Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY
/
Fighting Poverty with Virtue
Fighting Poverty with Virtue
Jul 18, 2025 8:01 PM

Is America returning to a tradition of moral reform that had been rejected one hundred years ago? Consider the titles of the two major pieces of antipoverty legislation, each of which represents a generation's approach to this perennial social problem. The War on Poverty was ushered in by the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, while the recent welfare reform legislation was the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. The contrast between the laws, Joel Schwartz suggests, “points to the growing recognition that economic opportunity can be seized by the poor only to the extent that they accept personal responsibility.” This shift, however, is not merely a turning away from the policies of the Great Society. It marks a return to the antipoverty strategy of the moral reformers of the nineteenth century who attempted “to make the poor less poor by making them more virtuous.”

Joel Schwartz, a program officer at the National Endowment of Humanities and a former editor of The Public Interest, has put together an academically rigorous but highly readable study that will fascinate not only students of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century history but also those interested in the contemporary challenges of welfare and welfare reform.

In this wonderful—and timely—book, Schwartz identifies a “unified tradition of moral reform” that goes from 1825 to the early years in the last century. The first part of the work focuses on the thought and action of four largely forgotten figures: Joseph Tuckerman (1778–1840), a Unitarian minister to the Boston poor in the 1820s and 1830s; Robert M. Hartley (1796–1881), the founder and guiding spirit of New York's Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor; Charles Loring Brace (1826–1890), who established and headed the New York Children's Aid Society; and Josephine Russell Shaw (1843–1905), a founder and leading theoretician of New York's Charity Organization Society. The tradition represented by these reformers opposed unconditional doles for the poor, instead emphasizing “the need to help the poor by enabling them to help themselves, specifically by inculcating and encouraging the poor to practice the virtues of diligence, sobriety, and thrift.”

This moral reform tradition embraced a balanced approach that considered both moral and material factors in understanding and attacking poverty: The poor were not poor because of abstract social conditions beyond their control, nor could they improve their lot without any assistance. It is this “reasonable middle ground,” Schwartz argues, that reformers today are correctly assuming.

The critique and rejection of this moral tradition is presented in the second part of the book. Schwartz looks at Jane Addams, the founder of Hull House in Chicago, a settlement house that became a training ground for social workers, and Walter Rauschenbusch, the Baptist preacher and leading mind of the Social Gospel Movement. These anti-reformers argued that “bourgeois standards are largely inapplicable to the life of the poor, and that it is unfair to demand individual effort by the poor to rectify poverty for which society is collectively responsible.” Their critique of individual moral virtues and the argument for collective responsibility of systemic poverty eventually became a wholesale rejection of personal responsibility in fighting poverty and can be seen as a precursor of the structural poverty argument that so transformed liberal social policy in the 1960s. Schwartz sees many of these themes prominently reflected in the influential books of the time, such as William Ryan's Blaming the Victim and Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward's Regulating the Poor, both of which came out in 1971. Not that it needs the assistance, but Fighting Poverty with Virtue is here strongly backed by (and makes a panion volume to) Charles Murray's classic study, Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980.

The argument of Addams and Rauschenbusch rejected the assumptions of the old moral reformers and launched a new approach to poverty that held sway throughout most of the twentieth century, achieving its height in the ambitious welfare state of the 1960s and 1970s. And it is precisely the failure of the antipoverty strategy of the Great Society that has led to the search for a new policy and the turn back toward moral reforms reminiscent of the previous era.

Fighting Poverty with Virtue is pelling when, in part three, it also considers America's leading black reformers—Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois. Their encouraging of hard work and personal responsibility, at a time of vicious discrimination, displays a determination and strength that stand out by any standard, then or now. The difference between their approach, more like that of the old moral reformers, and that of today's affirmative action and race-conscious public policy is especially striking.

Schwartz concludes by discussing contemporary prospects for moral reform, including a variety of reforms that place the poor in an even better pared with the late-nineteenth century, to improve their conditions. Nevertheless, he is rightly cautious because of an overwhelming difference between social problems then and now: family position. The solution to this problem is not to be found in the corpus of the moral reformers. “We would do well to try to emulate the antipoverty approach of the moral reformers in many respects,” Schwartz concludes, “but in doing so we must realize that family decline—for which they provide no solution, and for which we have no solution—may greatly hamper the success of our efforts.”

In looking back at the nineteenth-century reformers, we may not discover the easy solution to the breakup of the traditional family, the existence of which the early reformers could take for granted, but we do learn the root of the problem—and the way back toward societal health. The rejection of the “new” poverty reform in favor of the older model also implies an equal rejection of the “new” relativistic theory of values that has clouded the public mind for several decades. The recovery of the older tradition of moral reform, likewise, also implies the recovery of an older morality that is not confused by the value-free quest for tolerance but is centered on the time-tested concept of the moral virtues. Fighting Poverty with Virtue is a e signpost along this long road to renewal.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY
Editor's Note: Fall 2018
When I accepted the new position as managing editor of Religion & Liberty, only one thing had been set in stone: Caroline Roberts’ article on Walker Percy would be the cover story. Everything else remained to be determined. Her essay is one of the first e from Acton’s new longform journalism platform, bines extensive reporting with beautiful photography to give readers an immersive understanding of the subject. This project continues to grow and improve. Curt Biren analyzes economic and...
Nature, technology, and Pompeii
The primary mission of the Acton Institute since its inception has been identifying and revealing both traditional and innovative tonics to ward off Lord Acton’s dictum: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” In fact, the manner in which we wield our power over one another, our environment and God’s other creatures defines our humanity, or, in other words, who we are as individuals and social creatures. bined tradition teaches us that humanity was not created by...
Power, people and things in 'Westworld'
Since I was a child I’ve always loved a good story. I believed that stories helped us to ennoble ourselves, to fix what was broken in us, and to help us e the people we dreamed of being.” So begins Anthony Hopkin’s character, Robert Ford, in his speech marking the finale of the first season of HBO’s mind-bending, techno-philosophical series “Westworld.” Ford is the brilliant co-creator of Westworld, a theme park set several decades in the future in which...
Editor's Note: Summer 2018
In early July, an Indian court issued a ruling that accorded the status of “legal person or entity” to animals in the state, saying “they have a distinct persona with corresponding rights, duties and liabilities of a living person.” With this measure, designed to prevent cruelty to animals, justices of the Uttarakhand High Court in northern India declared that “the entire animal kingdom, including avian and aquatic ones, are declared as legal entities having a distinct persona with corresponding...
Acton Briefs: Summer 2018
A collection of short essays by Acton writers, click a link to jump to that article: AU and building the free society by Jenna Suchyta Westminster Abbey praises God for the NHS by Noah Gould President Trump nominates Judge Brett Kavanaugh by Joe Carter AU and building the free society Jenna Suchyta, Acton Institute Intern Over 1,000 people flocked to Grand Rapids June 18-21 to listen to more than 80 inspiring faculty members lecture on a wide variety of...
Labor unions, yesterday and today
Along-cherished predisposition on the part of the Roman Catholic Church is that labor unions act as a protection against the exploitation of workers. From Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum forward, the Church has been an outspoken proponent of organized labor, worker safety and human dignity. Thus, es as little surprise that the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops weighed-in when the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in February regarding the Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and...
Arvo Pärt and the universal soul of music
Sacred music is not only a devotional posed and performed to honor our Creator but also a bulwark against human sinfulness and frailties. Composer Arvo Pärt has been creating music of faith that inspires while at the same time subverts several of the most oppressive systems of government of the past century. poser’s lifelong development as a poser also led him to a deeper faith. He converted to Orthodox Christianity in 1972. Theologian Peter Bouteneff observed that Pärt is...
Sister Mary Kenneth Keller
For the first time, we can now mechanically simulate the cognitive process. –Sister Mary Kenneth Keller Sister Mary Kenneth Keller established herself as a strong influence in the world puter science at a time when women in the field were unheard of. At the same time, her work paved the way for what we now understand as the information economy – a key driver of wealth creation. She was the first woman in the United States to earn a...
The return of nature worship
We live in decadent times. Universal human rights have not been fully attained, yet radical environmentalists insist that flora, fauna and even geological features and structures should be deemed legal persons, a meme known as “nature rights.” The drive to grant rights to the entirety of the natural world has already achieved stunning victories. In 2008, Ecuador granted human-type rights to “nature” in its constitution back, while Bolivia recently passed a law to the same effect. More than 30...
The politics of apocalypse
Disarmageddon” is what The Economist earlier this year called placent, reckless leaders” who “have forgotten how valuable it is to restrain nuclear weapons.” The politics of nuclear weapons – deterrence doctrines, mutually assured destruction and so on – have been the obsessive stuff of international politics since the Manhattan Project. There is, as Alissa Wilkinson and I argue in our 2015 book How to Survive the Apocalypse, something unique about the nuclear age, in which it es terrifyingly clear...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved