Search

Almost a hundred years have passed since the settlement house was founded in the U.S. as part of an earlier generation's attempt to do something to remove the deprivations of urban poverty. This paper examines the role of the settlement house today, and the contribution it has made-and can make-to the attack on urban poverty. The settlement house, like most other helping professions, is currently going through a fundamental and often agonizing reappraisal of its functions, an important part of which concerns its ability to reach the client. By "reaching" is meant involving the client in the settlement program and encouraging him to develop values and behavior patterns favored by the settlement staff. These professions emerged out of nineteenth-century reform movements, set up by middle- and upper-class "Yankee" Americans who not only wanted to do something about urban poverty, but also hoped to make the then ethnic poor into middle-class Americans and allies against corrupt political machines and incipient socialist organizations.

It has become fashionable today to extoll the virtues of lower-class life and of ethnic "sub-cultures." This is, of course, related to the recent increase in social consciousness in the country, to the widespread concern with poverty and racism. The latent implication of this emphasis on the existence and legitimacy of sub-cultures is that "all Americans are equal" even though "they are different" and that the American middle class is imperialistic in its belief that only its own values are to be encouraged. Often the spokesmen for the legitimacy of sub-cultural values even imply that these are "better" than middle-class values-a curious cultural relativism which holds that all sub-cultures are equally superior to the culture of the American middle class. It is hoped that this paper may contribute to the realization that it is hardly consistent to praise the virtues of the matrifocal family which hampers achievement while at the same time advocating educational innovations such as Head Start that are designed to maximize it, that it is not consistent to advocate wider opportunities for the disadvantaged while defending subcultural settings that minimize occupational chances.

The article studies the relationship between economic growth and the extent of poverty among American families in order to find ways to reduce the poverty. The income distribution stretches as average income grows; if this were not true, poverty would long since have ceased to be a problem. In colonial times, the income gap between the very poor and all but the very rich must have been at most a few hundred dollars. Since the median income in the U.S. now is well above any upper bound of poverty, if the dispersion of income had remained constant as its central tendency grew, no one would now be poor. But the dispersion of income expands along with its central tendency. The quintile boundaries of the income distribution rise approximately by the same percentages, thus bringing widening absolute differentials. This accords with our retributive standards of justice; people are rewarded in proportion to their relative degrees of social worth or productivity. It incidentally guarantees the persistence of poverty without public policies designed to redistribute income or earning power.

Presents discussions on various issues in Economics. Examination of price theory; Attitude of trade unions in North Carolina towards employment of child labor; Contrast between national financial prosperity and distressful poverty in Italy.

This article analyzes the different factors which contribute to the incidence of poverty in the U.S. Since many of the possible explanations are interrelated, both their qualitative and quantitative importance are difficult to determine from descriptive classifications of those living in poverty. The incidence of poverty is explained without having explicit recourse to state median incomes or wage levels. In the other hand, the parameters from the poverty model provides estimates of potential gains from altering explanatory variables.

This article reports on a study of the affects of funds from the Office of Economic Opportunity on sixteen voluntary agencies in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, from 1960 to 7967. It was found that the agencies had changed little with respect to program emphases, types of clients served, and modes of served, and that the agency board members and voluntary funding bodies wore resisting change. The authors discuss some tactics for opening up negotiations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors trace the development of the settlement house movement through the history of the nation's oldest settlement--New York City's University Settlement--from its beginnings in the 1880's as an attempt to deal with the new poor created by the Industrial Revolution, through the era of its recreational emphasis, to its current place in the War on Poverty. The authors feel there is a clear need for the settlement to serve as an adult-centered agency, concerning itself programmatically with adult needs and problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demonstration programs sponsored by the President's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency invariably developed program objectives concerned with conditions of poverty. These conditions were seen as blocking opportunities for conforming behavior. Programs centered in poor neighborhoods developed means of involving neighborhood residents in their policy structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Victims of a real social revolution, the middle classes of the U.S. are passing away. The plutocratic ideal that rules this land judges wealth only by those things that can be purchased and displayed and the men and women who believe that privacy and intellectual recreation and some measure of personal service are necessities, while automobiles and jewelry and fine clothes are luxuries, find themselves becoming yearly a smaller and more contemptible minority. This is "The Plight of the Genteel," as depicted in tragi-comic paragraphs by Katherine Fullerton Gerould in "Harper's" for February 1926. The poverty and threatened extinction of those people who in the past have furnished the country its leaders alarms none but themselves. And their only salvation lies in definitely renouncing the standards of the mob, cultivating a Spartan simplicity of life and holding grimly to those intangible distinctions they consider of most genuine worth. Under the educated, civilized exterior of the grown man or woman lies a deep substratum of infantile traits and tendencies.

The article discusses the effect of pollution on human population growth which is accompanied by strict curbs on environment abuses and unresolved problem of population pollution in the U.S. The author said that the expression of man's full range of genetic potential is unattainable for goals such as healthy and happy human beings, free from malnutrition, poverty and disease, as well as war. It is defined as the mental and physical consequences of life in a world of more populous and technologically more complex that the present one. The Presidential Committee on Population and Family Planning proposed a $120 million increase in the federal appropriation for family planning services to be accessible to all American women.

The U.S. Congress is debating the antipoverty bill, and the shape of the legislation seems largely determined. Two ma jot issues have emerged-the size and the control of the purse. There will be less money than is needed and more municipal control than is desirable. One of the not-so-favorite congressmen, Charles K. Goodell of upstate New York, put his finger on the problem when be tagged the bill "Bossism and boll weevils" Goodell's implication was that the bill had been drawn to the specifications of big-city mayors and southern democratic congressmen. The bill is the short-sighted politician's answer to rural unrest and urban strife. It turns the world upside down-for what the poor need is more power to effect their life chances, not less.