Poverty and Welfare in Cities

Issues of poverty and welfare are tightly woven within the history of urbanization of the United States. Many urban areas are noted for their high rates of violent crime, high unemployment, and poverty. Examining the historical path that ideas of poverty and welfare took illustrates the difficulties between caring for society's poor and encouraging dependency over self-reliance. Public views of poverty began as caring for one's neighbor during hardships and slowly developed into a distribution system designed to weed out the undeserving—those unwilling to work, drunks, and criminals. These views were highly influenced by religious beliefs, particularly the Protestant work ethic, and by England's role in governing the colonists.

In the Elizabethan Poor Law created in 1601, England laid out the responsibilities and role of the Anglican Church of England. Churches were to care for the poor, collect taxes from the parish community to pay for their care, ensure that the poor found employment, and provide for those who were unable to work such as orphans, the elderly, and those with physical disabilities. The Poor Law stated very clearly family obligations to care for impoverished relatives and even to pay for any care the parish provided. Early English colonists based colonial poor laws around it. While the community had a responsibility to provide for the well-being of its members, members had a responsibility to the community to be productive and contributing citizens.

The initial practice of helping poor people in a family home setting was referred to as “outdoor relief.” Following the philosophy of the Poor Law, church communities called parishes were as responsible for people in the colonies as they were for people in England. Facing hardships such as disease, natural disasters of fires, drought, floods, and loss of life in battles fighting indigenous people or other settlers, and the death or disablement of a spouse often meant that women and children were particularly vulnerable to living in poverty. People experiencing these events were viewed as deserving of help and encouraged to seek aid first from the family and then, if necessary, the larger community or parish. The parish or church consisted of overseers whose job it was to determine what aid was needed, for example, food, clothing, shelter, or money for bills. Overseers also supervised [Page 604]the distribution of items and monitored for potential misuse by the poor.

The 1800s witnessed expansive growth of new technology such as the cotton gin, steam engines, and factories. Machinery and innovation allowed for smaller workforces in factories; business owners cut wages and jobs leaving many unemployed and unable to support themselves or families. Urbanization and industrialization combined with the arrival of increased numbers of poor immigrants placed an extraordinary burden on local communities. The fight to separate churches from government funding had led to the elimination of public taxes to support local congregations. Churches had to find stricter and less expensive means of addressing poverty. The result was a system called “indoor relief,” which was the practice of placing the poor into almshouses that had been built in large areas such as Boston, Salem, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere in New England. Previously functioning under local parish control, Pennsylvania was the first state to turn operations of poorhouses over to the county, and by 1820 the state's poorhouses became a model for future poorhouses in other areas across the growing nation. Caring for the poor had become a secular role, with churches volunteering assistance if they so chose.

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