Changing of the Guard:  The Rise of Ethnic Control and Values in Boston's Relief¹

Dorothy M. Brown
Georgetown University

TRAVERSO, SUSAN.  Welfare Politics in Boston, 1910-1940. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003. xiii + 163 pp. Introduction, notes and index, $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 1-55849-378-6.

In this well-researched policy study, Susan Traverso analyzes the transformation of Boston's primarily private, Protestant-run system of social provision to a primarily public welfare system in which Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders found common ground in the "idealized male-headed, single-wage family" (122). Attentive to gender issues, Traverso's core focus Ñand her contributionÑis the exploration of the role of ethnicity and religion in this transformation. While the political battles over public welfare in Chicago and New York had more significant national impact in the Progressive era, Boston's strong tradition of Brahmin/Yankee Protestant dominance in politics and social provision, the political rise of the Irish Catholics, and the challenge of Catholics and Jews "to take care of their own" makes a particularly compelling story.  Traverso tells it well.	1
Suspicions and hostilities were long-standing and especially deep in Boston. John McGreevy opens his history of Catholicism and American Freedom  (2003) with the Eliot School Rebellion in Boston in 1859 when hundreds of young Catholic school children, encouraged by a local Jesuit priest and their parents, refused to recite the King James Bible version of the ten commandments in the Eliot public school. One student was beaten on the hands so severely with a rattan stick that the incident gained national headlines. At the turn of the century, Catholics still saw the Boston public schools as Protestant enclaves but also viewed the leading private, non-sectarian charity organizations, the Boston Provident Association and Associated Charities, as dominated by Protestants with a dangerous proclivity for proselytizing. Both organizations worked closely with the public relief department, the Overseers of the Poor, who administered a budget that represented less than half of one percent of the city's operating budget. Only the most destitute were served and provided, Traverso observes, with "only enough aid to prevent starvation" (25).	2
The Boston Provident Association and the Associated Charities embraced the then current scientific charity approach and emphasized individual and family failings. They monitored the moral and material progress of their clients, whom they aided usually with in kind relief. By contrast, the Catholic Charitable Bureau, founded in 1903, blamed economy and environmental factors for the plight of their poor. Anxious to protect their co-religionists, the bureau successfully secured legislation to place Catholic children who were wards of the state in Catholic homes. The Federated Jewish Charities, Traverso concludes, had "a more positive approach to charity," than its Protestant or Catholic counterparts, offering a higher level of support and grounding its efforts "in a sense of justice, more than a sense of piety" (22).	3
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