Book Review

This remarkable volume assays more vital subjects and touches upon more contentious issues than any one monograph or author could treat comprehensively. But if Daniel J. Walkowitz runs the danger of touching too lightly here and there, evading a particular difficulty or contradiction, the value of his overview is still great. Indeed, if no one has come so close to identifying the first half of his given subject, rarely has such an insightful effort been made to encompass the second and far more problematic half. Although he does not say so, Walkowitz has also painted a fascinating portrait of that dynamic Jewish lower middle class, which replaced the bemuscled proletariat of the earlier radical movements but has also done much both to define a liberal "Americanism" and to express its limitations.	1
Walkowitz begins with the troubled recent scholarly efforts to define the modern middle class and the social worker within it. As he says, the "bourgeois working class" and the "proletarian white-collar class" occupy the same skin, as alternative and often arbitrary identities constructed by both themselves and society. In the Progressive Era, as the number of loosely defined social work professionals (in New York, especially, disproportionately Jewish and female) increased rapidly, so did the uncertainties. Thus the luminary Abraham Flexner could deliver a devastating blow at the National Conference of Charities and Correction in 1915, telling his listeners that social workers could never become true professionals because they lacked specialized training and advanced degrees. They were, in short, mere glorified workers.	2
Social workers had good reason to feel proletarianized. The wages and conditions at the Department of Welfare for the City of New York and the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York, two agencies where Walkowitz focused his archival explorations, were meager and demeaning. These social workers desperately needed something like the trade unions that were just beginning to uplift their relatives in the sweatshops. But they also urgently wanted to gain respect for themselves. They could perhaps rejoice belatedly when the Census Bureau in 1930 listed them among the "other professions" not earlier enumerated, a category including also librarians and county farm agents. But statistical recognition did little for daily lives on the job: As Walkowitz devotes loving detail to demonstrating, social workers made the needed improvements themselves.	3
The professionalization or "industrialization" of the caseworker during the 1920s indirectly prepared the way. The public's romanticizing of the devoted volunteer working in a settlement house gave way to praise of efficiency on the Taylorization model, with high case loads, regularized reporting procedures, and a bloc of statisticians on hand to make sense of the information gathered. The contradictions multiplied when radicalized caseworkers began to agitate for better pay for themselves and more help for their clients. At the heart of that development lay an ambiguous but deeply felt class sentiment along with a gender consciousness of women caseworkers facing male administrators. If many prominent social workers of the older generation never married, the mass of younger caseworkers lived the modern problems of balancing work and family. And furthermore, if unmarried, they approached the problem from their disadvantageous situation as badly underpaid, single women. Workers' Councils established in Boston and New York City during 1923–1924 heralded the formation of real unions and the composite self-image of caseworkers as professionals, trade unionists, and women with families of their own.	. . .