Welfare of 1890s Kept Aid on a Personal Level : Charity: A century ago, helping the needy was a one-on-one project. And there was no free lunch.

Historian Marvin Olasky looked at how American society took care of its wretched poor 100 years ago and how it does it now, and concluded that people did it better then.

Charity in the 1890s, he said, was not left to the welfare and charitable bureaucracies. Compassion was not dispensed via checkbook.

Back then, he said, the poor were helped by ordinary working people not much better off than they. The needy were taken into private homes and church basements--and shown the door if they refused to lift a hand on their own behalf.

In a word, charity involved compassion, he said, an element that is lost when helping the poor is left to institutions.

Olasky, a University of Texas professor of journalism history, is on leave as a scholar-in-residence with an anti-abortion group, the Americans United for Life Legal Defense Fund.

He is writing a book about compassion, and spent a year at the Library of Congress digging into newspapers and magazines, studying how paupers were treated a century ago.

Then, for contrast, he spent a few days walking around Washington, posing as a homeless person. In shelters, he said, he got plenty to eat but no one ever suggested that he do anything for himself. At one shelter, he said, he asked for a Bible and got a stare instead.

In an article he wrote for Policy Review, quarterly magazine of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research organization, Olasky asked whether society is better off now than it was when charity was a matter of individual responsibility. He concluded that then was better than now.

Robert Bothwell, executive director of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a nonprofit organization that monitors the world of charity, expressed some doubts. Our industrialized society, he said, has eliminated many jobs that once supported the unskilled poor.

Olasky decided that the way the poor are helped now is expedient, but ultimately unhelpful.

“The major flaw of the modern welfare state is not that it is extravagant, but that it is too stingy,” he wrote. “It gives the needy bread and tells them to be content with that alone. It gives the rest of us the opportunity to be stingy also, and to salve our consciences even as we scrimp on what many of the destitute need most--love, time, and a challenge to be ‘a little lower than the angels’ rather than one thumb up from monkeys.”

Most significantly, he said, people 100 years ago “made moral demands on recipients of aid. . . . They did not allow anyone to eat and run.”

A century ago, he wrote, charitable people, often poor themselves, provided food, shelter, work, organized excursions and summer camps, staffed dispensaries and ran schools, missions and reading rooms.

New York City alone had 1,288 charitable organizations. Many of them looked after members of their own nationality group. First-generation Italians took care of new immigrants from the homeland; the same was true of Swedes, Irish, Russians.

Some charities had remarkably no-nonsense names, such as the Erring Woman’s Refuge or the Union for Homeless and Friendless Girls.

Women volunteers worked by day, men by night.

These principles, Olasky said, prevailed:

* Before someone received a handout, an effort was made to find a relative who could care for him.

* Long-term, one-on-one contracts were forged between the volunteer and the needy person.

* Charity went only to those “worthy of relief,” that is, people who became poor through no fault of their own and were unable to change the situation quickly: the elderly, the chronically ill and children. The “shiftless and intemperate” were classified “not entitled to relief” and shown the door. Before a man got a meal, he was asked to spend two hours chopping wood. A needy woman was shown to the sewing room.

“Wood yards next to shelters were as common in 1890,” said Olasky, “as liquor stores are in 1990.”

* Relief was given only after need had been verified; “benign suspicion” was applied to those seeking aid.

* Avoiding dependency on aid was crucial. “The goal of charity workers,” said Olasky, “was to show poor people how to move up while resisting enslavement to the charity of governmental or private masters.”

* Charity had religious underpinnings. Groups such as the Industrial Christian Alliance didn’t hesitate to remind the poor “that God made them and had high expectations for them.”

In an interview, Olasky spelled out his conclusions: “It all comes down to your understanding of what compassion is. Mutual obligation was essential. The person who was better off was obligated to ‘suffer with,’ not just write a check or pass a law. And the person who needed help was obligated to change.

“Now, if your definition of compassion is merely the provision of material help, then you’re not going to like my suggestions.”

Bothwell, of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, said he welcomed Olasky’s “holistic” remedy--that charity should treat the whole person, not just a segment of the problem--but, he said, society has changed in fundamental ways since the 1890s.

In 19th-Century cities, sweatshops provided jobs for unskilled immigrants. The gap between the working and the unemployed was not great. Anyone could easily join the ranks of the respectfully employed by taking such a job.

Today’s counterpart job, Bothwell noted, might be flipping burgers in a fast-food restaurant, but that kind of work doesn’t pay enough to keep a family from poverty.

It is true, Bothwell said, that in this era of busy lives and two-income households, society largely has turned over to government the responsibility for welfare. But, he said, Olasky has overlooked the enormous amount of private help that still exists in a country with more than 800,000 nonprofit organizations.

Moreover, today’s immigrants--now likely to come from the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Latin America or Asia--still find their ethnic organizations to give them a lift. Newcomers still move in with those who preceded them.

“Everybody knows that we’ve grown into a society that is much more distant than the world Olasky describes,” Bothwell said. “So you devise different ways of assisting people, and one of them is the more distant, more automatic way of providing money to the destitute through the government’s safety net.”