From the very beginning of our history, American attitudes towards the poor have been shaped by the Puritanical idea that poverty was a result of laziness or some other moral defect. People were not poor because they lacked opportunity. On the contrary, this was a land of limitless opportunity, represented by a limitless frontier.
By the middle of the 19th century, this idea took the form of the County Home. If people refused to work, and ordinary citizens were going to have to support them with their hard-earned money, then the best that could be done for them was to confine them to a County Home, which was almost always a working farm, where they could be made to work, to the extent of their physical and mental abilities, and help defray the cost of their care.
The Pennsylvania census data for residents of the County Home in Loysville is revealing. In 1850, for instance, there were 46 “inmates:” 14 men, 16 women, and 16 children. (The children, by the way, were typically bound into apprenticeship, sometimes when they were as young as 18 months old.) Of those 46 inmates — in the words of the census — 4 were “cripples,” 1 was “sick,” 2 were “insane,” 6 were “foreigners,” 1 was a “drunkard,” 3 were “idiots,” 3 were “black,” and 2 suffered from “poverty.” The rest were ordinary, run-of-the-mill “paupers.”
These are not pretty categories. But they suffice to give a sense of the broad range of social problems the Home was expected to address.
The population of the Home swelled in the next two decades. The aftermath of the Civil War brought with it a host of new social needs. It was in this era that the proud brick building in Loysville was raised, a testament to the growing wealth of Perry County, and its on-going commitment to the needs of its weakest citizens.
By the 1880 census, there was the beginning of a recognition that the “inmates” were men and women who might have had fuller lives on the outside, if only their luck had been better. Each inmate’s entry includes an “occupation,” if there previously was one, and marital status, signaling an understanding that these unfortunates might be “inmates” now, but once they were farmers or laborers, husbands and wives.
Even so, the old attitude about moral defects and poverty persisted into the 20th century. H.H. Hain was pleased to report in 1922 that “…the word ‘pauper’ is no longer in use in the county press.” But Hain didn’t shy away from the pejorative terms “inmates” and “tramps” in his own reporting on the County Home.
By Hain’s day, the population at the Home seemed to have stabilized, after seeing a bulge in the late 19th century. He reports a mere 56 inmates at the beginning of 1922.
But the Great Depression was not far off. That calamity revolutionized the way Americans thought about poverty, particularly poverty among the elderly.
As part of my research, I applied a simple desktop calculator to the Pennsylvania censuses of the County Home. In 1850, the average age of the inmates was 38. By 1900, it had risen to 50.
Americans were living longer. In the 20th century, poverty added new dimension: old age.
The Great Depression exposed the vulnerability of aging Americans. In its depths, the poverty rate among the elderly was approximately 50%.
The nation’s haphazard system of county homes and urban poorhouses were incapable of handling millions of new “inmates.” A new approach was needed.
President Franklin Roosevelt responded to the crisis by proposing a radical idea: each American was entitled to protection from the gravest dangers of modern life, including unemployment, widowhood, being orphaned, and old age. In 1935, Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act as part of the New Deal.
Most of us have lived with the comforting idea of this protection our entire lives. At the time, however, it was hugely controversial. Some thought it would bankrupt the nation. Others questioned its constitutionality. Women and minorities were mostly excluded from benefits. Huge sectors of the economy — including agricultural laborers — were initially excluded, too. The government would be reaching deeper into its citizen’s lives — and pockets — than ever before.
But the country knew that there was no going back to the old way of trying to alleviate poverty. The Great Depression demonstrated vividly, once and for all, that this was not a country of limitless opportunity, and that laziness wasn’t the only reason a man might not find a job.
You could say that the County Home in Loysville was a casualty of the Social Security Act of 1935, which expressly forbade government payments to inmates of county homes and poorhouses. The government funding stream which had subsidized these institutions for more than two centuries was drastically reduced. County homes continued to fill gaps in the social safety net, but they became dinosaurs. There was no more economic or administrative advantage in concentrating the poor, no more need for an overseer to ensure that inmates earned their keep on the farm.
I’d be very interested to hear readers’ personal stories about the County Home in Loysville. Please email or write me if you have something you’d like to share.
Our nation has become steadily more merciful since colonial times. Indentured servitude and slavery are long gone. To be in debt no longer carries with it fear of a prison sentence. We’ve done away with ugly categories like “Idiot,” “Insane,” “Crippled,” “Maimed,” and “Pauper.”
There’s a long way to go, though. Our society still punishes misfortune. We still tend to blame the disadvantaged. Our health care system reflects this. The loss of a job or a preexisting medical condition can be utterly ruinous.
The debate rages on. Just as in the 18th century, when citizens were outraged by the prospect of being taxed to support their undeserving neighbors — “runaway servants,” “the lazy,” “foreigners,” “paupers — ” so, too, today we wrestle with the problem of who deserves to benefit from the sweat of our collective brow. Everyone is rightly wary of abuses. We all worry about bankrupting the country over some unaffordable entitlement.
We’ve been through this as a nation before. Every time we’ve chosen to protect our citizens from the blows of blind fortune, the country has improved and grown.
My hope for 2010 is that affordable health care is added to the list of inalienable rights that we’re all so justly proud of.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 31 December 2009
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
