by Paul R. Spitzzeri
As we explore in depth the annual report of Los Angeles City Auditor Lewis H. Schwaebe regarding the city’s expenditures and income for the year ending 30 November 1904, it is obvious to expect statements from municipal departments regarding such areas as schools, streets, parks and other typical functions. Of the many accounts in the Angel City’s budget, one that is not so clearly considered as a part of the operations of the municipality is the one dedicated to charity.
There were fourteen institutions supported by Los Angeles with monthly allotments ranging from $20 to $125, as well as the split expenses with the county directed to the Juvenile Detention Home, with the city’s share being $263.96. For that year, the total funding provided to the various agencies was just north of $6,500, this being not quite a half million dollars today, though there is not an exact equivalency, given how much smaller the Angel City was with a population of around 200,000 compared to the roughly 4 million today.
In any case, organizations were required, in return to municipal support, to submit reports to the auditor and these are of no small interest given their work at a time of extreme financial inequity at the time and the resulting social consequences. Some of the statements were rather straightforward and factual, but others are notable for their discussion of the matter of charitable support and the work these organizations conducted.
The Boys’ and Girls’ Aid Society noted that it was established in March 1888 during the peak of the major Boom of the Eighties and its founders included business, social and political leaders Helen Watson, William Lacy, Samuel M. Perry, Robert M. Widney, Moses L. Wicks, James Jaynes, and William H. Workman, the latter the mayor of Los Angeles and also the nephew of Homestead founders William Workman and Nicolasa Urioste. It noted that city support began in 1902 and 401 children were assisted, with 93 remaining in the Society’s care, the rest returned to their parents or found other homes.
In its report of income and expenses, the organization’s president, J.L. Starr observed that almost $1,000 was received in donations including clothing, food and other items and he added, “should we have paid actual money for these donations, you will find that the deficit would have been much greater than it shows, and this shows conclusively that this institution is not a money making one as has been charged.” Income comprised not far under $8,000, with state funding accounting for above two-thirds, 20% coming from “paying inmates,” 9% from other sources and the city’s contribution being 3%. There was a balance of some $2,000 from the prior year and below $500 from a building fund, so $10,350 was received for the year.
With respect to expenses, that amounted to about $11,300, leaving a deficit of about $950. Roughly 30% each came from payroll and food, with repairs and furniture responsible for about another 20%. Other fairly major expenditures concerned clothing, fuel and electricity, bedding and insurance, totaling about 18%, with the remaining payouts being for water, telephone, transportation, drugs, stationery and interest.
The Children’s Home Society of California, with headquarters in Los Angeles, was formed at the end of 1891 and owned and operated a receiving home at Griffith Avenue and 25th Street, northeast of Exposition Park. Its mission was “to find permanent homes in families morally and financially able to bring up a child and give it the advantages of a home.” After a 90-day probation period, the child would remain with the family “if all parties are satisfied in may be legally adopted.” A state and a quartet of district officials in the Golden State and the territory of Arizona worked on this mission as well as seeking funding.
More than 500 children were placed in homes, while 200 or so more were cared for by the Society before being returned to parents or guardians and, for the former, the average cost was about $137 per child, compared to California’s costs of $100 per year at a total of more than $433,000 annually. This, the report continued, showed “that the method pursued by this Society is not only better for the child, but is also much more economical for the tax-payer.” Unlike the Boys’ and Girls’ Aid Society, this organization did not receive state funding, “its only income coming from voluntary contributions,” these including $2,400 from private contributors in Los Angeles during the past year and north of 10,000 from all other sources, beyond the $30 a month from the city.
There were applications on file with the Society for the care of nearly 50 children in Arizona and California and it was noted that “if some method could be devised whereby existing Societies could be brought into co-operation” with this organization “to supply these homes wanting children it would reduce the per-capita cost, and confer blessing alike on the homeless child and on the family receiving him.” Expenses totaled just shy of $12,000, or under $1,000 below revenue, with just over half being salaries, 22% comprising the support of the home and about the same percentage involving general and traveling expenses, as well as mortgage and interest on the house.
The remainder concerned adoption expenses for the Society, who counted Protestant pastors as its state and district superintendents and Niles Pease (furniture and carpet merchant, then- president of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association and future city council member,) electric and gas fixtures manufacturer Zelotes L. Parmelee, and Dr. Francis B. Kellogg, as among its directors and officers.
Pease was also a director of the Associated Charities of Los Angeles, which, in its eleventh report to the city, mentioned four items under “What We Are Willing to Do”: “to find, as far as possible, a personal friend for each family in need;” to investigate and report on such cases; to “procure relief from proper sources;” and to “help those in need to remain self-supporting.” The public was requested to remit addresses of “strangers seeking aid;” to notify the organization when assistance was provided or rejected; and to help secure support from churches and societies using its records and investigations.
The Associated Charities’ officers were President Herman W. Frank of the well-known Harris and Frank clothing store; former city clerk and county sheriff James C. Kays as first vice-president; Leontide Ducommun, widow of watchmaker and merchant Charles Ducommun as second vice-president; Third Vice-President Hannah Graves Bath, who was county inspector for the organization; Secretary Thomas J. Stuart; and Farmers and Merchants Bank, which served as treasurer. In addition to Pease and the aforementioned, directors included the prominent merchants Hans Jevne and Harris Newmark, three other women in addition to Bath and Ducommun, these being Stella Weaver, Mrs. C. Brodie and Katherine Hooker, whose relationship with George Ellery Hale of the Mt. Wilson Observatory where the Hooker telescope, named for her husband, engendered significant conflict among the trio.
In a short statement, Stuart, who died in 1908 and who served in his secretarial capacity for the organization for fourteen years, declared, “indiscriminate giving is not charity, for it fosters untruthfulness, laziness, drunkenness and vie, the very thing true charity labors to put down.” He also implored those reading to not give to beggars and tramps, but, instead, to send these persons to the organization’s agent.
As was a declared problem by Associated Charities during this period, Stuart continued, “one of the greatest services you can do to the real poor is to assist the society in weeding out impostors”—a 1908 claim by the Los Angeles County poor farm’s superintendent is that fully half who went to charities for help were “impostors”— as “practically every penny given to an impostor is taken from the deserving poor.” Anyone stating that they were seeking assistance for “religious or benevolent” reasons was to be reported to the office and Stuart concluded that its goal was “in directing benevolence into channels where good may result instead of evil.”
A rather remarkable essay titled “Charity vs. Alms Giving” was penned by Bath, who sought to make a clear distinction between the two and indicating that they were “in many—very many cases” opposites. She observed
We have no right to encourage pauperism, to help a man or woman abandon his or her pride and self-respect; nevertheless, in ninety-nine cases out of one hundred the very first acceptance of charity will do this very thing . . . We take a decided stand against the deformed and crippled street beggars who make a pretense of selling small wares in order to ply their vocation, and believe they are a dangerous menace to motherhood, and in many other ways a blot upon our city. Several of those allowed upon the streets of Los Angeles are known to be capitalists holding property mortgages and having a more than fair income.
She went to note that the Associated Charities was investigating fraud and misrepresentation, but also castigated those who “fostered . . . a mistaken sentimentality that is presumed to be charity” while asserting “there is ample opportunity for every man and woman to expend his or her sympathy in true charity.” The giving of alms, however, “is often very far from the true essence of charity,” the latter “cometh from the heart and comforteth the bruised in spirit” and a manifestation of “loving kindness.” She implored, “help those that are down, but don’t help them to stay down!” and “encourage their pride and force them into a better life!” with the word “force” a significant one.
“Indiscriminate charity” was also condemned by Bath, who added “it is as wrong to encourage the man addicted to the vice of borrowing [money], as the one with the vice of alcohol or drugs” because their reliance on others “instead if upon [their] own strength of character” was an evil. This was fostered by the fact that “the too ready lender is almost as great an evil to humanity as rum or opium, since he too helps a man to kill his own better nature and destroy his self-respect.” Paying the rent and clothing the children of poor persons meant that “you would soon produce a condition of settled pauperism among them.”
Taking these positions to a religious realm, Bath added “let no man lean on anyone save God and his own divine self,” though she suggested that “little helps, when they are unexpected, arouse hope and awaken new faith and new ambition in a discouraged soul.” She continued,
Look about you for such souls, the worn and weary father of a brood of hungry children, the widow struggling with adverse fate in an effort to clothe and educate a child, the tired shop girl who uses all her earnings to sustain her parents, the ambitious boy or girl eager for a chance in life, and the poor cripple or invalid seeking health . . . It is an insult to the opulent Creator to suppose you will suffer want and poverty if you help those who are in temporary misfortune.
Bath then concluded with the observation that “dollars planted in the soil of benevolence grow into harvests of prosperity.” Yet, nothing was really said about why alms were destructive, how beggars were harmful to mothers and “a blot on our city” and how the plight of the working poor or those thrown out of work by mechanization, as just some examples, factored into the question of poverty and assistance to those in need.
President Frank’s report, his fourth as chief executive of Associated Charities, made specific mention of “alleviating the poverty, distress and sickness of the worthy poor.” After praising those who volunteered or worked for pay in the organization and how fundraising was a perennial priority, he spoke of the “great study in human nature” in what the association did. Frank mentioned “here one meets the impostor, the worthy poor and the unworthy poor” as well as those who created their misfortune and those who were victims of injustice, while “the poor sick are the most distressing of all.”
Frank talked of the health seekers, of whom there were so many from the Boom of the 1880s forward, buy who came “without any provision or means of gaining a livelihood.” Even with assistance with food, drugs or rental assistance, there were instances in which some of these people were sent back to their prior homes “to prevent their becoming a permanent charge upon this community.” Noting that the organization was a “central bureau of this character of work,” he observed that the call for assistance
comes from people of all creeds, and it is an open question, if we are not entitled to first consideration, above all sectarian charity work, when you are making your annual distribution of charity.
Stuart’s report commented that “when you consider the phenomenal increase of the city’s population” since the organization was founded in 1893 (the year of a national depression in a decade of several years of regional drought occurring in the general Gilded Age in America), “and the conditions which exist now” it was satisfying to contemplate its work. This meant assistance of varying kinds to the “worthy needs” and the result “that in many cases they have reached self-support.”
Given the “cosmopolitan character” of the rapidly growing Angel City and the evils attendant in such environments, the preeminence of investigations was “done on the lines of modern organized charity as practiced in all important centers of population throughout Europe and our own country, where the most gratifying results are obtained.” In providing clothing, food, medical care and other supplies and services, Stuart went on, it was “true, the facts show that some have been investigated and found unworthy and treated as such.”
The statement added “no worthy person need feel humiliated by coming to our Society for aid” and that “to all charitably disposed persons our services are freely offered, and such are earnestly urged to call and make full investigation of matters which so vitally enter into the welfare of the individual and the State.” He also noted that Associated Charities was the only group to keep records of its cases, with above 8,600 in its books and, in the preceding year, there were 1,041 of these. More than 2,100 visitor calls were logged, with 743 instances of food provided to the homeless, 262 examples of lodging to them, 122 instances of rent paid to families, 392 families given food, and 1,106 sick calls.
The financial statement reflected a surplus of $1,000, with just shy of $10,000 in resources, over $1,400 of which was cash on hand. Of the income, half came from cash donations ad another 38% from donations in the form of special railroad fares. Membership dues comprised about 8% of revenue and there were small amounts from the county, the Catholic and Ladies’ benevolent societies, the St. Paul Relief Society and others. For expenses, over a third involved those railroad tickets and nearly 20% was in distribution of food and supplies, while just over 10% came from salaries. Some 22% was expended in transportation, rent, clothing, bedding, and fuel, with the remainder involving office expenses, furniture, meal tickets, medicine, printing and postage, lodging, loans and more.
The fourth part of this post will look into reports of some the individual charitable organizations identified by Associated Charities as operating in Los Angeles, so please check in for that soon.