Human Services

RUNNING HEAD : Human Services

Chronicling the History of American Human Services

Chronicling the History of American Human Services

The history of the concept of human services in America dates back in the 1700s . Colonial America was influenced by the English Poor Law . That law , passed in 1601 , established four basic principles for government charity (1 ) care for the poor was a public responsibility (2 ) care for the poor was a local matter (3 ) public relief was denied to individuals who could be cared for by their families and (4 ) children of the

poor could be apprenticed to farmers and artisans who would care for them in exchange for work (Katz 1986 ,

. 13-14 . Most recipients of outdoor relief were women , children , elderly , or sick

At the late 1800s , both American public and private charity were undergoing profound changes . For public welfare , the days of purely local control were on the way out . State , and even federal , involvement was rising . The federal government was taking its first tentative steps into the social welfare arena . The Civil War had left a large number of disabled veterans for whom the federal government provided pensions and other benefits . In addition , the federal government provided emergency relief to victims of floods in 1867 , 1874 , 1882 , and 1884 . Farmers devastated by a locust infestation in 1875 received a special appropriation . There was also an 1879 appropriation to establish colleges for the blind (Warren 1978 ,

. 92

The government began focusing on the children and the elderly in their programs to help the poor . Certainly many children were living in miserable conditions . What became known as the Child-Saving Movement developed . The Child-Saving Movement was a broad , loose social movement that sought better conditions for children . Among the many issues embraced under the general heading of child saving were removing children from poorhouses preventing child abuse and enacting child cruelty laws replacing institutional care with foster care juvenile justice reform , including the introduction of juvenile courts and the removal of juveniles from adult prisons compulsory education and public health measures to combat infant mortality (Tiffin 1983 ,

br 204-205

Among the Child-Saving Movement 's greatest successes was moving children out of poorhouses into orphanages . Orphanages had a long history in the United States , as both private and public institutions . Private orphanages were established in New Orleans as early as 1729 and in Savannah in 1738 . The first public orphanage was probably the one in Charleston , South Carolina , established in 1794 . By 1910 there were at least 1 ,151 orphanages in the United States and a Children 's Bureau was established in 1912 . Approximately 90 percent of these social services were nominally private , but nearly all received at least some government funding . More importantly , mothers ' pensions ' was developed as the first state welfare program . This is giving small stipends to widows and other mothers to assist them in caring for their children . In part those programs were a county-level response to the large number of widows in the aftermath of...