| Abstrakt: |
The article focuses on some charity organization views on poverty, pauperism, and their causes. In the beginning the article presents the history of establishment of the charity organization movement. The etiology of poverty and pauperism was a perennial subject at the sessions sponsored by the Committee on Charity Organization. No single point of view can be identified as the charity organization attitude, for this was no monolithic movement imposing a prescribed creed upon its devotees. The growing belief of many charity workers that social conditions were largely responsible for the creation and preservation of poverty led to an apparently heated debate on the floor of the conference in 1891. At the 1897 conference, Alfred O. Crozier of Grand Rapids, chairman of the Committee on Organization of Charity, expressed a by-then familiar confusion of newer sociological thought and traditional Community Organization Society theories of causation: "Wrong environment," he averred, "has created more tramps than heredity", but he backtracked, this environment is often the creation of "misguided charity." |
