What weirdness possesses us, on the eve of the 21st century, to look to the 19th century for guidance? For years conservatives and libertarians have been building a cult of the Victorian era. Now these cultists have rummaged through Chicago history and found an object lesson. In the July issue of “Alternatives in Philanthropy”–a newsletter published by the Capital Research Center, a conservative libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C.–editor Daniel Oliver asserts, “The aftermath of the Chicago Fire offers a case study in how to help the needy.”
Sixteen days after the fire, society superintendent O.C. Gibbs advised his personnel that plenty of construction and housekeeping work was already available. “Clerks, and persons unaccustomed to out-door labor, if they cannot find such employment as they have been accustomed to, must take such as is offered or leave the city. Any man, single woman, or boy, able to work, and unemployed at this time, is so from choice and not from necessity.” Accordingly Gibbs instructed his relief workers to “give no aid to any families who are capable of earning their own support, if fully employed (except it be to supply some needed articles of clothing, bedding, or furniture which their earnings will not enable them to procure, and at the same time meet their ordinary expenses of food and fuel).”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Elected officials had some say in the General Relief Committee; they had none in the Chicago Relief and Aid Society. For more than a decade it had been run by the city’s commercial elite. On its executive committee sat railroad lawyer and lumberman Wirt Dexter, dry-goods merchant Henry King, industrialist George Pullman, his vice president Charles Hammond, lumber merchants Thomas Harvey and Thomas Avery, industrialist Nathaniel Fairbank, society doctor Hosmer Johnson, attorney E.C. Larned, iron manufacturer N.S. Bouton, and railway supplier J. MacGregor Adams. All were men, all were wealthy, all were deeply concerned that the fire might destabilize Chicago’s social structure. The mayor put them in charge on the assumption that they were above it all–that, in Sawislak’s words, they “stood apart from the ‘interests’ embodied by the ‘corrupt’ aldermen and were thus best able and entitled to decide just what steps served the ‘public interest,’ a best course for all the citizens of Chicago.” The aim wasn’t to add expertise to the relief effort but to subtract it–Fairbank and Gibbs had served on the General Relief Committee, so it would have been able to draw on private-sector talent. The effect of putting the Relief and Aid Society in charge was to make Chicago’s commercial elite the only arbiter of whom to help and how to do so.
These measures could hardly be described as scientific, since they were at least as likely to weed out the deserving as the undeserving. Because the society wasn’t accountable to the public, there was none of the feedback an aldermanic presence would have provided. What was called “scientific charity” turns out to have been a system of charity run by the rich for people the rich could sympathize with. The society even built this double standard into its organizational structure when it organized a “Committee on Special Relief” in addition to its “General Plan.”
There’s a certain irony here. Mayor Mason had given the society the job of handing out relief because businesspeople feared that aldermanic involvement in the relief effort would lead to corruption. What would the business owners then–or the Capital Research Center today–have said if the original General Relief Committee had remained in charge, been stingy about helping the needy, and later quietly converted the resulting surplus to its own purposes?
