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�A Public Charity:
Religion and Social Welfare in Indianapolis

A book proposal by Mary Mapes

 

Questions, Issues, and Historiography

In 1938, a girl pregnant with her first child arrived at Indianapolis�s Suemma Coleman Home for unmarried mothers.� When the women running the home learned that the girl was Catholic, they quickly contacted St. Elizabeth�s Home, the city�s Catholic home for unwed mothers.� Although the Suemma Coleman Home was not an official Protestant institution, the city�s social workers had long accepted the practice that Coleman Home would serve the city�s Protestant girls, St. Elizabeth�s the city�s Catholic girls, and the Jewish Family Service Society the city�s Jewish girls.� This religious division of labor was found not only in Indianapolis�s private maternity homes.� As fiscally conservative public agencies assumed greater responsibility for social welfare in the decades following the New Deal, they often turned to religiously affiliated institutions to supplement the services offered by public agencies and in some cases to administer publicly financed programs.

The story told above suggests that religion and social welfare have been intimately connected and that religious boundaries helped define social welfare even as the public welfare state expanded its responsibilities.� Using the New Deal, the War on Poverty, and the more recent devolution of welfare as benchmarks, this book will explore the relationship between religion and social welfare by asking three central questions.� First, what role have religious social services played within the city�s larger social welfare matrix, both its public and private sectors? Second, how have the more general relations between the public and private sectors evolved? And third, how have notions of citizenship mediated the delivery of social services?

In the last two decades social welfare historians have discussed in detail the emergence of the welfare state, examining how and why the state emerged as the central actor.� And while most historians have also discussed at length the limitations of the U.S. welfare state�a system that does not include social needs as part of the nation�s more general rights of citizenship�they have paid little attention either to private social welfare or to the relations between private and public agencies. However, a small number of historians have begun to argue that public programs should not be examined in isolation from the private sector because historically the line dividing the two has been far from clear, and in the latter part of the twentieth century has become even less clear.� This includes Michael Katz who contends that examining the �blurred boundaries� between public and private social welfare is critical for uncovering some of the practical and ideological underpinnings of America�s �semi-welfare welfare state,� including, most importantly, the fact that public resources have never been sufficient to meet need and that aid has continued to be cast as a charitable endeavor rather than a right of citizenship.

While historians have generally overlooked the relationships between the public and private sectors, policy studies scholars and political scientists, including most notably Michael Lipsky, Steven Rathgeb Smith and Lester Salamon, have begun to map the relations between nonprofit social welfare agencies and government as they developed on the national level. For example, they have documented the many linkages between the two, discussing in depth the impact that the federal budget cuts of the 1980s had on the nonprofit sector. Unfortunately, religious nonprofits do not figure prominently in this research. And because most of this research focuses on post-1960 America, the longer historical roots also remain unexamined.�

Focusing on a much longer time period, this book will seek out those historical roots, placing special attention on the relationship between religiously affiliated social welfare and public agencies.� Moreover, by looking at only one city this book will remain attentive to �local variation,� which has always been a defining feature of American social welfare.� Throughout the twentieth century, both local charities and local governments continued to provide social welfare programs and, as one would expect, the benefits they provided varied greatly from city to city.� In addition, even federal programs have varied from city to city and state to state because local governments have been granted significant power to decide what services to over and to whom.� Despite the fact, then, that most studies of social welfare focus on the formulation of policy at the national level, social welfare practices have been shaped as much by local politics as by national agendas and legislation.�

Indianapolis is an ideal place to explore the relationship between public and private social welfare and the impact that both religion and notions of citizenship had on it.� As soon as the New Deal began expanding public responsibility for social welfare, public agencies in Indianapolis worked diligently both to minimize expenditures and to �keep bureaucracy small.�� They achieved these objectives by looking to the religious community and keeping alive the notion that social welfare was not a responsibility of the body politic but rather of private citizens. In the last seventy years, religious social welfare agencies have provided a wide range of services, focusing in the earlier decades on providing care for dependent children, unwed mothers, and homeless men, and in more recent decades tackling such problems as domestic violence and AIDS hospice care.� The city�s religious communities worked, however, not only to fill the gaps left by the semi-welfare state, but also to shape the policy guiding the state.� Some of these religious providers rejected the notion that social welfare was ultimately a private responsibility and lobbied to increase public assistance to the less advantaged and to remake public assistance into a right of citizenship rather than a charitable gift. Others, however, held onto the notion that social welfare needs were disconnected from any larger rights of citizenship, arguing that social needs were the province of private bodies. Both of these religious voices helped shape the city�s social welfare system, although the influence of the latter was far greater than the former.

This book covers a broad time frame, but its purpose is not to provide a comprehensive history of the city�s social welfare system.� It seeks instead to elucidate the broad trends and events that were also occurring nationally, drawing on those local �case studies� that best illustrate the direction in which social welfare policy and practice were moving. As a result, each chapter focuses on a larger national movement that will be quite familiar to the reader, including among others the New Deal, the War on Poverty, and the more recent devolution of welfare.� And while each chapter introduces new actors who on the surface may seem only tangentially related, the threads that weave together the book�s chapters are the common themes of religion�s impact on social services, the relationship between public and private agencies, and evolving notions of citizenship.�

 

Book Chapters

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Introduction

This chapter will provide the book�s conceptual and theoretical framework in addition to introducing the reader to Indianapolis.� As discussed above, social welfare history is a thriving field.� But because historians are most concerned with public welfare, private social welfare has figured only marginally into these histories, and religiously affiliated social welfare even less. When historians do discuss religion�s impact on social welfare, they usually tell only one story: how religion�s role declined, from playing a major role in social welfare at the beginning of the twentieth century to becoming only one small part of a much larger matrix at the end of the century. According to political scientist Theda Skocpol, social welfare historians have long ignored voluntary endeavors because they hold the assumption that the public and private sectors are inherently incompatible, with the one expanding only at the expense of the other.� Current social welfare history does not explain why today more than 50 percent of federal social service dollars are channeled through nonprofit organizations, including religiously affiliated agencies.� It also fails to discuss the impact such relations have had on the delivery of services and ever-changing notions of citizenship.�

After discussing the current historiography, this chapter will provide a demographic profile of Indianapolis and discuss why this city provides a good place to begin exploring religion�s impact on social welfare. Among other things, it will emphasize the city�s fiscal conservatism, its heavy reliance on private agencies (especially religiously affiliated ones) and its unwavering belief that social needs should be the responsibility of private citizens rather than the larger democratic body politic.� It will also point out that because Indianapolis was and still is a �midsize� city, its social welfare system was small enough to enable social welfare providers of different religious affiliations and political views to be aware of and interact with each other.�

Chapter One: Catholic Charities and the Making of the Welfare State

Historians have described in great detail the emergence of the New Deal, both on the national and local level. In its most basic form, the traditional narrative describes how the federal government displaced voluntary organizations as it assumed fundamental responsibility for the welfare of the nation�s citizens. By focusing almost exclusively on the immense growth of the welfare state, these historians miss the point that voluntary social welfare in general, and religiously affiliated welfare in particular, continued to exist.� How religiously affiliated organizations maintained a place in the field of social welfare within the context of the evolving welfare state will be the focus of this chapter.

This chapter describes how religious organizations responded to and affected the shape of the emerging welfare state, using Catholic Charities as a case study.� Having witnessed first-hand the deprivation engulfing their city, the workers at Catholic Charities recognized that governmental action was necessary.� However, none believed that government would or should displace or replace them. Committed to the notion that they had a responsibility to protect the religious �rights� of Catholic children, Catholic social welfare providers felt confident that they had a strong basis upon which to defend their place in the city�s emerging social welfare system.

In discussing how Catholic Charities carved out a new role for itself as public responsibility for relief emerged, particular attention will be placed on the various ways Catholic social welfare workers used the emerging welfare state to help buttress their own social welfare endeavors, highlighting the Works Progress Administration (WPA) program and the newly created Marion County Department of Public Welfare.� At a time when donations were falling and volunteer efforts declining, Catholic Charities� workers eagerly accepted federally funded WPA workers into their institutions.� They also worked out arrangements with the county welfare department, which agreed to send all Catholic children needing foster care to Catholic Charities in addition to providing funds for their support.� Catholics believed that as citizens they had a right to care for �their own� and to do so with tax dollars.� The ways in which the men and women working at Catholic Charities used both the WPA program and the county welfare department demonstrates that they learned early on how to negotiate the emerging public welfare system.� That they were successful was made clear by the fact that Catholic Charities grew significantly during the depression, tripling its staff and adding new services.�

For its part, the county welfare department turned to Catholic Charities and other private agencies because it was fiscally conservative and wanted to keep alive the notion that social welfare was still a private responsibility. That the public welfare department turned, in particular, to religious institutions to help secure care for the city�s needy children demonstrates also that it recognized the city had a pre-existing welfare system defined by both religious and racial boundaries.� This should not surprise, for the city�s social workers had for decades recognized that Catholic, Jewish, and Protestants should be able to claim responsibility for �their own� and that the city�s racial divide must not be disturbed.� This chapter ends by making the argument that when the public welfare bureaucracy emerged in Indianapolis, it did so by appropriating rather than rejecting these religious and racial boundaries.

Chapter 2: A City of Families: Social Welfare and Prosperity in Post-War Indianapolis

The 1940s and 1950s are the most understudied decades in American social welfare history.� The U.S. emerged victorious from the World War II eager to forget the deprivation of the Great Depression.� The work of historian James Patterson shows that many Americans saw the booming economy as proof that class divisions would soon become irrelevant and poverty a thing of the past.� And as historian Elaine Tyler May has described, the growing prosperity of American society heralded in an ideal of the nuclear family in which the middle class family reigned supreme.

Historians have begun to explore the impact that this ideal of the middle class family had on a wide array of topics, including the Cold War, the practice of psychiatry, and the pastoral counseling movement, to mention just a few.� Evidence from Indianapolis and elsewhere suggests this ideal of the family and the notion of America becoming� �classless� had a profound effect on many urban social welfare organizations which prior to the war had focused almost solely on the poor and understood social ills in largely class terms.� Reinforced by trends in psychology, leading social workers began to redefine urban social ills as psychiatric disorders, and in their search for the �causes� of these disorders they looked to the family rather than to the larger environment of the city. Social ills such as juvenile delinquency and unwed motherhood, which during the depression had been understood to be linked to urban poverty, were redefined: adolescent boys became delinquent because they were �maladjusted,� and adolescent girls became pregnant because they were �neurotic.�� Because social ills were neither defined by nor restricted to any particular class, social workers began to ask themselves whether they should focus solely on the poor.� It must be noted, however, that even though the recognition that social ills were not confined solely to the poorest could serve to de-stigmatize social ills, it could also serve to mask the economic inequalities that still defined urban America.

Across the nation many social welfare providers responded to this new cultural context by revamping their programs to serve all classes and to fit the growing domestic ideology.� In Indianapolis, the Family Welfare Society, the city�s largest private welfare organization, renamed itself the Family Service Association (FSA), following the lead of its national parent organization.� Explaining why this name change was necessary, FSA social workers told the public that the counseling it provided to �all classes� was more important than the financial assistance it provided to �the poor.� Still concerned that the larger public might continue to associate the FSA with only the poor, FSA social workers began charging fees for the counseling services they provided.� And in its effort to strengthen the ideal of the middle class family, the FSA greatly expanded its visiting homemaker service.�� In essence, the family became the unit of analysis, and the therapeutic social worker its savior.�

How religiously affiliated social welfare organizations, which had traditionally viewed themselves as the �guardians� of the poor, negotiated these changes in Indianapolis is the focus of this chapter.� As will be discussed, some religious social agencies followed the example of the secular providers, emphasizing that they served all classes, not only the poor.� Beginning in the late 1920s the Jewish Welfare Federation had begun to focus less on social welfare and more on social activities as the class composition of its community changed from largely lower class to mostly middle class. In the 1940s, the Church Federation followed a similar path, despite the fact that there were plenty of poor Protestants in the city.� A quick review of the Church Federation�s Social Service Department reveals that it focused greater and greater attention on middle class families, offering marriage counseling to couples and new social activities for the children.� The Church Federation explained its new emphasis on the middle class by stating that they �have problems too.� The Church Federation even justified its extensive collaborative endeavors with the Juvenile Court by emphasizing middle class children were not immune to �maladjustment.��

Even as some religious social welfare providers attempted to redefine themselves to fit with the new domestic ideology, many continued to direct attention to the poor. The evangelicals who provided care for homeless men at the Wheeler Mission and the Salvation Army rejected the psychiatric explanations of social problems and instead continued to believe that poverty resulted from personal moral failings.� They fed and housed men because they hoped ultimately to �save� their souls.� Some of the city�s Catholics and mainline Protestants also focused on the poor, but they rejected the moral language of the evangelicals, arguing instead that serving the poor was a fundamental part of one�s obligation to Christian witness. At a time when the larger society expressed little concern for the less privileged, both of these religious communities provided a bridge to the 1960s, when once again poverty would gain center stage in public life.

Chapter 3: Rediscovering Poverty, Redefining Community: Religion, the Civil Rights Movement, and the War on Poverty

In 1965 the War on Poverty officially arrived in Indianapolis with the creation of Community Action Against Poverty (CAAP), the city�s local poverty board.� Soon thereafter parishioners at St. Rita�s proposed to CAAP that the city�s first federally funded neighborhood center be housed in their church, an African American church located in one of the city�s poorer neighborhoods. Under the leadership of Father Strange, St. Rita�s parishioners had already begun providing social programs and they believed that they were well suited to help fight the War on Poverty.� CAAP leaders agreed. St. Rita�s was chosen to house the city�s first neighborhood center and Faye Williams, an African-American woman who was undoubtedly the parish�s most active parishioner, was asked to head it.� Yet even as the city celebrated the opening of the neighborhood center at St. Rita�s, conflicts raged over who would control the War on Poverty in Indianapolis and what battles its warriors would fight.

Chapter 3 examines the debates surrounding the War on Poverty, with a special focus on the African-American clergy who saw this federal initiative as an avenue by which to challenge the second-class citizenship to which they were assigned. By concentrating on the African-American clergy and examining the ways in which their religious views informed their political activities, this chapter builds a bridge between the history of the War on Poverty and the histories of urban religion and the civil rights movement.� Of course, historians have already begun exploring the connections between the War on Poverty and the civil rights movement.� And historians have also explored in great depth the role religion played in the civil rights movement.� But the interconnections between all three�urban religion, the War on Poverty, and the civil rights movement�have not yet received much attention.

In Indianapolis, known as the �southernmost northern city,� African-American clergy who were concerned about civil rights, and the sympathetic white clergy who aligned with them, became deeply involved in the War on Poverty, battling the city�s political establishment and public welfare authorities to make sure that the voices of poor African Americans were heard.� Like civil rights activists in other cities across the nation, they looked to the federal mandate for �maximum feasible participation� of the poor in the planning and administration of local War on Poverty programs as the legal wedge for gaining a place in the policy making arena. African Americans believed that social welfare should be a means for challenging racial and class inequalities and expand the social and civil rights of all the city�s residents. Even though they were less successful than many had hoped they would be, these clergy nonetheless brought attention to the interconnections between race and economics as well as the impact of both on evolving notions of citizenship.

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Chapter 4: �Beyond Religious Boundaries�: Faith-Based Neighborhood Work

Although the official War on Poverty lasted only a brief time, its legacy proved long-term.� In particular, the belief that social welfare issues must be addressed at the neighborhood level persisted. This chapter will discuss this legacy as it affected faith-based social welfare endeavors in the 1970s and 1980s.� After discussing Protestant neighborhood-based activities, it will turn to Catholic Charities.� Particular emphasis will be placed on how Catholic Charities drew on this new heritage to redefine itself and its mission at a time when its traditional programs began losing appeal.��

In 1960 Catholic Charities� two most important areas of service, foster care for children and residential care for unwed mothers, were thriving, and in many ways these programs looked no different than they had in 1940. Catholic Charities continued to assume responsibility for the city�s dependent Catholic children referred to it by the county public welfare department, and St. Elizabeth�s maintained its status as the city�s only Catholic home for unwed mothers.� By the mid-1970s, however, both programs were struggling. Forces from both within and without the Catholic community brought about this decline.� The number of Catholic families willing to provide foster care to Catholic children fell dramatically. With single motherhood losing its stigma and abortion becoming more available, fewer pregnant Catholic girls sought residence at St. Elizabeth�s.�

At the same time that Catholic Charities� traditional programs began losing appeal, it found new opportunities appearing.� In the late 1960s, the federal government began on a grand scale to contract with nonprofits for the delivery of social services. Using federal money and drawing on the neighborhood legacy of the War on Poverty, Catholic Charities in the early 1970s initiated an extensive �neighborhood community services program,� known more commonly as the Parish Outreach Program (POP). Beginning with three parishes in 1973, the POP soon became an important part of the social welfare landscape, offering counseling services and emergency aid to the poor.� Yet what is most notable about the POP is not that it operated at the level of the parish, but that it redefined whom within the parish Catholic Charities felt obligated to serve.� Though the POP served many Catholics, it was designed also to reach the city�s non-Catholic poor, including impoverished African Americans.�� Until the 1960s the notion that Catholic Charities should take care of �its own� predominated.� Because the city�s Catholic population was predominately white, these religious boundaries often functioned as de-facto racial boundaries.� But with the POP Catholic Charities began to claim that it needed to work �beyond religious boundaries,� to reach the poor who were not members of the Catholic faith.� As a result, Catholic Charities carved out a new role in the 1970s by speaking for those non-Catholics who so often had no voice in the city.� By doing so, the Catholic helped reconfigure the city�s long-standing religious and racial divides.

Chapter 5: The Mixed Economy and Marketization of Social Welfare

For social welfare historians, the 1980s mark a critical juncture.� President Reagan�s social welfare cutbacks invoked a heated debate about the role and responsibility of the voluntary sector.� Reagan believed his cuts would result in a more vibrant civic society, with voluntary organizations picking up the �slack� left by the retrenching welfare state.�� Liberals feared that the poor would be left to fend for themselves.� What is most striking about this debate is that neither side was willing to admit much less discuss the fact that no clear divide separated voluntary organizations from the state and that America�s social welfare system had long been defined by a mixed economy.

Using the national debates surrounding welfare devolution as a backdrop, this chapter will explore how two very different faith-based organizations negotiated this difficult time.� The first will focus on Catholic Charities, an organization that had recently become heavily dependent on federal funding.� As will be shown, federal cutbacks had a devastating impact on Catholic Charities and the poor population it served, demonstrating all too clearly that the fate of the voluntary sector was tightly interwoven with the fate of the state. Although Catholic Charities continued to receive federal money, it found resources for many of its programs cut. Most important, the case of Catholic Charities shows that those who believed the voluntary sector could easily fulfill the role previously occupied by the welfare state were seriously mistaken.

After discussing Catholic Charities, this chapter will turn to Protestant social welfare organizations that did not receive federal monies.� Although these organizations were not �directly� affected by federal cutbacks, they nevertheless had to deal with the fact that the number of needy citizens was rising quickly. Policy studies scholar Lester Salamon has described how many nonprofit social welfare organizations, both secular and religious, responded to the need for greater resources by engaging in more direct and open �commercial� activities, a phenomenon he refers to as the �marketization� of social welfare.� Social welfare had long been recognized as a responsibility of government and nonprofits, but increasingly �for profit� firms entered social welfare and nonprofit firms began to engage in more commercial activity.� Indianapolis�s Lighthouse mission, an evangelical mission that in recent years has become involved in new commercial ventures, exemplifies this trend.� Drawing on the experience of Lighthouse, as well as other examples, this chapter discussed the impact such ventures have had on religious nonprofits, and the implications such activity has had for notions of public accountability and citizenship.� Finally, this chapter ends by placing the �marketization� of social welfare within the longer history of the mixed economy of social welfare.

Chapter 6: Faith and the Future of Social Welfare Policy

In recent years, religion has once again figured centrally into social welfare policy as the federal government dismantles the national social safety net, leaving local communities responsible for the nation�s poorest and neediest citizens.� Religious responses to the 1996 welfare reform act and the Charitable Choice provision contained in it have been varied. Catholic Charities of Indianapolis actively opposed the act, fearing the act�s authors were motivated more by a concern with reducing welfare rolls than with serving the needs of the poor or reducing poverty. However, others in the religious community support the welfare reform act, looking to Charitable Choice as an opportunity to create new roles for congregations as social service providers.�

In Indianapolis this includes both former Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, who initiated the Front Porch Alliance to encourage clergy to play a more active role in their neighborhoods, and Governor Frank O�Bannon, who created Faith Works to help congregations participate in Charitable Choice. �These are the kinds of programs that President George W. Bush�s newly established White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives seeks to support.

It is clear that there are several assumptions underlying these initiatives, including: 1)religious-based providers are more effective than public agencies; 2) local communities are better suited to respond to social ills than the federal �bureaucracy�; and 3) poverty results not from larger structural inequalities but from the personal moral failings of the individual. �Religious and social welfare scholars have challenged the first assumption but for the most part have left the other two unexamined.� This chapter focuses on the latter two, arguing that these assumptions were used throughout the twentieth century to minimize public responsibility for the poor and to disconnect social needs from the larger rights of citizenship that Americans cherish.�