 
 
 under an, 248 
 
 Background of husband and wife, 
 differences in, 56 
 
 Back history, 33~34. 70, 76, 80, 
 
 83, 106, 137 
 Baldwin, James Mark, 129-130, 
 
 171 
 Basset, a Village Chronicle. S. G. 
 
 Tallentyre, 6 
 Begging, 60 
 
 Belonging, the sense of, 119, 189 
 Bielowski, Maria: story of, 31- 
 
 43; case of, cited, 96, 105-106, 
 
 108, 109, 112, 114, 116, 118, 
 
 119, 122-124, 217 
 
 Biography and the study of fam- 
 ily life, 190-194 
 
 Blind: the greatest single handi- 
 cap of the, 161-162 
 Boarding homes, 44 
 Bojer, Johan, 126 
 Bosanquet, Mrs. Bernard, 163 
 Breaking up the home, 72 
 Breckenridge, Sophonisba P., 196 
 Bridgman, Laura, 7. 9. 15 
 
 Laura Bridgman, Dr. Howe's Fa- 
 mous Pupil. Maud Howe and 
 Florence Howe Hall, 7 
 
 Broken Homes. Joanna C. Col- 
 cord, 155 
 
 Bronner, Dr. Augusta, 105 (foot- 
 note) 
 
 Brooks, Phillips, 20 
 
 Campbell, Dr. F. J., 161-162 
 
 Cannon, Ida M., 213 
 
 Case: a term applied to the 
 situation, not the person, 27 
 
 Case conferences, 136-137 
 
 26l 
 
INDEX 
 
 Case records: Dr. Howe's, 8, 10, 
 28; Miss Sullivan's letters, 10; 
 choice of, 26-31; uses of, 28- 
 30; confidential nature of, 29 
 
 Case Work and Democracy, 244- 
 254. See also Social Case Work 
 
 Causal factors, search for, 79 
 
 Change of environment, 13, 24, 
 43, 53, 66, 116-118, 198 
 
 Charity organization societies. 
 See Family Welfare Societies 
 
 Child labor: 76; campaigns, 203, 
 231-235; committees, 235 
 
 Child-placing societies: work of, 
 with George Foster, 43-49; 
 early case work in, 244-245 
 
 Child welfare work: fuller records 
 of, 30-31; illustrations of, 26- 
 49; and daily life, 177; for neg- 
 lected and difficult children, 
 219; in child labor campaigns, 
 234 
 
 Children: building upon affection 
 for, 58, 61, 66-67; the rights 
 of, 181, 186, 188 
 
 Choosing illustrations, process of, 
 26-31 
 
 Church attendance, 113 
 
 Client, use of the term, in case 
 work, 27 
 
 Club work, 223 
 
 Colcord, Joanna C, 155. 241, 242 
 
 Combination of many itemized 
 insights and acts involved in 
 case work of professional grade, 
 102, 124 
 
 Community resources: 15,16,18, 
 19; case workers' duty in the 
 absence of, 115; utilization of, 
 by case workers, 225 
 
 Community work, 223 
 
 Conclusion, 255-260 
 
 Confidential nature: of case his- 
 tories, 29; of relation of social 
 worker to client, 29 
 
 Conklin, Edwin Grant, 146 
 
 Continuity of policy, 248 
 
 Court: decision based on social 
 evidence, 42; probation officer 
 and, 123; children's rights in 
 the, 188; probation in the, 216- 
 217; procedure in the, 215, 217; 
 social evidence in the, of the 
 future, 218 
 
 Criminal Justice in Cleveland. 
 Pound and Frankfurter, 215 
 
 Criticism of case work processes 
 on basis of long-term, intensive 
 treatment, 90 
 
 Definition, a tentative, of social 
 case work, 98; basis of, 87-90 
 
 Democracy: and individual dif- 
 ference, 149-154; in the fam- 
 ily, 182, 228; case work and, 
 244-254, 248-249; a daily 
 habit of life, 249 
 
 Dewey, John, 142 (footnote) 
 
 Difficult girl, a, 31-43; Teresa 
 Allegri, 83 
 
 Disasters and rehabilitation, 219 
 
 Discipline, 12-13, 22, 64, 109 
 
 Drinking man, 51-59 
 
 Drinking woman, 59-68 
 
 Dutcher, Elizabeth, no 
 
 Elements of Social Science, The. 
 R. M. Maciver, 95 (footnote) 
 
 Eliot, George, 214, 244 
 
 Employers, 1 19-120 
 
 Endowment of special ability in 
 the social case work field, 251- 
 254 
 Enuresis, 35 
 
 Environment: 22, 23; social and 
 99; 
 See 
 
 physical, distinguished, 
 heredity versus, 146-149. 
 also Change of and Social 
 
 Equality: not likeness, 150; 
 
 essence of, 151 
 Ethical Philosophy of Life, 
 
 Felix Adler, 150 
 
 Eugenics, 148-149 
 
 the 
 
 An. 
 
 262 
 
INDEX 
 
 Evolution and Ethics. Thomas 
 
 Huxley, 128 
 Expert advice, 20, 24 
 
 Face of the World, The. Johan 
 Bojer, 126 
 
 Family, the: a council of, 84-86; 
 personal equation in discussions 
 of, 177-178; specialists should 
 know facts of the life of, 180; 
 children the test of, 181; that 
 fails, 187-188; as a test of in- 
 dustrial organization, 201-202; 
 in current outlines of sociology, 
 226. See also The Home 
 
 Family deserters, 135. 154-155 
 Family Social Work, Institute of, 
 
 249-250 
 Family welfare societies: fuller 
 records of, 30-3 1 ; case work of, 
 illustrated, 51-86, 134-136, 
 139-142, 185; and housing, 
 227; and tuberculosis cam- 
 paigns, 227; and studies of de- 
 sertion and non-support, 227; 
 and social research, 227-228; 
 in child labor campaigns, 232- 
 234; early case work in, 244- 
 245; an index of what is hap- 
 pening in, 250 
 
 Fathers and Children. Ivan Tur- 
 genev, 187 
 
 Feeble-minded, the, 55, XXI, 182 
 
 Finding work, 206-2.ro 
 
 Follett, M. P., 145 
 
 Forms of Social Work, the, 222- 
 
 243 
 Foster, George, story of, 43-49; 
 
 case of, cited, 96, no, 112, 116, 
 
 179, 189 
 Foster homes, selection of, 44 
 Frankness, 21, 40 
 Free homes, selection of, 44 
 
 Freedom of growth the impor- 
 tant thing in case work, 251 
 
 Fundamental principles restated, 
 257-258 
 
 Group character of some case 
 
 treatment, 80, in, 139-142 
 Group thinking, 84-86 
 Group work, 223, 224, 229 
 
 Habit, re-education of, 73, 108 
 Haldane, J. S., 95 (footnote) 
 Hall, Florence Howe, 7 
 Hamilton, Cicely, 178 
 Handicapped, work with, 220 
 Harrison, Shelby M., 236 
 Health, see Physical Condition 
 Healy, Dr. Wm., 104 (footnote), 
 
 121 
 Heath, Arthur George, 16s 
 Heredity and Environment. Ed- 
 win Grant Conklin, 146 
 Heredity versus environment, 
 
 146-149 
 Hocking, Wm. Ernest, 132 
 Holbrook, David H., 229 
 Home, the, 175-194; developing 
 affection for, 58; re-estab- 
 lished, 63; instinct of, 65; 
 breaking up, 72; as a family 
 center, 78; and children, 118; 
 not the institution of, for its 
 own sake, 179; many kinds of 
 social work visits to, 180; pro- 
 posed substitutes for, 181; and 
 the school, 197; and the work- 
 shop, 201-202; rehabilitation 
 of, after disasters, 219; as a 
 preparation for life, 258. See 
 also The Family 
 Hospital social work, 210-214, 
 
 230 
 Housing conditions, 120-121 
 Howe, Maud, 7 
 Howe, Dr. Samuel Gridley, 7-9, 
 
 10 
 Human Interdependence, 126- 
 
 143. 257 
 Human Nature and Its Remaking. 
 
 Wm. Ernest Hocking, 132 
 Human Psychology. Howard C. 
 Warren, 94 (footnote) 
 
 263 
 
INDEX 
 
 Humble services as a means of 
 treatment, 23, 58, 64, 107-108 
 
 Husband and wife disagree, 51- 
 
 59, 184 
 Huxley, Thos., 127-128 
 
 Illustrations: Miss Sullivan and 
 Helen Keller, 9-25; process of 
 choosing, 26-31; Maria Biel- 
 owski, a difficult girl, 31-43; 
 George Foster, a dependent 
 child placed out, 43-49; Mr. 
 and Mrs. Rupert Young, hus- 
 band and wife who cannot 
 agree, 51-59; Clara Vansca 
 and her neglected children, 59- 
 68; Winifred Jones and her 
 children, widow not an efficient 
 home maker, 68-80; Lucia 
 Allegri and her relatives, who 
 fail to understand her situation, 
 80-86; pellagra cases, 134-135; 
 desertion case, 135-136; group 
 case work, 130-142; unwise 
 service, 167-171; of visiting 
 teaching, 190-200; of case 
 work in compensation field, 
 205-206; relief in aid of wages, 
 236; reports to public depart- 
 ments, 238 
 
 Imaginative sympathy, 23, 37, 42, 
 106, 107 
 
 Immigrant family, 80-86, 185- 
 
 186 
 Immigration: 117-118; recent, 
 
 154; and case work, 220-221 
 
 Individual Differences, 144-158, 
 257-258 
 
 Industrial: employment of wo- 
 men and equality, 152-153; 
 conditions, 237 
 
 Industrial disease legislation, 230 
 
 Infallibility, no claim of, 40 
 
 Innate make-up: and prognoses, 
 105 (footnote); not easily dis- 
 tinguished, 145 
 
 Insight into individuality and 
 social environment, 1 01-102, 
 103-107 
 
 Instinctive responses versus the 
 
 reasoning and habit-forming 
 
 processes, 164 
 Institutional care, 43, 60, 189 
 Intensive case work, 90, 142, 176, 
 
 251 
 Interest, any serious, has power 
 
 of radiation, 136 
 Interrelation of the different 
 
 forms of social work, 222-243 
 Introduction, 5-25 
 Introduction to the Science of 
 
 Sociology. Park and Burgess, 
 
 228 
 Irresponsibility, 57 
 
 James, William, 191 
 
 Jones, Winifred: story of, 68-80; 
 case of, cited, 104, 108, 112, 
 113, 114, 117, 119, 121, 166, 
 179, 189, 225 
 
 Keeping faith, 24, 108 
 Keller, Helen, 10-25 
 Knowing what is happening, 41 
 Kropotkin, Prince, 129 
 
 Lane, Franklin K., 203 
 Legal aid societies, 220 
 Letters of William James, The. 
 
 Edited by his son, 191 
 Level of participation, 170 
 Life of Pasteur, The. Rene Val- 
 
 lery-Radot, 192-194 
 Lippmann, Walter, 142 (footnote) 
 Long-term services to individuals, 
 
 90, 142, 176, 251 
 
 Maciver, R. M., 95 (footnote), 
 
 146 
 Macy, Mrs., see Sullivan 
 Marital difficulties, 52-59 
 Mark, Thistleton, 95 (footnote) 
 Marriage: current discussions of, 
 177; the rights of children and, 
 181; laws relating to, 182; ad- 
 ministration of, laws, 183, 227; 
 education for, 184-185 
 
 264 
 
INDEX 
 
 Marriage and Divorce. Felix 
 Adler, 184 
 
 Mead, George M., 130 
 
 Mechanism, Life and Personality. 
 J. S. Haldane, 95 (footnote) 
 
 Medical-social work, 210-214; 
 pressure of numbers in, 212- 
 213 
 
 Mendelian laws and human in- 
 heritance, 147 
 
 Mental examination, 72, 112 
 
 Mental experts, 106 
 
 Mental hygiene: of industrial 
 workers, 204 
 
 Mental testing, 46; value of, 104 
 (footnote); and social evi- 
 dence, 72, 104-105 
 
 Meredith, George, 183 
 
 Meyer, Dr. Adolf, 183 
 
 Moberly, R. C., D.D., 94 (foot- 
 note) 
 
 Moral and Social Significance of 
 the Conception of Personality. 
 Arthur George Heath, 165 
 
 Motive, 1 70-1 7 1 
 
 Mutual Aid, a Factor in Evolution. 
 Prince Kropotkin, 129 
 
 Myerson, Dr. Abraham, 147 
 
 Neglected children, 59-68 
 
 Neighborhood: opportunities of 
 a new, 66; work, 223; condi- 
 tions, 229 
 
 New generation of administra- 
 tors, 254 
 
 New State, The. M. P. Follett, 
 145 
 
 Numbers, pressure of: in visiting 
 teaching, 200; in hospital so- 
 cial work, 212-213; in family 
 social work, 208, 210, 227, 239- 
 241; in probation work, 217; 
 in public service, 247; in all 
 forms of social case work, 252 
 
 Obedience, lessons in, 12-13, 22 
 Occupational resources, 1 19-120 
 
 Officialism, absence of, 108 
 
 Osier, Sir William, 243 
 
 Our Social Heritage. Graham 
 Wallas, 148, 153 
 
 Outlines of Historical Jurispru- 
 dence. Sir Paul Vinogradoff, 
 202 
 
 Panic year, figures of a, 51 
 
 Parent: and child, 160, 185; ob- 
 ligations to, 187 
 
 Park, Robert E., 227 
 
 Parole officers, 220 
 
 Participation of the client in 
 making and carrying out plans 
 for his welfare, 39, 48, 109-110, 
 170-171, 173 
 
 Pasteur, Louis, 192-194, 243 
 
 Patience, 108 
 
 Pauperism, 167 
 
 Pearson, Sir Arthur, 162 
 
 Pedagogy and personality, 94 
 (footnote) 
 
 Pellagra, 135 
 
 Perkins, Frances, 204-206 
 
 Perkins Institution for the Blind, 
 7, 9, 19 
 
 Permanent welfare as a test of 
 case work, 90, 142 
 
 Perry, Bliss, 93 (footnote) 
 
 Personal equation, the, in dis- 
 cussions of the family, 177-178 
 
 Personal influence, 108 
 
 Personal side of case work, 126- 
 128, 244 
 
 Personality: of Helen Keller, 22; 
 the service of, 24-25; develop- 
 ment of, the aim of case work, 
 90, 97, 260; effect of loss of 
 social status or health upon, 
 91; nature of, 92; and indi- 
 vidual differences, 92; must 
 grow or atrophy, 93; no scale for 
 measuring, 121-122; not static, 
 122, 13 1 J society the source 
 and origin of, 129-132, 257; 
 reverence for, 158, 248; all 
 forms of social work serve, 259 
 
 265 
 
INDEX 
 
 Philosophy of social case work, 
 128, 257 
 
 Physical condition, 35, 46. 48, 
 54. 57. 63, 74. 79, "2, 141 
 
 Physicians: and social case work, 
 135, 144; and patients, 160; 
 private practice of, 221 
 
 Pity, the handicap of an un- 
 nerving, 161-162 
 
 Placement work, 37, 44-49 
 
 Plato on equality, 151 
 
 Pound, Roscoe, 215 
 
 Prevention, 230 
 
 Preventive medicine, 211 
 
 Principles of Sociology. E. A. Ross, 
 185 
 
 Privately supported agencies: 
 staff representation in, 248- 
 249; continuity of policy in, 
 248 
 
 Probation: for Maria Bielowski, 
 32-35, 42; insights needed 
 in, 122-123; pressure of num- 
 bers in, 216-217; need of good 
 social training for, work, 231 
 
 Professional organization of so- 
 cial workers, national in scope, 
 243 
 
 Prohibition, 241-242 
 
 Psychiatric Family Studies. Dr. 
 Abraham Myerson, 147 
 
 Psychiatry and social case work, 
 133, 144, 213, 221 
 
 Psychology from the Standpoint of 
 a Behaviorist. J. B. Watson, 94 
 (footnote), 164-165 
 
 Public administration and case 
 work, 238-239, 245-248, 253- 
 254 
 
 Public Education Association of 
 New York, 198, 200, 228 
 
 Public employment bureaus, 207 
 Purposeful Action: the Basis of, 
 1 59-1 74;" routine and, 164 
 
 Recreation, 37. 68, 73. 114, 223 
 Reid, Thomas, 91 
 
 Relatives, 12; participation of , in 
 case work, 16; of Rupert 
 Young, 53-59; of Clara Van- 
 sea, 62, 65, 113; of Winifred 
 Jones, 69, 77; of Lucia Allegri, 
 84, 85; of a button maker's 
 family, 140 
 
 Relief, material: 167-174; as a 
 substitute for justice, 172; in 
 aid of wages, 236-237 
 
 Religious instruction, 20-21, 24, 
 113, 144 
 
 Repetition, 75, 109, 166 
 
 Rigidity, no permanence with 
 extreme of, 184 
 
 Ross, E. A., 184-185 
 
 Royce, Josiah, 130 
 
 Sainte-Beuve, Charles- Augustin, 
 222 
 
 School records, 45. 48, 66, 74. "2. 
 169 
 
 School Workshop Hospital 
 Court, 195-221 
 
 Schools: policy of same thing for 
 everybody in, 196; case work 
 in, 196-201 
 
 Self-respect, appeal to, 38 
 
 Sense of the whole in social work, 
 223, 245, 259 
 
 Sham families, 187-188 
 
 Shopmates, co-operation of, 140 
 
 Short-term services to individu- 
 als, 88, 176 
 
 Social agencies, team play be- 
 tween, 113-114, 141 
 
 Social Case Work: in Being, 26- 
 86; defined, 87-125; uncon- 
 scious, 5-7, 11; as neighbor- 
 liness, 7; when subsidiary to 
 some other professional ser- 
 vice, 27. 88-89. 214. 259; 
 widening scope of, 30, 251; 
 profession of, not well estab- 
 lished, 87 (footnote); of the 
 short-term variety, 88, 176; 
 of the long-term and intensive 
 type, 89-90, 142, 176, 251; a 
 form of teaching, 94. 96; the 
 
 266 
 
INDEX 
 
 special approach of, 96; dis- 
 tinguished from mass treat- 
 ment, 98; is, a specialized 
 form of skill? 100; material 
 with which, deals a part of 
 daily life, 102, 177; Per- 
 sonal side of, 126-128, 244; 
 must have a philosophy, 128, 
 257; and psychiatry, 133. 144- 
 213, 221; of one, two, and 
 three dimensions, 138-142; 
 and social psychology, 142- 
 143; field of, not identical with 
 that of other professions deal- 
 ing with personality, 144; and 
 reverence for personality, 158; 
 present-day, 175; intensive, 
 may bear a separate name 
 later, 176; short-term, 176; 
 in schools, 196-201; in work- 
 shops, 204; in hospitals, 210- 
 214; in courts, 216; private 
 practice of, 221; and group 
 work, 224; and social reforms, 
 225, 234; and social research, 
 227, 230; in child labor cam- 
 paigns, 232-234; and industrial 
 conditions, 237; and public 
 officials, 238; under public and 
 private auspices, 248 
 
 Social case workers, increasing 
 demand for, 250 
 
 Social diagnosis, skill in, saves 
 time, 103-104 
 
 Social environment: 99; insight 
 into the resources, dangers, and 
 influence of the, 102, 103-107; 
 approach through the, char- 
 acteristic of case work, m; 
 indirect action through the, 
 illus., 139-142 
 
 Social and Ethical Interpreta- 
 tions in Mental Development. 
 James Mark Baldwin, 130 
 
 Social heritage, 147-149 
 
 Social psychology and social case 
 work, 142-143 
 
 Social reform, 223, 227, 228, 231 
 
 Social relationship: no one, can 
 serve for all, in; a key to 
 client's life, 132; the approach 
 by way of, 133-134 
 
 Social research, 224, 227, 230, 251 
 
 -253 
 Social settlements, 143. 223, 232 
 
 Social Work in Hospitals. Ida M. 
 
 Cannon, 213 (footnote) 
 Social work and social case work, 
 
 US 
 Society the source and origin of 
 
 personality, 129-132 
 
 Special ability, endowment of, 
 
 251-254 
 Spiritual gains, 20-21, 68 
 Staff representation on commit- 
 tees of private agencies, 249 
 
 Stages of development: in social 
 case work, 154; in medicine, 
 2Ii; in the administration of 
 justice, 215 
 
 Standard of Life, The. Mrs. Ber- 
 nard Bosanquet, 163 
 
 Stimulation: and encouragement, 
 program of, 72, 75. 80, 109; 
 of wants, 166 
 
 Story of My Life, The. Helen 
 Keller, 11-22 
 
 Stout, G. F 162 
 
 Stranded travelers, 220 
 
 Studies in Good and Evil. Josiah 
 Royce, 130 
 
 Study of Poetry, A. Bliss Perry, 
 93 (footnote) 
 
 Subsidiary case work, supple- 
 menting service of another 
 profession, 27, 88-89, 214, 259 
 
 Suggestion, 73 
 
 Sullivan, Anne Mansfield (Mrs. 
 Macy), 9-25. 40, 95. 107, 117. 
 224 
 
 Summary of ground covered, 255- 
 260 
 
 Sympathy, two kinds of, 23; 
 imaginative, 37. 42 
 
 Syphilis, 35. 41 
 
 Tallentyre, S. G., 6 
 Teacher and pupil, 160 
 
 267 
 
INDEX 
 
 Teaching and social case work, 
 
 95, 133, 144 
 Technique: and constructive 
 
 imagination, 107; versus slo- 
 gans, 242; and a sense of the 
 
 whole, 243 
 Temperament, 91 (footnote) 
 Thrift, lessons in, 64-65, 67, 114 
 Trade union a serious interest, 
 
 136 
 Trained social workers, need of, 
 
 157. 251 
 Training schools of social work, 
 
 243 
 Truancy and Non-Attendance in 
 
 the Chicago Schools. Abbott 
 
 and Breckenridge, 196 
 Trust estates, administration of, 
 
 a field for social case work, 219 
 Tuberculosis, 140 
 Turgenev, Ivan, 187 
 
 Unemployed, the, 154, 208-210, 
 239-242 
 
 Unfavorable conditions, 165-166 
 Unfit, the, 127-128, 182 
 Unfolding of Personality, the, as 
 
 the Chief Aim of Education. 
 
 Thistleton Mark, 95 (footnote) 
 Unwise service, 1 67-1 71 
 
 Vaile, Gertrude, 150-151 
 Vallery-Radot, Rene, 194 
 
 Van Dyke, Dr. Henry, 151 
 Vansca, Clara, story of, 59-68; 
 case of, cited, 108, 109, 113, 
 114, 116, 118, 119, 121, 179 
 Victory Over Blindness. Sir 
 
 Arthur Pearson, 162 
 Vinogradoff, Sir Paul, 202 
 Visiting Teacher in the United 
 States, The. A survey by the 
 National Association of Visit- 
 ing Teachers and Home and 
 School Visitors, 200 
 Visiting teachers, 197-201, 228 
 Vocational guidance, 206, 220 
 
 Wallas, Graham, 147-148, 153 
 Wants: stimulation of, 166; pro- 
 gressive and higher, 167 
 Warren, Howard C, 94 (footnote) 
 Watson, J. B., 94 (footnote), 164 
 Wider self, theory of the, 131 
 Widow with children, 68-80 
 Working homes, 36, 44 
 Workmen's compensation ad- 
 ministration and case work, 
 204-206 
 Workshop, the: and the home, 
 201-202; case work in, 204, 220 
 
 Young, Mr. and Mrs. Rupert, 
 story of, 51-59; case of, cited, 
 108, no, 112, 113. 116, 118, 
 120, 121, 210, 239-242 
 
 268 
 

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