Fighting Poverty with Virtue: Moral Reform and America's Urban Poor, 1825-2000.

• Author: Ziliak, Stephen T.
• Position: Book Reviews

* Fighting Poverty with Virtue: Moral Reform and America's Urban Poor, 1825-2000 By Joel Schwartz Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2000. Pp. xxii, 353. $39.95.

Cusins. Excuse me: is there any place in your religion for honor, justice, truth, love, mercy and so forth?

Undershaft. Yes: they are the graces and luxuries of a rich, strong, and safe life.

Cusins. Suppose one is forced to choose between them and money or gun-powder?

Undershaft. Choose money and gunpowder; for without enough of both you cannot afford the others.

Cusins. That is your religion?

Undershaft. Yes.

--G. B. Shaw, Major Barbara

President Clinton promised to "end welfare as we know it," and, by popular opinion, he did. He did not, however, end welfare as American historians know it: in dimensions financial, legal, administrative, and moral, too numerous to name here, the recent reform (with amendments by President Bush) is striving to remake welfare as historians of the 1870s know it. In the Bush administration, it appears that social-service funding--from poverty alleviation to drug abuse treatment--will go increasingly into the hands of faith-based groups. Specifically, more state and federal dollars will go to groups that believe in reducing dependence with moral reform and to those who measure the practice of self-reliance in a metric of virtue and vice. In Fighting Poverty with Virtue, Joel Schwartz (the son of Anna J.), a political scientist by training and a former editor of The Public Interest, has examined some nineteenth-century precedents of the current movement.

With this book, Schwartz seeks to shed "light on our contemporary efforts to remoralize the poor by looking at the rhetoric and actions of some of the nineteenth-century moral reformers" (p. xvi). The book will be of immediate interest to the nonspecialist. The style is agreeable (in a way to which American academics have conformed), and the conclusion is easy to understand: Schwartz believes "we should and must" encourage "diligence, sobriety, thrift, and familial responsibility among the poor" (p. 237).

The focus is in fact on the social thought--not, as the author says, on the "rhetoric"--of four major figures: essentially, it is explication by anecdote, recounting the moral ideas of the Reverend Joseph Tuckerman, a Unitarian and charity reformer of 1820s and 1830s Boston; of Robert M. Hartley, who at midcentury founded the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor; of...