The politics of self-help: San Francisco Jews and the Great Depression
By Dr. Shelly Tenenbaum, April, 1997. A previous version of this paper was presented by Dr. Tenenbaum at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies, Boston, December 15-17, 1996.
Ernest Baum was a young boy growing up in San Francisco when the Great Depression hit the West Coast. When asked to reflect on how his family was affected by the crisis, he offered the following recollection: "My mother really bore the brunt of it. We were very poor, poverty stricken, but she didn't really let us know it. She took most of it onto herself." When asked how she did that, Baum replied: "By working hard and by utilizing every... service of the Jewish Community.... She got them to help us as a form of welfare. My father's a very proud man, and my mother's a very pragmatic person and that helped a great deal."1
For Baum, a child of the Depression, the intersection between ethnic institutions and his personal economic experience is evident. Yet Jewish collectivist strategies have received surprisingly little attention within histories and sociological studies of Jewish immigrant economic life.2 For example, scholars of immigrant Jewish mobility have focused almost exclusively on the intersection of three factors: 1) economic opportunities offered by the growth of the garment industry and the expansion of City College, 2) Jewish values that encouraged the pursuit of education and the practice of thrift, and 3) a relatively low rate of return to East Europe.3 The degree to which an ethnic community can mobilize its resources and "take care of its own," also deserves serious scholarly investigation. That Caribbean black immigrants in the United States have credit networks while American blacks do not, may be related to their respective and different rates of movement on the economic ladder.4 Similarly, that immigrant Jews had an impressive and well-organized communal network of self-help organizations contributed to their relatively rapid exit from poverty and to their ability to weather the Depression better than average Americans.5 By self-help, I am referring to "the numerous organizations established by ethnic minorities to deliver urban social services, provide life insurance benefits and unemployment compensation, and make available not only jobs but also the capital necessary to purchase real estate and finance small businesses and related commercial ventures."6
A consideration of ethnic self-help can do more than simply contribute to scholarly discussions about Jewish economic life. It also raises interesting political questions. All Americans, no matter where they stand on the political spectrum - right or left - support the concept and practice of self-help over the current practice of public welfare assistance. When people band together to help themselves, conservatives highlight individual dignity and responsibility while liberals talk in terms of group empowerment. Conservatives, however, are much more consistent than liberals in their advocacy of self-help. People on the right articulate a clear position of support for the principle of self-help over the efficacy of government programs. For liberals, however, the call for self-help is more muted due to a fear that making a strong public plea for ethnic and religious groups to help their own members might undermine political support for government programs that help disadvantaged Americans. As a result, people on the left end of the political spectrum are much more timid and uneasy than those on the right about discussing self-help. At times, liberals appear to flip flop between, on the one hand, advocating communal forms of self-help in light of a distrust of a government that uses welfare programs as means of social control and as vehicles for denigrating poor people and, on the other hand, defending those same programs when they come under conservative attack.7 As a result, this discomfort and defensive posture lead to a murky politics of self-help.8 As someone who identifies with a liberal political agenda, my past and present research on Jewish self-help poses an interesting personal challenge.
A study of San Francisco Jews during the Depression, an era that marks a transition from private philanthropy to public welfare, provides a site for exploring these questions about the politics of self-help. Before the Depression, Jews living in this West Coast city, relied almost exclusively on their communal organizations to take care of their poor. In San Francisco, poor Jews would seek help from the Eureka Benevolent Society (EBS), a relief agency funded by the Federation of Jewish Charities. During the Depression, however, a profound change occurred in the distribution of welfare funds. In the early years of the economic crisis, the government assumed a greater role in the provision of relief but dispensed aid through private philanthropies such as the EBS. Poor Jews in San Francisco would go to the EBS building and not to the city welfare office to receive public relief. Similarly, indigent Italians went to the Italian Board of Relief while others received financial help from the Associated Charities. As a result of this partnership between private and public, Jewish agencies had some autonomy on how best to dispense aid to their community members. Unemployed Jews who sought help from the EBS often walked away with more benefits than recipients of other private relief agencies and than recipients of city and county welfare relief. At different times during the 1930s, EBS paid for electricity while the city and county considered electricity non-essential; gave higher grocery allowances than did the Associated Charities ($9.62 vs. $6.67 per week for a family of five); was more likely to give their families cash benefits while other agencies gave actual groceries; was more likely than the city to pay rent expenses; and had a higher budget standard than public agencies ($30 vs. $20 per month for a single man).9
As the Depression continued to overwhelm and exhaust private agencies, the shift from private to public became even more pronounced. Rather than give funds to private agencies that then distributed relief to individuals, the government began to play a more centralized role by dispensing welfare directly to individuals. At this juncture, rather than going to the EBS, unemployed San Francisco Jews went to city and county welfare offices to pick up their relief checks. Hyman Kaplan, executive director of the EBS, characterized 1933 as the year that "the Jewish group in the United States, for the first time in its history, has been forced to transfer to the state primary responsibility for relief to its dependents" (italics in original).10 Most Jewish communal workers supported the shift from private to public, recognizing that private organizations could no longer financially shoulder expanding relief burdens. Kaplan wrote regular newspaper columns in Jewish newspapers and professional journals arguing for the necessity of public relief and pointing with pride to the national role that Jews were taking in promoting this shift from private to public philanthropy.11
At the same time that Jewish social service leaders actively supported and promoted the pragmatic need for increased government participation in the provision of relief, they were fully aware that their private organizations were better able than public relief programs to identify the needs of their poor ethnic constituents. In 1935, when the Community Chest pressured EBS to transfer 27 cases to the city and county, the EBS board was reluctant to heed the request because "the relief allowances were so low and the available service so inadequate that hardship would result."12 Similarly, in her impressive study of New York Jews during the Depression, Beth Wenger finds that New York Jewish social workers were also reluctant to transfer cases to state relief bureaus because of public welfare's low standards and because they felt that Jewish agencies could better serve Jewish clients. She describes the inability of government relief agencies to accommodate even simple needs such as dietary preferences. "Federal grocery provisions... contained much that the families did not know how to cook or did not like; for instance, the Negroes did not like what the Italians liked, and the Jews would not eat the things given to them, yet the things were common to all boxes."13
It is the tension between the support for public relief and the recognition that private agenices can better create, maintain and develop strategies to alleviate poverty that has implications for contemporary American life. While the government is in the best position to generate funds, public welfare is not conducive for fostering creative self-help strategies that can lead people out of poverty. Private agencies, such as neighborhood, ethnic and religious institutions, are much better suited for the development of programs and organizations that address particular constituency's needs. If our goal is to create remedies that inspire self-help, then we might want to return to the previous private/public partnership, a partnership that can tailor programs to constituent needs yet be assured a secure financial base.
San Francisco is just one of many American Jewish communities that provides a historical model of how, with sufficient funding, a group can foster self-help strategies and organizations during a crisis as severe as the Depression that are not possible in the public realm. The Hebrew Free Loan Society (HFLS), a lending organization that provided borrowers with interest-free loans, supplied San Francisco Jews with business loans throughout the 1930s. In 1932, the HFLS made 428 loans for more than $72,000. Recognizing the need to help the "new" downwardly mobile, the HFLS created a new fund for people "who prior to 1930 were generous supporters of philanthropic enterprises."14 These former philanthropists were able to receive loans of up to one thousand dollars, while the maximum for all other borrowers was set at five hundred dollars.15
Since 1912, the Emanu-El Sisterhood ran a boardinghouse for young Jewish working women between the ages of 16-35. In 1922, the boardinghouse moved to a new building - designed by architect Julia Morgan with room for 60 residents - in the outer Fillmore-McAllister district . During the Depression, however, many of the young women living at the Emanu-El Sisterhood home were unemployed and seeking work. Although boarding fees were low, these unemployed single women had difficulty meeting their expenses. In order to help the residents maintain their financial independence, Ethel Feineman, the resident social worker who directed daily life at the boardinghouse, involved the young women in the Soup to Nuts cookbook project (three editions were published during the Depression), hired them as waitresses, and in 1935 initiated the Institute for Practical Arts to train unemployed Jewish women in domestic work.16 Upgrading housekeeping to a professional status was not only a priority of the Emanu-El Sisterhood members but was also on the agenda of many early twentieth-century social reformers and feminists.17
Data from Mount Zion Hospital records provide a brief illustration of the economic importance of ethnic organizations during a crisis of such magnitude as the Great Depression. In 1932, Mount Zion patients paid 54% of the expenses incurred by their treatment. Meanwhile patients at St. Luke's Hospital paid 85% of medical costs; at St. Francis Hospital 99%; and at the French Hospital 100%. The only institution that subsidized its patients' care to the same extent as Mount Zion was the hospital administered under the auspices of the University of California. Compared with many poor Catholic patients, then, poor Jewish patients had to pay less of their hospital bills, leaving them with more money for other necessities.18 Throughout the Depression, Mount Zion Hospital gave free health care and free medical appliances such as glasses, dentures and artificial limbs to EBS clients, children housed at Homewood Terrace, the Jewish orphanage, elderly living at the Hebrew Home for the Aged Disabled, and young women boarding at the Emanu-El Sisterhood Residence Club.19
While poor elderly disabled Jews had the Hebrew Home for the Aged Disabled, an institution with spacious grounds, private rooms, and recreational and cultural programs, the vast majority of poor elderly disabled non-Jews in San Francisco only had access to the Laguna Honda Home, the county almshouse. During the 1930s, San Francisco's Federation of Jewish Charities spent one-quarter of its expenditures on care for the elderly. According to a 1935 study on elderly care, Jews, a very small percentage of San Francisco's population, "actually spends far more from private philanthropic funds on its dependent aged than all the rest of the community."20
The Hebrew Free Loan Society, the Emanu-El Sisterhood boardinghouse, the Mount Zion Hospital, and the Hebrew Home for the Aged Disabled could not have been maintained without funding. The existence of a wealthy elite that was very active in communal life combined with a relatively large white-collar class is central for understanding the existence of these Jewish organizations in San Francisco. While Jews comprised approximately 6% of the city's population, they contributed about one-third of all Community Chest funds. In turn, the Federation of Jewish Charities (FJC) received about one-fifth of all Chest allocations, a percentage that FJC directors often found too low and some non-Jews criticized as unfairly high.21 During the 1930s, Jews in San Francisco were concentrated in white collar positions with nearly one-third working as proprietors and managers compared with 9% of the general San Francisco population. On the other end of the economic spectrum, less than one percent (.7%) of San Francisco Jews were unskilled compared to over 9% of all San Franciscans.22 That San Francisco Jews raised $600,000 for a new Jewish Community Center and $800,000 for an expanded Mount Zion Hospital during the early Depression years highlights the interconnection between class and organizational life. With adequate funding, local groups can have the capacity to create a network of mutual aid institutions that can help poor constituents.
With 38 million Americans currently living below the poverty line and another 25 million at or just slightly above the poverty line, new strategies to alleviate indigence are critical.23 The Depression offers us a place to revisit public welfare policy. In a recent article in the New York Times Magazine, sociologist William Julius Wilson, suggests that we reintroduce Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration in order to provide poor people with useful public jobs.24 Similarly, the observation of Depression-era Jewish social workers that small private agenices, rather than large government bureaucracies, can best meet their members' needs and can best design self-help strategies to alleviate poverty may be relevant for contemporary policy discussions. The challenge might be to return to a decentralized system of welfare where local communities are integrally involved in the distribution of government welfare funds. At the same time that I recognize the many dangers and complexities of implementing policies directed at local control of welfare, I, like historian Michael Katz, am "committed to local democracy, excited by the potential of community economic development and the myriad activities directed toward rebuilding local communities."25 Precisely because hostility towards welfare is "remarkably democratic,"26 and because the concept of self-help shares universal support, creating policies that encourage the government to become involved in the business of self-help might be successful. With adequate funding, communities might be able to help members to help themselves.
1. Name has been changed to protect confidentiality. Interview with Ernest Baum, July 7, 1978, "Growing Up in the Cities Project," Frederick M. Wirt, Bancroft Library, University of California-Berkeley, 80/17, Box II. Return to text.
2. An exception is Mark S. Rosentraub and Delbert Taebel, "Jewish Enterprise in Transition: From Collective Self-Help to Orthodox Capitalism," in Scott Cummings (ed.) Self-Help in Urban America: Patterns of Minority Economic Development, Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1980: 191-214. Also see, Shelly Tenenbaum, A Credit to their Community: Jewish Loan Societies in the United States, 1880-1945, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993. Return to text.
3. Thomas Kessner, The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City, 1880-1915, New York: Oxford University Press, 1977; Stephen Steinberg, The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America, 1981; reprint Boston: Beacon Press, 1989; Sherry Gorelick, City College and the Jewish Poor: Education in New York. 1880-1924, New Brunswick, Nj: Rutgers University Press, 1981; Selma Berrol, "Education and Economic Mobility: The Jewish Experience in New York City, 1880-1920," American Jewish Historical Quarterly, March 1976: 257-71; Nathan Glazer, "The American Jew and the Attainment of Middle-Class Rank: Some Trends and Explanations," in Marshall Sklare (ed.) The Jews: Social Patterns of an American Group, Westport Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1958: 138-46; and Edward Shapiro, "American Jews and the Business Mentality," Judaism 27 (1978): 214-21. Return to text.
4. Ivan Light, Ethnic Enterprise in America: Business and Welfare Among Chinese, Japanese, and Blacks, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972; and Aubrey W. Bonnett, Institutional Adaptation of West Indian Immigrants to America: An Analysis of Rotating Credit Associatons, Washington: University Press of America, 1981. Return to text.
5. For a description of immigrant Jewish philanthropic organizations, see: Boris Bogen, Extent of Jewish Philanthropy in the United States, Cincinnati: National Conference of Jewish Charities, 1908. For an analysis of how Jews fared economically during the Depression, see: Thomas Kessner, "Jobs, Ghettoes, and the Urban Economy, 1880-1935," American Jewish History 71 (December 1981): 235-6. Kessner writes that compared with Italians and African-Americans, "relatively more Jews kept their jobs even in the midst of the economic crisis... None of this is to say that Jews successfully avoided the Depression. On the contrary it cut a wide swath, reducing many to lesser incomes and lower socioeconomic positions... The point is that relative to other groups, and especially the Italian group, they survived with more modest losses." Return to text.
6. Scott Cummings, "Collectivism: The Unique Legacy of Immigrant Economic Development," in Cummings (ed.) Self-Help in Urban America, 1980: 5. Return to text.
7. For an example of an indicting critique from the left of welfare in the United States, see Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward Regulating the Poor: The Function of Public Welfare, New York: Vintage Books, 1971. Return to text.
8. Liberal confusion about whether or not to publicly advocate for self-help is particularly apparent is current discussions about requiring welfare recipients to work for their benefits. The welfare debate, however, is more about individual self-help than collective forms of self-help being discussed in this paper. Return to text.
9. Eureka Benevolent Society, Minutes of the Board of Directors, February 28, 1933; May 23, 1933; and June 25, 1935; and letter from Kaplan to Billikopf, June 8, 1933, FJC, Box 6. Return to text.
10. "Trends in Jewish Philanthropy," Emanu-El and the Jewish Journal, September 7, 1934: 8. Return to text.
11. See for example: "Conquering the Depression," Emanu-El and the Jewish Journal, April 7, 1933: 4; Return to text. and
12. Letter from Jospeh Feigenbaum to Samuel Lilienthal, September 5, 1935, Eureka Benevolent Society collection, WJHC. Return to text.
13. Beth S. Wenger, "Government Welfare and Jewish Communal Responsibility: The Evolution of Jewish Philanthropy in the Great Depression," in Jeffrey S. Gurock and Marc Lee Raphael (eds.) An Inventory of Promises: Essays on American Jewish History in Honor of Moses Rischin, New York: Carlson Publishing Inc., 1995: 317-18. For more detail on New York Jews during the Depression, see: Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Return to text.
14. San Francisco Hebrew Free Loan Society, Annual Report, April 5, 1937. Return to text.
15. Tenenbaum, A Credit to their Community: 59 -74. Return to text.
16. Lynn Fonfa, "The Emanu-El Sisterhood: Agent of Assimilation," The Californians, March/April 1986: 34-38. Return to text.
17. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: One Hundred Fifty Years of the Experts Advice to Women, Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1978. Return to text.
18. "Hospital Council, Community Chest of San Francisco, Comparison of 1930-1932 Hospital Figures of Twelve Hospitals in San Francisco," Federation of Jewish Charities Collection (FJC), Box 37, WJHC. Return to text.
19.Mount Zion Hospital, Minutes of the Board of Directors, March 18, 1934, WJHC. Also see, "Report of the Mount Zion Hospital, 1936": 34. Return to text.
20. "Memorandum on Care of Jewish Dependent Aged in San Francisco," 1935, FJC, Box 46, WJHC. Return to text.
21. "Is Community Chest a Vicious Racket?" Sunset Courier, September 28, 1933; Memo on "Background of the Relationship of the Federation of Jewish Charities and the Community Chest of San Francisco," ca. 1941, FJC, Box 43; Letter from Hyman Kaplan to Jacob Billikopf, December 23, 1931, FJC, Box 6. For an analysis of the intersection between this wealthy Jewish elite and San Francisco politics, see: David G. Dalin, "Jewish and Non-Partisan Republicanism in San Francisco, 1911-1963," in Moses Rischin (ed.) The Jews of the West: The Metropolitan Years, Berkeley: Judah Magnes Museum, 1979. Return to text.
22. Samuel Moment, "The Jewish Population of San Francisco," January 1939. Return to text.
23. William P. O'Hare, "A New Look at Poverty in America," Population Bulletin 51 (September 1996): 2. In 1994, for example, the poverty line was set at $11,940 for a family of three. Despite this very conservative annual income, 14.5% of Americans fell below the poverty line. Return to text.
24. William Julius Wilson, "Work," New York Times Magazine, August 18, 1996: 52. Return to text.
25. Michael B. Katz, Improving Poor People: The Welfare State, the 'Underclass,' and Urban Schools as History, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995: 6. Return to text.
26. Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, New York: The Free Press, 1994: 2. Return to text.