A Poetics of Social Work: Personal Agency and Social Transformation in Canada, 1920-1939 [Hardcover ed.] 0802048609, 9780802048608

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A POETICS OF SOCIAL WORK: PERSONAL AGENCY AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION IN CANADA, 1920-1939

In A Poetics of Social Work Ken Moffatt considers the epistemological influences in the field of Canadian social work and social welfare from 1920 to 1939. Here modernist constructs of knowledge are explored through the analysis of the thought of leading social welfare practitioners, namely Dorothy Livesay, Carl Dawson, Charlotte Whitton, and EJ. Urwick. These four figures represent a wide cross-section of Anglo-Canadian social thought at two of Canada's most influential universities (McGill and Toronto), and Moffatt's study of their thinking reveals the presence of a diversity of approaches to social work and social change during this period. By challenging the notion that human values and humanitarian concerns were abandoned in favour of science, empirical findings, and technical interpretation of authoritative knowledge, the author attempts to expand the concept of the social work knowledge base and explores how social work emerged as a profession in Canada. Moffatt's study presents a broad context for analysis, and provides fascinating reading and source material for those interested in history, philosophy, literature, and biography, as well as social work and the social sciences. KEN MOFFATT is Associate Professor and Graduate Programme Director at the School of Social Work, York University.

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KEN MOFFATT

A Poetics of Social Work: Personal Agency and Social Transformation in Canada, 1920-1939

U N I V E R S I T Y OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2001 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-4860-9 (cloth) ISBN o-8o2o-8382-x (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Moffatt, Kenneth James, 1952A poetics of social work : personal agency and social transformation in Canada,1920-1939 Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-4860-9 (bound) ISBN o-8o2O-8382-x (pbk.) i. Social service - Canada - Philosophy. HV1O5.M58 2000

36i-3'oi

I. Title.

000-932583-2

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

To Allan Irving, Ian Lumsden, and George Rallis

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

IX

Introduction 3 1 The Contested Concepts of Social Service and Social Change 12 2 Social Work Practice Informed by Philosophy: The Social Thought of Edward Johns Urwick 30 3 Dorothy Livesay's Politics of Engagement 46 4 Social Science in a Secular Society: The Thought of Carl Addington Dawson 69 5 A Scientific and Philanthropic Christian Community: The Philosophy of Charlotte Whitton 86 Conclusion

101

NOTES 117 BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX 151

14!

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Acknowledgments

This book is due to much support through friendship. The research originally was conducted for a doctoral thesis. The principled academic careers of committee members who supervised the research have been an inspiration to me. Many thanks to Carol Baines, Don Bellamy, Adrienne Chambon, Roger Hutchinson, and Allan Irving for the seriousness with which they reviewed my work. A special thanks to Allan Irving, who embodies the best qualities of a teacher in terms of intellectual stimulation, theoretical sophistication, and unwavering support for his students' work. He has taught me a great deal. Also, a special thanks to Adrienne Chambon, who constantly surprises with fresh interpretations and a keen sensitivity to justice issues. A support and study group of doctoral students at the Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto, read, listened to, and commented on my work at critical points during the research. The group named itself the Dorothy Livesay Collective, in recognition of our sharing with Livesay the historical struggle over progressive causes. Thanks to members of the group: Susan McGrath, Carol Anne O'Brien, Xiaobei Chen, Frank Wang, Donna Baines, Catrina Brown, Suzanne Dudziak, Jane McMichael, Stephanie Baker Collins, Martha Kumsa, Shoshana Pollack, and Lisa Barnoff. It has been important to me to be part of an academic group that has made the study of disadvantage due to class, race, sexual orientation, and gender central to the study of social work. Hugh Shewell could not be present for the Livesay Collective, since he was far off in British Columbia. I met him as a doctoral student, and our many discussions about the state of the economy and politics has been instrumental to my thinking. Another group of social workers, the 'lab group,' have helped me

x

Contents

sustain my commitment to the field of social work. Joyce Curry, Margaret Beardwood, Nurjehan Bharmal, and Dawna Satov continue to offer stimulation with tales from both private and public lives. We met in 1983 in the Master of Social Work program and continue to exchange stories today. Gail Sermat is with us in spirit. Some friendships last so long that it is difficult to document the nature of their support. Thanks, in no special order, to Patricia Smith, Brenda Winter, Gunars Imaks, Marily Hyde, Barb Dufh'eld, Michele Hornby, Ian Lumsden, Dennis Miehls, Jennifer Presst, and Patrick Decoste. Thanks also to family: Louise, Linda, and Bill Moffatt. Most of all, thank you to Ruth Moffatt for her interest in the arts and humanities. Of course, special thanks to George Rallis for unconditional support and guidance. I thank Virginia Smith for the meticulous copy editing she did on an earlier version of the manuscript. The editors at the University of Toronto Press, Virgil Duff and Chris Bucci, have been very supportive. The thorough and constructive comments of Anonymous Reader "A" were extremely helpful in shaping the manuscript into a book. I would also like to thank research assistants who have assisted me at various stages of the project: Sara Collings, Wendy Lee, Sean Martin, Susan Philpott, Steven Skyers, and Joseph Vaz. Thank you to Shelley Sweeney, Head, Department of Archives and Special Collections, University of Manitoba, and to Jay Stewart, literary executrix for the Livesay estate, for allowing permissions for Dorothy Livesay's poetry and for staying true to Livesay's vision. The research was supported by fellowships and scholarships from the University of Toronto and the Ontario government. The generous support provided by a National Welfare Fellowship from the Department of National Health and Welfare was key to the successful completion of the research. I have also received assistance from Atkinson College, York University, and the T. Glendenning Hamilton Research Grant, Department of Archives and Special Collections, University of Manitoba. A modified version of Chapter 2 appeared as 'Social Work Practice Informed by Philosophy: The Social Thought of E.J. Urwick/ Canadian Social Work Review 11, no. 2 (1994): 133-49. A portion of Chapter i appeared as The Influence of Technology upon the Emerging Profession of Canadian Social Work/ Canadian Social Work Review 10, no. i (1993): 43-55.

A POETICS OF SOCIAL WORK

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Introduction

Most analyses of social work and social policy have had a liberal, technological bias. As a result, writings on social work history have relied heavily on the recounting of facts and events, and analyses of legislative change and policy content. Although useful, this approach to the history of social work at times ignores underlying assumptions, the values embedded in those assumptions, and the subjectivities that influenced various events. In particular, the impact of social scientific and technological thought on social work and social policy has often been assumed, or been treated as progressive and triumphal in nature. Value-oriented, humanistic contributions to our understanding of the social work profession have been neglected because of the dominance of a narrative of social work that presupposes a nonproblematic relationship among empirical findings, scientifically based techniques, and interventionist controls over clients or subjects. In this book I attempt to challenge old assumptions by showing how multiple approaches to understanding social ills were in play during the 19205 and 19305 the time when social work arose in Canada as a profession. I will also illustrate that in the social work field it was far from unanimous that human values and humanitarian concerns should be de-emphasized in favour of science, empirical knowledge, and the technical interpretation of authoritative knowledge. During the 19205 and 19305, approaches to social science and technology were in fact hotly debated. Significant developments in historiography make possible this reconsideration of the historical construction of social work knowledge. Increasingly, historians are showing an interest in a variety of subjectivities, in multiple ways of knowing, and in a variety of world views.1 In particular, there has been an increasing awareness of the role Cana-

4 A Poetics of Social Work

dian women have long played in the field of social work and social welfare.2 All of this frees us to consider how of a variety of points of view developed at the same time. It is in this spirit that I consider the epistemological traditions and dimensions of knowledge related to the burgeoning profession of social work during the 19205 and 19305. This historical analysis moves us away from the notion that there is a single narrative of social work, away from the concept of a linear, progressive development of knowledge. In the interwar years, 1920 to 1939, significant change occurred in the social institutions associated with social work. The field of social service was shifting away from formal alliances with the religiousbased institutions, toward a patchwork of nonprofit secular organizations and fledgling government bureaucracies. At the same time as institutional alliances were shifting, social workers were showing more interest in professionalization. Some social workers were sensitive to their new role as efficient administrators within developing bureaucratic state institutions.3 In response to these changes, there was a strong trend toward professional expertise based on rigorous research.4 But this trend was not the sole expression of social work. As the profession was being established, there was considerable public discussion and debate about the nature and purpose of secular, public social work interventions. The profession formed at a time of extensive debate about the proper form for social interpretation and political intervention. McGill University and the University of Toronto were influential in the development of Anglo-Canadian social thought in the interwar years. Within these institutions, students and professors struggled to understand the relationship between the university and the community. Schools of social work were established at both schools during the 19108, although they would develop in very different ways in the 19205 and 19305. I have considered the thought of four people associated with these two universities: E.J. Urwick, Carl Dawson, Dorothy Livesay, and Charlotte Whitton. E.J. Urwick had a particular dedication to social service but was also an academic administrator, social philosopher, and political economist. He was the director of both the Department of Social Service (today's Faculty of Social Work) and the Department of Political Economy at the University of Toronto.5 Dorothy Livesay was a poet and an activist as well as a social worker. In the 19305, while a student at the University of Toronto, she was an active member of the Communist

Introduction 5

Party.6 Carl Dawson was an empiricist who studied both theology and social science in Chicago. In the 19205 he became the director of the School of Social Service and a professor of sociology at McGill.7 Charlotte Whitton had a long career as a leading social work practitioner, most notably as the executive director of the Canadian Welfare Council, and as a lecturer at both McGill University and the University of Toronto.8 The women and men in this study were chosen for their eminence in social thought in Canada. The two men held important administrative, research, and teaching positions at two of the most influential schools in the country. As directors of the schools of social work, they were likely to be influential not only within their schools but also within the field of Canadian social work. It is more difficult to characterize the women as leaders in academia, since social conditions restricted the advancement of women within universities. However, both women became well known as social analysts by commenting publicly on their social service work. Each of the four represents an archetype: Dorothy Livesay, the politically motivated social activist and literary modernist; Charlotte Whitton, the benevolent service provider and conservative practitioner; E.J. Urwick, the social philosopher; and Carl Dawson, the social scientist. Together, they represent a broad cross-section of Anglo Canadian social thought, particularly as it was cultivated at McGill University and the University of Toronto. Although it has been useful to choose them for the approaches they represent, the archetypes collapse when we examine their thought more closely. Although treating each of the four as a type may be useful as a beginning, careful consideration of their world views brings into question stereotypical views of practitioners and biases about knowledge. I chose Urwick, Livesay, Dawson, and Whitton also for their concern about social disadvantage and how to ameliorate it: they were as concerned about changing social relations as they were about individual adjustment. Although their approaches to social ills were cultivated in a Canadian context, all four were open to international influences, particularly from England, continental Europe, and the United States. Each of them struggled to sort out these differing approaches to social welfare within a social and cultural context that was challenged by the colonizing influences of Britain and the United States. The four persons in this book were innovators who raised hard questions about the presuppositions of the field of social work.9 When

6 A Poetics of Social Work

we consider the social and ethical limits of knowledge, we can assume that knowledge is socially defined. We construct the appropriate limits and the relative value of knowledge types through our ethical stance, values, ideology, and social context as much as through past developments in knowledge.10 Having equipped ourselves with this premise that acceptable knowledge and concepts are socially constructed - we can develop an understanding of the limits of certain knowledge constructs within a helping profession. In this study I have uncovered a richness of interpretation about social life and the nature of social service and social work during the interwar years. No single voice or point of view exists that defines social work knowledge and practice. Indeed, such knowledge and practice reveal a tapestry of patterns of thinking. For the social workers in this book, there were many sources of inspiration. To frame their thinking, they drew on the humanities - including political science, history, philosophy, biography, and literature - and also on the social and natural sciences. The limits of the social work field are difficult to determine, and the social work knowledge base is open to considerable interpretation. What makes social work such an interesting study is the general nature of its knowledge base. The four people highlighted in this book were engaged in a struggle with other people interested in social remedial action and change. Their battle about ideas took place in a field of social institutions, political positions, and social organization. The struggle was about the very nature of social work: how to define it, and how to place it as an institution within a broader social context. It is best to view the four as a myriad of voices, each exercising its own power, each defining and being defined by the discipline of social work. The trends in thought are best understood as legacies of current thought rather than as silenced narratives that are lost due to the ever increasing control of a particular point of view.11 All four social workers in this study conceptualized social work as a project concerned with bringing public social ills to light in order to facilitate remedial action. Dawson, Livesay, Urwick, and Whitton all insisted on a distinctly modernist approach - that is, the need to fix a flawed social order through personal and social agency.12 Social work, because it has focused on these concerns, has been of interest to a wide variety of modernists, including literary modernists, political activists, social scientists, philosophers, philanthropists, and practitioners. The concern for individual agency to influence personal and social

Introduction 7

transformation has created a discipline of social work that is defined by practice.13 All four subjects of this study shared an interest in practice. Social workers assume that the disadvantaged person and the social worker can create new knowledge and learn together through practice. Furthermore, they assume that a disadvantaged person's emotional and social well-being can be fostered through a social worker's direct, practical intervention. Among the subjects of this study, one can see the historical tension between those who viewed social work practice as wilful action to promote social change and those who saw it as a mediating profession that helps individuals make social adjustments.14 The practice focus of Canadian social work is situated within a broader North American cultural context. Within this culture, knowledge that links making and knowing is highly valued. In fact, North Americans have inextricably linked knowing and producing. Technology brings together the Greek concepts of 'techne' and 'logos,' so that making and knowing have become linked through technology.15 This cultural bias has created an ontological problem for social workers: social work knowledge can best be validated through its link to productivity. Furthermore, in order to avoid being morally suspect, social workers have taken care to draw upon technical and scientific knowledge. However, the desire for rigour has at times made invisible the assumptions underlying the discourse of rigour, neutrality, and objectivity. The scientific and technological enterprise is taken up as if a moral imperative.16 It has often been argued that the 'technological era' began at the time of the Second World War. In this book I suggest that, in fact, technological developments were having a powerful impact on human affairs during the interwar years. A broader understanding among Canadians of the tremendous potential for technical and technological development was one of the legacies of the First World War. Technological thought and the efficient administration of humans could be harnessed for both magnificent and ferocious ends. The technological point of view was also elaborated during the Depression. During these years of misery and want, a commitment to public service was combined with a confidence in technical study and social scientific research. Men, who took on the moral responsibility for defining and studying social and economic issues, marginalized the social work practice and social activism of women.17 This research illustrates that when a professional social work knowl-

8 A Poetics of Social Work

edge base was being developed, a central struggle took place around technology, technique, and social science. Technology, conceptualized as knowledge that links the concepts of knowing and doing, is an approach to organizing and managing social relations and personal behaviours. In other words, technology is not a collection of artifacts or hardware.18 In this study I use Ellul's concept of technique as a central point of reference for understanding the nature of technology. Technique, according to Ellul, is the collection of practices that utilize resources to achieve certain valued ends; specifically, it is all those means that have efficiency as their ultimate purpose and that are derived through rational thought.19 All the people in this study treated science and technology as central to the discussion about social relations in a modern, industrial, Canadian context. Technique is integrated with social work knowledge. Technological development became possible through a particular paradigm that was widely shared (as well as hotly debated) by social workers. Social workers' discussions of technology during the interwar years suggest a general way of knowing or 'episteme' that both constrained and influenced people's understanding of social relations. I would argue that the technological world view - defined by parameters such as technical rationality, appeal to expertise and efficiency, reductionist thinking, confidence in progress, and individualism - is one of those general ways of knowing that defines what ideas or concepts can be expressed within social work. The episteme both limited social workers' imaginations and created possibilities for discourse.20 The subjects of this book both accepted and resisted new technological development and its social implications. Closely related to the enterprise of technology is the methodology of social science. Although the nature of social science was poorly defined in the interwar years, there was a desire to create a more rigorous and empirical science of human relations.21 In Canadian social work there has been a clear desire to deal with social phenomena from a scientific perspective. Irving has demonstrated that the scientific imperative has been a central, guiding paradigm for Canadian research on social work and social welfare.22 However, a review of the historical development of the modern social work profession suggests that although social workers have been influenced by technology and social science, they have not accepted its claims blindly.23 The zeal among some social workers for the scientific professional enterprise24 was met with a call by others for knowledge based on a passion for social justice based on ideals.25

Introduction 9

Historically, the management and categorization of the poor and marginalized has been a central task of social work. Thus, the application of science and technique within the field of social work presents social workers with major ethical concerns. Ultimately, the tensions inherent in a technological approach to social work centre on how knowledge and values are created. Urwick and Livesay felt that their ways of looking at the world were in tension with the dominant world view during the Depression. They were particularly interested in constructing knowledge bases that would compensate for the inequitable relations implicit in a technical point of view. Both understood technological development and the promulgation of the scientific point of view in human affairs as repressive in nature. Whitton and Dawson, on the other hand, felt that science and technology contributed to the progressive, civilizing forces of Western capitalist culture. The social locations of the chosen subjects reflect the gendered nature of the social work field during the 19205 and 19305. Urwick and Dawson held secure positions as administrators and teachers within academic institutions. Their roles gave them the authority to define the nature of education for the social work profession - a profession that was taken up overwhelmingly by women.26 Livesay and Whitton were practitioners, whose understanding of the social work field was based in the historical reality that they had no access to leadership roles in academia. Necessarily, they expressed their leadership in other ways. Livesay expressed her leadership in the social welfare field through a multiplicity of roles including political advocacy, literary expression, and direct practice. Whitton expressed her leadership through her pioneering work as a contractual lecturer at both McGill University and the University of Toronto, and as an administrator in the voluntary sector.27 Gender bias is also clear in the historical record. The professional lives of Urwich and Dawson are well documented in the academic archives; it can be assumed that their functions as educators and administrators were highly valued. The work of most female social work practitioners has been poorly documented.28 Both Livesay and Whitton, however, left exceptional archival records; they carefully documented their struggles as women, political persons, and social workers. This suggests that both were well aware of the historical significance of their personal and professional struggles as women. In the development of a knowledge base for the fledgling profession of social work, contradictory forces were at play. Social workers have been caught in contradiction as they endeavour to reinvent their past

io A Poetics of Social Work

while continuing to draw on historical ways of knowing. There is a central contradictory tension within social work thought, between the impulse to develop a technology of social work practice based in instrumental reason, and the impulse to draw upon humanist understandings of social service. And there is a related contradiction, between social workers' inclination to draw on a variety of epistemological influences to adequately define social work practice, and the inclination to develop a more rigorous, controlled practice based in expertise. The social workers in this study sought definitive solutions to social ills while actively promoting social change. They wished to make sense of the modern social 'maelstrom' as a step toward bringing about a social order congruent with their intellectual understanding of social relations. Frames are constructed to guide the restructuring of social relations; each vision is meant to act as a new foundation for improved social relations. However, their urge to promote change made that foundation elusive. In this manner, a further contradiction lay at the heart of the modern field of social work.29 The personal circumstances of the subjects of this book changed dramatically toward the end of the Depression. In 1937 Dorothy Livesay was fired from her position as a social worker for the British Columbia Field Service.30 The same year, EJ. Urwick retired amidst controversy from the Department of Social Science.31 In 1939, Charlotte Whitton was pressured from her position as executive secretary of the Canadian Welfare Council.32 All three were personally embattled as they attempted to manage their changing circumstances within the shifting field of social work and social welfare, and experienced emotional exhaustion due to the demands of a shifting epistemological context.33 In particular, a troubling contradiction existed for Whitton and Livesay. Although they contributed to the development of the new social work profession, both were involuntarily removed from their paid social work positions. They were caught in the circumstance of contributing through their professional practice to the material conditions that undervalued their worth as paid public servants. Thus, they worked to create a public paid role for women - the profession of social work - and found themselves excluded just as the profession was establishing itself. Dawson also struggled to define a social sphere in which his knowledge claims would be valued. However, his personal circumstances were different. By the end of the 19305, he was in the middle of a sue-

Introduction 11

cessful academic career. He had built a successful research and teaching career within the field of sociology. His career success had less to do with his relations to the field of social work than with his focus on the social ecological approach to sociology.34 In this book I explore a number of questions. How did social workers make sense of social work knowledge and practice during the interwar years? What were some of contemporaneous forms of social thought within the single professional field of social work? How could a variety of world views within the field of social work be understood in relation to one another? Specifically, what were the understandings of social scientific and technological thought during this time period? In Chapter i, I outline some of the patterns of thinking about Canadian social and political realities during the 19205 and 19305 at McGill University and the University of Toronto. This overview offers a context for exploring specific nuances of thought among the four individuals discussed in the subsequent chapters. In Chapter 2 the social thought of Edward Johns Urwick is explored. Urwick's philosophical basis for social work is outlined. His frustration with the limits of social science is integral to his discussion of the true nature of social work practice. Chapter 3 discusses Dorothy Livesay's thought, which is based on the imperative of socially relevant work. Livesay's emphasis on idealism and community was supported by her communistic interpretation of social relations. Her understanding of science and technology is linked with an analysis of class and power relations. Chapter 4 outlines Dawson's thought. It is argued that both social work and sociology were contested forms of knowledge at McGill. Dawson created his understanding of social affairs through a pseudoscience based on the ecological perspective. For Dawson, social science was inextricably linked with modern social development. In Chapter 5 the solidaristic knowledge base of Charlotte Whitton is discussed. Her philosophy of social relations, based in her understanding of Christian community, meant that Whitton understood social work as both a science and a vocation. Her integrated understanding of social work allowed her to develop a sophisticated critique of social work within a technological context. In the conclusion I compare and combine aspects of each person's thought to better understand the influence of historical social work thought on contemporary thought and practice.

1

The Contested Concepts of Social Service and Social Change

Many Canadians during the 19205 and the 19305 were prepared to face social ills directly rather than avert their gaze from the increasing evidence of those social ills, which were a result of modernization, industrialization, and urbanization. Philosophers, social welfare practitioners, academics, and the clergy developed a broad spectrum of approaches to combatting social ills; however, all shared the conviction that society could be reconstructed through direct interventions in the social fabric. Social reformers across the ideological spectrum set out to find the proper methods for gathering social evidence and constructing social truth, with the goal of promoting social reconstruction. All of this was part of a search for certitude and truth in social relations.1 One of the results of this activist approach to social relations was the modern, secular profession of social work. Canadian social work, which has long been concerned with the relationship between the personal agency of dependent persons and the just construction of social relations, came into being as a profession during the interwar years. In this chapter I discuss some of the intellectual struggles at McGill University and the University of Toronto. The debate at the two universities reflects some of the key epistemological tensions concerning social change during the interwar years. Similar tensions within the field of social service and social work can be situated within these broader discussions. Thompson and Seager argue that the interwar years have a cohesion, notwithstanding the tendency of many historians to perceive the 19205 and the 19305 as separate eras. In the public realm, a variety of dissenting voices reflecting widespread social discord contributed to a

Concepts of Social Service and Social Change 13

lively discussion of social matters. Thompson and Seager conclude that, for all the public discussion, the political mandarins responded only ineffectually to social issues; the Canadian state did not function as a just and effective arbiter of its citizens' needs. Nor did Canada show itself to be a nation-state untied from the colonial, imperialistic causes of Britain and the United States. It is troubling that Canada's political leaders failed to respond to a growing modernist consensus to confront the country's social, economic, and political imbalances with the goal of redressing social problems.2 During the final years of the First World War, labour strife was one of the more public manifestations of widespread political and social discontent. Canadian union membership had increased dramatically during the war, partially due to a strengthening of the international labour movement. At the same time, governmental actions late in the war such as censorship, conscription, a ban on strikes, and the arrest of conscientious objectors were contributing to unease within the labour movement.3 Inflation, the arbitrariness of decision making by the federal Union government, and politicians' ambivalence over the interventionist nature of the wartime government pushed unionists to action. By 1918 even normally reserved workers such as civic employees were taking strike action. That year there were 169 strikes across Canada.4 The most dramatic event, however, was the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919. Between 30,000 and 35,000 workers from a variety of workplaces went on strike in support of the metal workers' right to bargain collectively through third-party agents of their choice.5 Increased union membership and activity was part of broader social change. Canadian urban culture had always been open to international influence, but these influences strengthened during the 19205 and 19305. During the 19205, travel and communications both became faster and easier, and this intensified the spread of ideas internationally. Canadian culture was particularly influenced by the powerful international presence of Great Britain and the United States. Sojourns abroad by Canadian nationals, the immigration of academics, and funding from American foundations such as the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations, all contributed to the international flavour of Canadian cultural and intellectual development.6 Internationally, political, economic, and social crisis was in the air. High unemployment, fascism, and the constant threat of war were creating a sense of doom so pervasive that to ignore these things amounted to a political act.7 The international economic downturn at

14 A Poetics of Social Work

the end of the 19205 resulted in unprecedented unemployment in Canada. Unemployment was tremendously unsettling for families and for entire communities.8 International events such as the victory of Franco in the Spanish Civil War and the Munich settlement mark the end of the period of study. The defeat of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War was understood to be the end of an epoch, and the Munich settlement and the occupation of Czechoslovakia brought the world to the brink of the Second World War. For many people, Franco's victory in Spain ended the hope that human intervention could decide the fate of the modern world.9 The political nature of the times was expressed in Canada through people's interest in political parties such as the United Front, socialist parties in Ontario and British Columbia, and the Communist Party of Canada. In this politicized climate, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), a third national political party for Canadians, was formed in 1930 at a convention in Calgary. In 1933, CCF delegates to a convention in Saskatchewan tabled the Regina Manifesto, which was based on proposals for the public management and social ownership of the Canadian economy.10 During the interwar years, Canadian socialists possessed a multiplicity of nuanced opinion and thought. Members of the Communist Party such as Tim Buck, J.B. Salsberg, and Jacob Penner constantly called for the CCF to join it in the battle against 'a common enemy.' However, the goals of the two organizations were profoundly different, and Canadian democratic socialism would maintain its distinct identity.11 By 1921, Canada's social environment had changed significantly: most Canadians now lived in cities. Urbanization, mechanization, and technology were central to the Canadian social experience. Americanization, the struggle to deal with the British colonial heritage, the spread of commercial culture, and the anonymity of urban life made it more important than ever to nurture a Canadian culture. Some Canadians felt threatened by the urban environment; they perceived a loss of identity and individuality and a breakdown in their sense of 'natural' community. Various technologies contributed to the commercialism and urbanization of Canadian culture; they also created in heightened sense of urgency among some Canadians to promote a Canadian culture. This urgency was heightened by the rapid spread of American technology.12 A number of Canadian writers and artists remained buoyant in the face of all of this social change as they struggled to express a distinctly

Concepts of Social Service and Social Change 15

Canadian culture in the face suffocating American and British influences.13 Modernist poets such as the 'Montreal Group' - a group of McGill University students including Leo Kennedy, Leon Edel, F.R. Scott and A.J.M. Smith - were strongly influenced by international authors such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Carl Sandburg. They drew on international influences, yet produced distinctly Canadian texts without distorting their work to suit the arbiters of taste in the metropolitan centres of Europe and the United States.14 However, the purposes of Canadian cultural promotion were varied. For some Canadians, culture needed to be preserved against the faceless forces of modernization and immigration. The mainstream approach to Canadian art and culture was often defined by Victorian romanticism, with its imagery of nature and the land. For younger Canadians, however, contemporary influences offered the welcome possibility for creating distinctly new forms of expression. Although their thematic concerns, such as Canadian identity and nature, were often similar to those of the mainstream culture, the young moderns were more likely to explore contemporary themes and openly discuss social concerns and topical historical realities.15 Canadian universities contributed considerably to cultural change during the interwar years. McGill University and the University of Toronto became significant gathering places for intellectuals, poets, painters, writers, and musicians. Only a small percentage of Canadians attended university; even so, that percentage increased significantly during the 19205. For example, enrolment at the University of Toronto almost doubled in the two years following the First World War. Because of the concentration of students at McGill and University of Toronto, those two universities did much to foster an EnglishCanadian intelligentsia.16 The League for Social Reconstruction, one of the groups associated with both universities, was founded in 1932 to reflect on changes in Canadian political and social structures. The league was spearheaded by F.R. Scott, a poet and law professor at McGill University, and the University of Toronto history professor Frank Underhill; the two had met at a conference in Massachusetts. Scott and Underhill agreed to form research groups in Toronto and Montreal along Fabian lines. The league's members included poets, painters, lawyers, professors, students, politicians, and business people.17 Members of the league from the teaching staff at the University of Toronto included Eric Havelock, Harry Cassidy, Joe Parkinson, and Irene Biss. Members of the Mont-

16 A Poetics of Social Work

real group included Marian Scott, Pegi Nicol, G.S. Mooney, David Lewis, and J.K. Gordon. Within a year of the first meeting, the league had seventeen branches in six provinces.18 The League for Social Reconstruction was an association 'working for the establishment in Canada of a social order in which the base principle regulating production, distribution, and service will be the common good rather than private profit/19 League members imagined a radical reconstruction of the economic system within the tenets of parliamentary democracy. While the league's manifesto characterized the capitalist system as unfair and inhumane, the statement was carefully worded to appeal to middle-class Canadians who were interested in social reconstruction.20 The league was not doctrinaire. Members were as interested in the works of modern Canadian artists such as the Group of Seven, and of fiction writers such as D.H. Lawrence, as they were in constitutional law and the works of political theorists.21 The league's manifesto reflected much more than a socialist attack on the capitalist system. King Gordon, professor of Christian ethics at McGill, wrote that 'the evil in the capitalist system to which the Manifesto points, is more than injustice, more than human suffering which it causes. It is the almost blasphemous defiance of the spiritual principles in an order in which man can find sustenance and fulfillment. The spectacular collapse of the guilded house which the system erected with the resultant intensified human suffering presents the challenge to the rebuilding on firmer foundations/22 When Gordon articulated a common view for the league, he was suggesting a modernist concept: 'a deep concern for man, a being capable of love and creative effort in an ordered world/23 He remembered a heady mix of music, talk and parties at F.R. Scott's Montreal home. As a complement to their aesthetic and intellectual efforts, they danced to Jerome Kern's 'Smoke Gets in Your Eyes' and Cole Porter's 'Night and Day/ 24 Relations between the fledgling university intelligentsia and the university administration were often strained, since social dissent and critique were integral to new movements at the universities.25 F.R. Scott was troubled by restrictions to freedom as well as by the concentration of wealth and privilege in Montreal during the mid 19205: I was in a palatial mansion this evening. All that wealth could purchase of beauty in pictures, hangings, carpets, furniture, china - all that was there.

Concepts of Social Service and Social Change 17 Not a chair, but would sell enough to feed a slum family for a month: not a picture but would provide a home for every beggar in Montreal. In the house was a little, tired woman, with a magnificent gown and necklace of large pearls. She had a cross as a pendant. And down in the Railway Shops men toiled half-naked round roaring fires, and beside clanging machinery, for hours a day at cents an hour. And whenever he wanted to do so, the husband of the tired woman with the pendant cross, would tell these men there was no more work.26

This concentration of power allowed Montreal's establishment to make decisions 'akin to life and death' about the lives of recent immigrants, the working class, and French Canadians. The powerful anglophone establishment associated with McGill University had an uneasy relationship with students and professors interested in reconstituting social relations.27 At the University of Toronto, students were actively engaged in political organizing around social issues. In 1933, W. Delmas Clark of the Toronto Baptist Seminary wrote in alarm to President Cody about students' efforts to organize. Although he was pleased the president had planned to take some measures against a communist presence on campus, he was still concerned over the activities of a number of student organizations. He warned the president that there was the potential for common ground among a number of student organizations including the Christian Social Order, Fabian Club, Spartacus Club, the Student Leagues of University and High Schools, and the Young Communists' League - that could lead to their amalgamation. Delmas Clark perceived the actions of the student organizations as a threat to the precepts of freedom and justice. He ended his letter 'with prayer that they who consider Russia Paradise may speedily pass on.'28 Delmas Clark's prayers were not to be answered. In the autumn of 1935, the university administration was notified of the constitution of the University Communist Club. The main purpose of this group of University of Toronto students was to 'study and discuss the philosophy of Karl Marx.'29 They notified the university president that they intended to invite Tim Buck, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Canada, to speak at their inaugural open meeting.30 At the same time that Canadian political culture was in state of flux, university curricula were undergoing significant change. During the 19205 and 19305 a more pragmatic approach to intellectual develop-

i8 A Poetics of Social Work

ment was evident within most disciplines at Canadian universities. Under the presidency of Robert Falconer, the University of Toronto reorganized itself: it had been a federation of liberal arts colleges focused on the classics and traditional humanities; now it was remaking itself as a research institution promoting industrial and scientific research, and was creating departments focused on particular fields of study such as political economy, and psychology.31 After the First World War, the arts faculty at McGill expanded swiftly, and new departments were established such as the Department of Sociology and the Department of Education. Also, the Department of Psychology separated from the Department of Philosophy so that psychology could be offered to students as a distinct discipline. Increasingly, the arts faculty was becoming a gateway to the professional schools.32 At the same time as this shift toward pragmatic and applied knowledge, there was growing interest among academics in the social sciences. In 1931, professors from McMaster University and the University of Toronto met at Hart House to promote research in the social sciences. They passed a resolution to express their shared interest in promoting social science and to 'enlist the support of the Ontario Research Foundation for calling together representatives from the various universities and research bodies to discuss further the proposal.'33 However, E.J. Urwick, director of the Department of Political Economy, questioned the composition of the group, wondering aloud to the director of the Ontario Research Foundation whether academics from departments such as psychology and the medical faculty were qualified to engage in social or economic research.34 Despite the lack of support for the ad hoc group among key university administrators such as Urwick, there was widespread interest in social science among Canadian academics. Carl Dawson, a sociology professor at McGill, told the Montreal Lions Club that social science had been so vital to 'leaders of vision' that it had become part of the curriculum of many American and Canadian universities in spite of many 'handicaps.' He claimed that subjects such as economics, psychology, political science, and sociology had become more popular with students. His modernist conceit was that there was a growing awareness of the tremendous potential of the 'practical application of social engineering.'35 In 1931, the social science disciplines were given a significant boost at McGill University, when the American Rockefeller Foundation donated $105,000 over five years to fund research in the fields of eco-

Concepts of Social Service and Social Change 19

nomics, sociology, psychology, and education. The purposes of the funding were: a) to train well educated men and women in technique of social and economic research b) to inspire departments to increase interest in research problems in their subjects leading to an understanding and solution of social and economic problems c) [to] compile balanced and authoritative statements dealing with problems under investigation, statements which will be distinct contributions to the understanding of these questions which have so much to do with the social and economic welfare of the people.36

However, social science, pragmatism, specialization, and empiricism did not become the sole standards for intellectual development. Within the university community there rose a central tension between an education based on value-oriented humanities and philosophy, and one based on the study of natural sciences.37 In spite of a tendency toward specialized, empirical study at the University of Toronto, that institution harboured an intellectual heritage from the Victorian era that was clearly based on values.38 The directors of the university's Department of Political Economy from 1926 to 1952 - E.J. Urwick, R.M. Maclver, and Harold Innis - valued a liberal arts education. Although the department housed a number of disciplines, including the pragmatic fields of social work, economics, political science, commerce, and finance, this group of male academics shared a broad vision of social science. They felt it was possible to construct social science from a variety of disciplines including philosophy, history, sociology, psychology, and geography. They subscribed to a university tradition that preferred to organize social sciences along British lines rather than according to the American approach, which was more pragmatic and scientific, as well as more specialized. The Canadian belief that philosophic values undergird all social science was one of the points of divergence between the English-Canadian and American university systems.39 Dean MacKay, the dean of arts at McGill University, also valued a liberal arts education. According to MacKay, specialized training, attention to detail, and preoccupation with technical ability were damaging the judgment of both students and faculty. Proper education could be gained only through a generalist's approach to scholarly

20 A Poetics of Social Work

work. In a letter to Sir Arthur Currie, principal of McGill, he lamented the difficulty of curriculum review within the faculty of arts: 'As you probably realise, it is extraordinarily difficult to get an assembly of 50 specialists to fix their attention upon any broad lines of educational policy. Sound and balanced judgement seem always to be prey to highly specialised technical training. This probably explains why our Faculty, like other Arts Faculties should be so predisposed to interest itself in trivial matters of detail. I have always said that students may be well left to teach themselves these trifles if only they are given a sound, carefully arranged, general university education.'40 Dean MacKay's opinion was shared by prominent colleagues at McGill, including Stephen Leacock, a political economy professor who had lectured in the Department of Social Service in 1920. Stephen Leacock cautioned that 'A B.A. course is not, or ought not to be, practical. Its aim is to develop mental capacity and not to impart practical or rule of thumb knowledge. A wise discretion would dictate regardless of expense the extent to which practical training and academic courses should be combined.'41 Concepts of social service were also being reconsidered during the interwar years. Just as there was discussion about the merits of differing forms of knowledge in academia, so too there was a difference of opinion as to how social service work should best be conceptualized. Within the field of social service, one of the key tensions was whether to define the field as a values-based, idealistic vocation or as a pragmatic profession. This tension was due in part to the historical relationship in Canada between social service and the Christian church; the rise of social service and social welfare work had long been associated with the growth of the Canadian Social Gospel.42 At the turn of the century, a number of formally educated Canadians from protestant churches were interested in creating a new society, and wished to reform or regenerate both the human soul and the broader social context. They envisioned a society that was not only prosperous but also more equal.43 The sources of inspiration for the Social Gospel movement included literature, religious tracts, and science.44 According to the social gospellers, social issues were not merely secular; rather, the social conditions of the community had profound religious significance. The social gospellers perceived God as an immanent being who worked for a revival of the entire society. Since societal development was associated with the possibility of renewal, social action became a religious rite as people strove to Christianize the social

Concepts of Social Service and Social Change 21

order. The key aim of the social gospellers was to create the Kingdom of God on earth. According to the social gospellers, both the individual and the social structure were in need of salvation and redemption,45 and one of the primary obstacles to the right relationship between men, and between men and God, was Western capitalism, which by nature was exploitive, competitive, and greed-driven.46 The Social Gospel movement was based on the practical work or praxis of women; in the early twentieth century, social services were most often delivered on a voluntary basis by women. From 1870 to 1930, a number of women's organizations with strong affiliations with the protestant churches were involved in social service and social reform work. Groups such as the Woman's Missionary Society, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and the Young Women's Christian Association set the stage for modern social services. These women shared the vision of 'a caring society free from male exploitation.'47 Middle-class women created separate institutions that offered opportunities for them to become involved in philanthropic practice while exercising some autonomy within a male-dominated society.48 Randi Warne illustrates how social gospeller Nellie McClung, author, social activist, and politician, challenged the construction of private and public spheres. Drawing on women's experience, she was as interested in the role of women in marriage as in the relations within the public workforce. Her vision of social change involved supporting both the individual and the community.49 The Social Gospel movement declined during the 19205, with the rise of secular social work and secular social welfare institutions. After the 1928 Canadian Conference on Social Work, the first conference of the Canadian Association of Social Workers, attendance declined dramatically at meetings of the Social Service Council, a key organization within the Social Gospel movement. It seemed as if the links between social work and religion that had been forged within the Social Gospel were being weakened. Secular organizations, which were at times critical of church institutions, were gaining influence within the field of social work.50 It is tempting to associate all of this institutional change with a complete repudiation of the traditional ways of knowing and sources of inspiration within Canadian social service. Canadian intellectual historians such as Ramsay Cook and Brian McKillop have argued that the advent of Darwinian thought and the development of social science created a crisis of faith, with the result that the evangelical understand-

22 A Poetics of Social Work

ing of philosophy and social thought was displaced.51 On the other hand, authors such as Roger Hutchinson, Phyllis Airhart, Mariana Valverde, and Michael Gauvreau suggest that a subtle and intricate relationship developed between the scientific and religious views of the world. Religion was not replaced by science; rather, people attempted to integrate confidence in science and technology with a spiritual sense of mission.52 In fact, it can be argued that the Social Gospel was well suited to modernist trends in thought as it struggled to deal with personal change and social transformation. Those historians who focus on women's understanding of social service are less likely to see the changes in social service work in terms of dramatic breaks. According to Gayle Wills, the tendency for historians to write as if social work retreated from social reform after the First World War reflects a historical bias that ignores the influence of women. Faced with the Canadian capitalist system, for which efficiency was the dominant consideration, many women embraced an ethos of co-operative democracy - an ethos that grew out of their religious experience in the early twentieth century. The women's social work tradition, based on democratic and co-operative approaches to community, was marginalized. The role of women was thus undervalued, and women were eventually pushed from positions of prominence.53 Carol Baines in her study of Earlscourt Children's Home illustrates that the strong religious and maternal ethic of Canadian women social work practitioners continued throughout the 19305. Women practitioners resisted the shift from a social work guided by a sense of mission.54 The links between spirituality, social service, social change, and academia continued to be valued among male academics as well. Philosophy in English-Canadian universities had its origins in Hegelian idealism and was often regarded as an expression of Christian morality and doctrine.55 The idealist approach to education and social service, which originated in British social thought at Oxford University in England, was generally embraced at the University of Toronto. T.H. Green, Oxford philosopher, argued that the university student was elevated in spirit through service to others. Since industrialization had torn apart the traditional social bounds of family and community, social reform must focus on the reconstitution of community. The poor would be influenced through contact with the 'cultivated souls' of civilized philanthropic students. Arnold Toynbee , a historical economist, argued that the collection of social facts could be guided by philosoph-

Concepts of Social Service and Social Change 23

ical principles. The study of social problems through the 'scientific' collection of facts could lead to the solution of ethical and moral problems.56 This idealist concept of education shared by male academics included a sense of citizenship defined by public service. This vision of service was based on the belief that interdependence at the community level, created by direct, personal relationships between academics and persons in need, could be harnessed to achieve social ideals.57 Unfortunately, the male-defined perception of community service was prescriptive in nature. Sara Burke argues that in emphasizing knowledge over skill in the correction of social ills, male idealists tended to ignore the practice knowledge of female social workers.58 The institutional manifestations of the idealist principles were schools of social work and settlement houses.59 The Department of Social Service at the University of Toronto, the first social work program in Canada, opened in 1914; McGill University opened a social work program in 1918; the third Canadian social work program was started at the University of British Columbia in 1928. During the 19205 many social work schools were developed at North American universities. By 1929, thirty-two North American universities were offering secular social work training.60 In 1931, the University of Western Ontario began considering developing a course in social service. A main objective of the proposed program was to prepare students for professional social work. However, the program planners designed the course of study to appeal to those students interested in the modernist exercise of 'equipping themselves for constructive community living and social benefit.' In keeping with this, the foundation of the program was of a general nature. Students were required to take courses in literature and history as well as biology, psychology, economics, and sociology.61 McGill University's school for social workers, the Department of Social Study and Training, was well suited to the ethos of efficiency, service, and action that was the hallmark of McGill University in the early 19205. Within a few years, however, the school was somewhat isolated by the growing interest among McGill's academics in social problems, as opposed to direct action to ameliorate those problems. The department, which had been renamed the Department of Social Service, would close in 1931. While it continued as a community-based school during the 19305, it did not reopen as a university program until 1945-62

24 A Poetics of Social Work

During the 19205 and 19303, teaching within the University of Toronto's Department of Social Service - today's Faculty of Social Work - was based on social service principles that were pragmatic in nature but also reflected the British philosophic approach to social welfare. Allan Irving »notes that the 'department was characterized by a pragmatic philosophy and was not under the sway of any strong belief about the nature of social work but rather motivated by a general concern for social betterment.'63 The course work focused on community rather than on individual and personal adaptation. In the department's early years, the knowledge base was drawn predominantly from sociology and social philosophy rather than psychology.64 During the 19205, the American bent toward a more intensive focus on the individual became increasingly evident, yet the focus - drawn from progressive and Fabian thought - on a philosophic base for social work was not lost.65 Within the school of social work, broader academic tensions - over the humanities versus social sciences, and the efficacy of political action, and the true nature of social service - were evident. E.J. Urwick, the director of the Department of Social Service, argued in 1929 that psychology should be but one approach among many for understanding the causes of human want.66 He argued against the tendency in North America to replace the study of history, social philosophy, and ethics within social service departments with purportedly more 'objective' and rigorous disciplines such as sociology and psychology. He wrote to Sir Robert Falconer, the president of the university: 'It is also perhaps arguable that some philosophical training is almost as valuable as some scientific training, especially for students whose life work will call for the continual exercise of philosophic judgement and generalising ability/ In fact, according to Urwick, social work studies had such breadth that it was difficult to determine which specialized courses should be offered in the program.67 The second institutional manifestation of idealist principles, the settlement house, was founded as an agency for practical service in lowincome and immigrant neighbourhoods. The settlements also functioned as institutions for teaching social service to students from a variety of backgrounds. The University Settlement in Toronto was founded in 1910 to 'bring the university students in direct contact with those living amidst the unfortunate conditions of our modern cities and thus broaden the one and elevate the other' as well as to engage in 'all sorts of social work and investigation.' The Department of Social

Concepts of Social Service and Social Change 25

Service at the University of Toronto used the University Settlement House as a placement where students could experience direct social work practice.68 In 1891 a women's group at McGill University, the Alumnae Society of McGill, opened the Women's University Settlement. There, students from the departments of social work and sociology learned techniques of philanthropic organization.69 Links to the settlement house movement were also strengthened through the presence of settlement workers as teachers within the schools of social work. Miss Libby Carson, who developed the first settlement house in Canada under the auspices of the Presbyterian Church, and the Rev. F.N. Stapleford of the Neighbourhood Worker's Association were recruited as lecturers at the University of Toronto.70 In 1932 Miss Barbara Finlayson's appointment as lecturer at the school of social work was recommended based on her relationship to a prominent Toronto family and her decade of experience as a settlement worker. It was felt that her hiring would lead to greater co-operation with organizations outside the university that were important to the training of students.71 During the 19205 and 19305, pragmatism became increasingly important as a philosophical base for social work practice; a number of social workers were arguing for the elevation of pragmatism over the idealism of earlier periods.72 However, the nature of the pragmatism in Canadian universities was loosely defined, since it drew from both philosophy and social science.73 Some social workers, preoccupied with defining the nature of the fledgling profession, saw themselves as professionals concerned with developing a specialized, expert knowledge.74 By 1926, social service, which had begun as everyone's business, was developing a technical skill common only to members of the profession. A technical social work vocabulary had evolved, and social workers were cautioned against using it with the general public.75 Seminars held during the 19205 to expose social workers to social science technique illustrate that for many social workers, increased competency in social service methods was the route to professional recognition.76 The struggle to define an exclusive professional domain for paid social workers is evident in the social work journal articles of the 19205. Discussions of social science paralleled the academic tensions in the university between pragmatism and idealism. In 1926, Mr G.B. Clarke, the chair of the Canadian Association of Social Workers, wrote in the journal Social Welfare that since the social worker required special qual-

26 A Poetics of Social Work

ifications in both education and personality, casework could not be done by just anyone.77 The push toward the professionalization of social work was also evident in the writings of Mr J.A. Dale, who contended that social workers must give a definite shape and clear consciousness to a vague, underlying good will: 'Practical method applied in diligent sympathy can do more than random benevolence/78 Social worker Ruth Hill argued that the social worker must be a truly disciplined practitioner who has been taught in a professional college course.79 According to these authors, a social worker was a professional with superior knowledge and specialized skill.80 The plethora of journal articles about the professional nature of social work was prompted by the formation of the Canadian Association of Social Workers. This association was formed at a time when corporate society provided the basis for professional organization and bureaucracies were increasingly requiring social service personnel.81 A central purpose of the association was professional development. Its formation was a significant step toward situating social work as a technical occupation entrusted to expert professionals rather than to private, voluntary, religious-based philanthropy.82 The professional purpose of the association was evident in its founding statement of purpose, reported in the October 1926 issue of Social Welfare: The objective of the Association set forth in the Constitution: The association aims to bring together professional social workers for such cooperative effort as may enable them more efficiently to carry out their ideals of service in the community. To this end the association may seek to promote professional standards; encourage proper and adequate training; cultivate an informed public opinion which will recognize the professional and technical nature of social work/83 An orientation informed by technique and method was evident in the association's concern for professional standards, for training, and for increasing the public's awareness of the technical and professional nature of social work. It also seems that social workers were organizing for their roles within bureaucracy, where efficiency was vital, while also ensuring their professional status by declaring service to be a central objective of the association. By making efficiency and the promotion of technical aspects of social work central to the profession, the Canadian Association of Social Workers was beginning to define the social work role in terms of technology. Many male leaders in the field of social welfare - for example, Harry Cassidy, Leonard Marsh, George Davidson, and R.E.G. Davis -

Concepts of Social Service and Social Change 27

actively promoted a technical approach to social welfare policy and planning. The legacy of their 19305 vision was an extensive bureaucratic welfare state founded on technocratic principles.84 Furthermore, many progressive reformers were working to develop a knowledge that was value neutral in order to understand social problems more fully; they were also confident that science, technology, and expertise would benefit society.85 In the technological state, all organizations are influenced by the ethos of corporate institutions based upon principles of efficiency, productivity, and personal freedom.86 Perhaps social workers were under pressure to legitimize their profession in these terms. At the point of direct practice, some workers advanced the case method as an approach that was both specialized and expert in nature.87 By 1932, key nongovernmental organizations, the Canadian Association of Social Workers, and the Canadian Council on Child and Family Welfare were reporting that 'case work is the basis of modern social work/88 Social casework originated with the British Charity Organization Societies at the turn of the century; these societies began investigating each applicant for service in a methodical manner. The scientific approach to social work was introduced as social workers at the societies began to understand need in terms of both social and psychological factors. Social workers began to draw from the disciplines of sociology, biology, and economics to better understand clients' suffering.89 In North America during the 19203, caseworkers adopted psychoanalytic theory as a central paradigm, since it provided a rationale for diagnosing and treating clients' problems.90 Casework was seen as inculcating scientific investigation with personal service. One of the advantages of this method of social reconstruction was that each person was treated as an individual rather than an anonymous member of a social grouping. Charlotte Whitton, executive director of the Canadian Council on Child Welfare, defined casework as treatment of every individual as a case different from that of every other human being, because each person is different in endowment, character, and circumstances from every other person; and the service which will be given will differ with this different character, his or her different circumstances, and background. Meeting the need of this basis involves the most patient and skilled inquiry of each application for help, with the purpose of finding out the fundamental cause of the person being in the plight in

28 A Poetics of Social Work which she, or he, is, [sic] and of giving treatment that will provide material aid if that is necessary, but most of all personal understanding, advice, encouragement, character strengthening, and a plan to work the person out of this need as soon as possible if there is any hope of re-establishment.91

A number of Canadian social workers worked hard and long to establish a rigorous social work knowledge base revolving around casework. Casework that focused on the diagnosis of problems and the use of factual evidence was promoted as a scientific endeavour. Social workers were being warned against becoming subjectively involved in the misery of their clients. It was argued that professional objectivity was the most effective approach to issues as complex as poverty.92 Even while social service work was being redefined as an objective method, many social workers continued to base their judgments on a type of practice wisdom that was distinct from the rigorous casework method. Women social workers learned from that form of direct practice which was guided by a sense of mission and based on common sense and caring.93 Gale Wills argues that the early practices of social workers were an expression of feminism, since social work has always existed at the interface of everyday life and politics. In this sense, social work was a political practice that combined individual acts of charity with the goal of social and economic change. Within the field of social work, women engaged in a form of casework that was integrated with community forms of practice. This created a public space for articulating approaches to social actions, such as caring and nurturing, that are too often characterized as private and domestic.94 Indeed, the Canadian Association of Social Workers was not interested in restricting its membership by qualification, technical skill, or proficiency in casework. The definition of professional social work remained quite broad for the association; its members were torn between the desire to establish exclusivity and the need to increase membership. Elspeth Latimer notes that the association members were willing to comment on a wide variety of social issues, and that their refusal to become overly concerned with defining the limits of professional social work indicated a lack of interest in professional status and control.95 When considered in the context of a variety of Canadian modernist interpretations of social reality during the 19205 and 19305, social work

Concepts of Social Service and Social Change 29

is better understood as a modernist construction. The emerging profession of social work shared with these other endeavours a preoccupation with personal agency for reconstructing troubled social relations. Modernist thought made it possible to imagine the field of social work. The secular social work profession, defined during the 19205 and 19305, was influenced by the eclectic mix of understandings of social change and a Canadian culture that was enriched by cosmopolitan influences. At the same time, the modernist pretext of social work - to reconstruct both the individual and the society - made it difficult to be definitive about the nature of the task at hand. The tension between the demand for rigour in technique and social science on the one hand, and value-based interpretations of efficacious social intervention on the other, paralleled the broader academic tensions between pragmatism and idealism. The profession of social work, which was based on the premises of personal agency and social reconstruction, would be appealing to a wide variety of modernists. Literary modernists, political activists, social scientists, philosophers, philanthropists, and practitioners were attracted to a field that promised change in both the person and the society. In the following chapters I explore the thought of four social workers with distinctively different understandings of the most effective approach to social change. The field of social work provides the opportunity for a challenging epistemological study because of the wideranging influences from which the social work paradigm draws. The richness of social work epistemology is brought to light by considering the specific world views of four Canadian social work leaders.

2

Social Work Practice Informed by Philosophy: The Social Thought of Edward Johns Urwick

Edward Johns Urwick's contribution to the debate about the true nature of social work knowledge was based in the humanities. First and foremost, he was a social philosopher who believed that social work matters could only be understood in philosophical terms. He drew from diverse sources including practical wisdom, the Vedanta, Judeo-Christian thought, and Plato. As the head of both the University of Toronto's social work school and its Department of Political Economy, he was influential in the fields of Canadian social service and social work. Dorothy Livesay (see Chapter 3), who met Urwick in 1932 while she was his student at the University of Toronto's Department of Social Service, described him as 'an idealist, a charming and gentle man of the old school.'1 This chapter explores Urwick's social thought. He valued social work practice highly as long as it was underpinned by philosophical interpretation. If we are to understand why he so valued the integration of philosophy and practice within the social work field, we must understand his critique of social science. Urwick was born in Cheshire, England, in 1867, the son of a Congregational minister. His interest in social work and the welfare of others was evident early in his career. From 1899 to 1902, he was the subwarden of Toynbee Hall settlement house, where he worked under the Rev. Samuel Barnett. During his time at Toynbee Hall, he was also a Poor Law Guardian and a member of the Port of London Immigration Board.2 Urwick was educated at Uppingham and at Wadham College, Oxford and began his career in university teaching and academic administration at the age of thirty-six. In England, his academic positions included director of the London School of Sociology and Social

Social Thought of Edward Johns Urwick 31 Economics (1904 to 1910), Tooke Professor of Economic Science at King's College London (1907 to 1914), professor of social philosophy at the University of London (1914 to 1924), president of Morley Memorial College (1903 to 1923), and director of the Department of Social Science and Administration in the London School of Economics (1910 to 1923). In addition to his academic duties in London, he helped establish courses for social workers in Liverpool, Edinburgh, Birmingham, and Glasgow. Urwick moved to Canada in 1924, intending to retire from academic life and pursue his interest in writing. Instead, he became fully engaged in Toronto's academic and social welfare community. Upon his arrival in Canada he became a special lecturer at the University of Toronto; soon after, he was appointed head of the Department of Political Economy. The department encompassed a number of disciplines, including economics, political science, commerce, and finance.3 The Department of Political Economy was also the parent of other specialized departments such as law, sociology, social science, and geography.4 In 1928, Urwick became the director of the Department of Social Service, which later became the Faculty of Social Work. He remained director of the department until he retired, for a second time, at the age of seventy in 1937-5 Urwick was a prolific academic writer who published a number of articles and books. His books include Studies of Boy Life in Great Cities (1905), Luxury and Waste (1906), A Philosophy of Social Progress (1912), The Message of Plato (1920), The Social Good (1927), and The Values of Life (1948). Urwick approached social service as a philosopher. Early in his career he studied the philosophy of British idealism, which is an adaptation of Hegelian thought as it appears in the social thought of Bernard Bosanquet. To a lesser extent, he was influenced by thinkers associated with the movement known as British new liberalism - Hobhouse, Hobson, and Tawney.6 Essentially, however, Urwick was a 'Hellenist and a Platonist/7 and Plato's influence is evident in much of his work.8 For example, he was convinced that Christian students would become much more useful as reformers once they had read the Republic.9 In Urwick's writings and practice there was a constant search for the social good.10 He saw the social good as one of the central purposes of social philosophy and social work, and as the touchstone of social work values. He was adamant that discussions of social good need not

32 A Poetics of Social Work

be pretentious or complicated.11 Social good was based on people achieving the right fit among themselves. Good and happiness resulted when people were able to subjugate themselves to the requirements of reciprocity.12 In simple terms, social good was about the relationship 'between Smith and me - and God; and human good means the happiness which Smith and I may perhaps be able to find together.'13 Urwick had a similarly pragmatic view of social justice, which according to him was 'largely founded on the question: 'Do the interests here related interact harmoniously?' In other words he wanted to know: 'How does the system work?' He contended that if Plato were alive he might have dealt with questions of economic and social justice in a similar manner. Urwick further argued that social justice must be defined before issues related to it were pursued. He felt that questions such as 'Does labour have the right to organize?' and 'Is the distribution of wealth just?' can only be answered after a definitive concept of social justice has been developed and then applied to the issues. He cautioned that too many people dealt with each social and economic question separately from the others, and in doing so substituted good will for social justice.14 In philosophical terms, he saw society as a spiritually based organization that should progress toward a pattern of good.15 According to Urwick, the social philosopher's role was to conceive of 'a spiritual pattern for all good including the good of society.'16 Pursuit of the social good required that the individual philosopher possess 'strength of affection and of interest, of purpose, and of self-control/17 The intellect's main use was to help prepare a completely different faculty, the faculty of nous, which can understand the Good.18 In 1930 he agreed with Dr Hamilton Fyfe, the principal of Queen's University, that the central purpose of university education was the soul's education. The student should be taught in such a way that his or her soul was focused on questions necessary to understanding issues of social life.19 During the Age of Reason, at the end of the eighteenth century, science became the most highly valued discipline for interpreting social change and process. Faith, the only other faculty acknowledged at the time, was considered naive and lacking credibility because it did not provide definitive proof of truth. Urwick contended that the bias favouring logical and intellectual methods of social science continued to permeate modern thought. Science had come to be perceived as a type of superknowledge with influence beyond the sphere of science itself.

Social Thought of Edward Johns Urwick 33

Plato, on the other hand, had taught that social process can be understood on three levels: logismos, dianoia, and nous. The levels have been translated roughly as reasoning or a process defined by logic (logismos), the use of superintelligence (dianoia), and the direct grasp of reality, or wisdom (nous). In defining social work practice, Urwick tried to be true to Plato's entire range of faculties. He corrected through practice what he perceived to be a myth of his age - that science or the faculty of logismos would be able to rectify social ills.20 Urwick used Plato's cave metaphor to describe society's preoccupation with earthly matters. A person trapped in the cave is concerned only with understanding worldly matters and therefore is not open to knowing the truth manifested through dianoia and nous. Particularly important to social work was Plato's clear distinction between nous, the faculty that experiences God within the spiritual realm, and the intellect, which is preoccupied with causation and order among phenomena.21 According to Urwick, Classical Greek thought was essential not only because it grappled with the difficulties of rational thought and scientific method, but also because it offered a transcendent philosophy based on the thought of the ancient East. It was the ancient wisdom's clear view of the spiritual universe, as well as its explanation of humanity's place within the phenomenal universe, that particularly interested Urwick. The faculty of nous needed to be encouraged among social work practitioners if they were to understand the spiritual aspects of the human.22 Urwick did not see social change as inexorable progress toward some fixed endpoint defined by Christian values. According to him, religion was simply knowing God. He argued that every religion is relative, with both good and regrettable aspects that influence our morality and social creed.23 There is no single religious truth since religion is constantly changing. Nor does one religion's truth have more meaning than another's. In fact, he felt that all religion is one, in the same way that all mystics are sisters and brothers, and that within each religion there are several versions of the prophets' truth. Each truth known to us is a clouded version of the truth revealed by the true prophets.24 After reading Urwick's The Message of Plato in 1930, Swami Achokarranda of the Prabuddha Bhavatu Editorial Office in India wrote to Urwick asking for help with his research on how Indian thought had penetrated Greek thought.25 Urwick wrote back to apologize, explaining that he had deserted his work on the relationship between Platonic

34 A Poetics of Social Work

philosophy and the Vedanta, which is a system of Hindu philosophy. Lack of interest on the part of English and North American scholars had discouraged him from continuing his study.26 One purpose of social interaction, according to Urwick, was the 'unfolding of the individual soul and the knowledge of himself.'27 In life, there are two paths: the path of materialized religion and the path of spiritual life separated from the worldly. Both paths are necessary and good, but true human growth is defined as the progress of the individual soul on its journey along the spiritual path. The spiritual journey on the upper path, though essentially solitary, is not separate from the well-being of others.28 Urwick understood the social good and the good self as complementary. He thought that the soul is naturally social and that the social good is therefore linked to the individual soul. The purpose of social life is for people to become self-aware enough that each individual recognizes that there is no separation among individual interests.29 The assertion of the others' self-consciousness 'compels us to widen our self-consciousness to the point of including them and recognizing that their self hood is identical with ours.' The recognition of social good, therefore, cannot be considered separately from the growth of selfconsciousness and the development of the good self.30 In this way the social good is based on reciprocity, and it is not possible for a single person to impose his or her understanding of social good upon others.31 For Urwick, the social ideal was not static and in fact was always open to discussion and redefinition. Such discussion was the purpose of a meeting with a visiting scholar that Urwick organized at the University of Toronto; that presentation focused on some ideals that social work leaders were striving to realize. Urwick's hope was to promote similar discussions among interested social workers and social welfare practitioners.32 He had defined the philosopher's role in a way that opened the pattern of ideal values defined by the philosopher to criticism by every 'honest thinker.'33 It is likely that Urwick's idealist approach to social thought was well-received by his male colleagues at the University of Toronto. Urwick would surely have been comfortable within the well-established idealist tradition at Canadian universities.34 As pointed out in Chapter Two, he was one of a succession of heads of the Department of Political Economy who thought that social science and the study of human affairs must be founded on idealist precepts. In fact, R.M.

Social Thought of Edward Johns Urwick 35

Maclver, Acting Director of the Department of Social Service, was probably motivated to recommend Urwick for the position so that the ethos of male-defined service based on values would continue to be cultivated at the University of Toronto.35 In spite of Urwick's ongoing insistence that his involvement at the University of Toronto was temporary, he was quite influential, particularly at the social work school. Catastrophic international events such as the First World War and the Depression made Urwick more determined than ever to exert his influence, as director of the Department of Political Economy and head of the social work school, so that students would be seeking knowledge based on spiritual certainty.36 Urwick's commitment to idealism and to values-based education, and his promotion of spiritually based community, placed him within a strong tradition in Canadian academia. At the same time, this idealist commitment put him at odds with those who sought social truth through rigorous, scientifically controlled methodologies (e.g., in sociology and economics). Urwick believed that social phenomena could be presented as part of an orderly process; but he was skeptical that knowledge of society could be modelled on the assumptions of science.37 He was not so much opposed to science as he was concerned about its limits.38 According to Urwick, there was a very broad field of human experience that scientific methods could not interpret. In such realms, truth could not be discovered through the scientific method.39 Urwick argued that social science could not define human facts and social facts, and that science did not deal adequately with humanity's dynamic inner life.40 Engaged and enthusiastic participation in society was the way for social workers to understand that 'what we are really dealing with is changing bundles of essential significance, part of which depends upon our interested attitude.'41 According to Urwick, the sociologist's disinterested stance - a basic condition for a social science - was a dangerous illusion. Social relations are significant precisely because of interests that grow 'in relation to the innumerable ends which lure people into activity.' The social scientist too was part of a broad culture influenced by goals and values. According to Urwick, the study of human life and social relations was a Value impregnated realm'; for that reason, an analogy to nonhuman sciences was false and a disinterested stance meaningless. Only philosophy could explain and harmonize values and ideal ends.42 Urwick defined science's job as the 'work of pure intelligence in its own sphere.'43 The first step in the scientific process was to define an

36 A Poetics of Social Work

object in abstraction from its universe. Since the scientist can only deal with portions of a universe, he or she must choose the significant variables for the study. Because science cannot deal with whole events or situations, a scientist of human life is compelled to disregard the most vital questions about existence. Urwick argued that matters of conscience, free choice, will, and the ideals and purposes that give moral significance to behaviour were excluded from scientific endeavour. The requirements for definition and abstraction so limited the discussion of social life that it was emptied of vivacity and became lifeless.44 Urwick distrusted social scientists' claims because they provided no way to deal with metaphysical questions such as justice and the social good. Science dealt with human development as if it were a natural process without a particular meaning: every development was postulated on the previous ones. This social scientific determinism did not allow for the intervention or influence of any agency, whether it be God, or will, or human choice.45 Urwick also felt that the limits of social science were set by the character of scientific exploration. The scientific enterprise was limited because it focused narrowly on matters measurable in terms of cause and effect and 'amenable to the reasoning of pure logic.' The social scientist was required to take a neutral, nonemotional stance in order to observe and verify social facts impartially. Human beings, Urwick contended, observe without accuracy and reason without impartiality. Each observation is made through the prism of a person's desires and biases; reasoning and logic are influenced by the human project's aims. At the same time, it is impossible to be certain of a conclusion's rightness so that verification becomes possible. Humans are not necessarily interested in making their experience fit a predictable scheme, since human life includes an element of the illogical. In short, since science requires manageable material, it is unable to deal with purposive human intelligence.46 Science posed a special problem for Urwick because of its new, powerful social meaning in Canada and in Western civilization as a whole during the 19205 and 19305. He was concerned about the trend within universities to bring all knowledge under the domination of scientific reason. If this trend continued, questions of moral philosophy - such as which truths are essential to good living - would be denied any validity.47 According to Urwick, every system and process must be judged and interpreted from an end point. The end point or purpose provides social progress with meaning.48

Social Thought of Edward Johns Urwick 37

From Urwick's perspective, the exaltation of science during the 19305 as the only successful human activity became coupled with the belief that governments were the only institutions powerful enough to utilize science. These myths spawned a concept of the state as beyond reproach. Thus a new god, the state, was born of the marriage of science and force. Urwick argued that no man or woman could understand a society's entire process. The assertion that we control social interaction to the point that we can have a definitive understanding of social relations is false. Such thinking obscures the fact that we need to strive for a higher logic.49 By 1938, Urwick was lamenting that his contemporaries worshipped progress, which was defined by increasing complexity. At the same time, many of his contemporaries defined freedom in a way that made personality development their final goal. These beliefs were accompanied by a type of relativism that denied the existence of absolute values. The defining motive for action was seen as the desire for free expansion of the individual. According to Urwick, science, which was at the centre of these social developments, bred a complexity that in turn required control. Since internal, personal controls based on faith, morality, and idealism were weakening, there was a proliferation of external controls and prohibitions. The ultimate expressions of a lack of self-discipline and restraint were the communist and fascist states that made like-mindedness compulsory and that defined as well as enforced principles, standards, values, and aims. Science ushered in modern political regimes and acted in their service.50 The political nature of a science of society was further troubling: social science was unable to deal with metaphysical endeavours, such as the attainment of an egoless state, that would allow us to come to some religious realization of the social good. Science focused on the self in the worldly context. Science's focus as a knowledge contributing to self-development, and the scientist's preoccupation with results, were irrelevant to the religious path. According to Urwick, action in a religious capacity could not occur until a sense of self had been lost.51 His religious view makes the scientist's self-conscious, objective stance highly problematic. The objective social scientist's preoccupation with personal control and the individualized self did not allow for the pursuit of the social good within the spiritual human community. Urwick's tremendous distrust of social science was related to his perception that there was a broader tendency toward materialism among students and academics. His disdain for methodologically

38 A Poetics of Social Work

driven approaches to human affairs was so great that he argued openly with colleagues such as R.M. Maclver. Although Maclver and Urwick agreed that the study of social systems must be morally based, they could not agree on the extent to which social science should be used to understand society. While supporting Maclver's philosophical foundation for understanding sociology, Urwick was offended by Maclver's contention that universal principles or facts could be determined as a means to understanding social relations.52 Although Urwick fought against the institutionalization of social science within academic settings, he was interested in pragmatic engagement with the social welfare community. Certainly, his colleagues marvelled at his many diversified duties.53 He served on the board of the University Settlement and for a time was its chair. He played an important role in developing the Toronto Welfare Council and acted as its chair. His special interest in housing led him to become vice-chair of the Lieutenant-Governor's Commission on Housing Conditions in Toronto, and vice-chair of the Housing Centre during the Depression. During the 19305 he also prepared briefs for the United Church study 'Christianizing the Social Order' and for the Rowell-Sirois Commission.54 His understanding of practice was congruent with his conceptualization of social welfare and social change as a spiritual enterprise. In his own practice, Urwick did not focus exclusively on the solitary and mystical pursuit of the upper path. However, he did follow the way of the Vedanta, which recognized the path of Karma Yoga or the path of work: 'Karma Yoga is all activity: ceaseless action for the good of others, never for oneself; but with no care about successful results of any action. The one rule is do all you can and leave the rest to God.'55 He was distrustful of actions that he thought were motivated by selfinterest. In 1936 he expressed some misgiving to University of Toronto President Cody about a proposal by Harry Cassidy, Director of Social Welfare for British Columbia, to develop an institute for social and economic research. Cassidy had been a colleague of Urwick's at the University of Toronto's Department of Social Service. Central to his complaint about the project was his suspicion that the 'scheme is inspired by its author's desire to make a place for himself as a director of research'; he added, T do not like any scheme based on selfinterest.'56 Certainly, Urwick was striving to develop social intelligence among citizens. He perceived this to be a primary goal for social workers.

Social Thought of Edward Johns Urwick 39

Social intelligence required social workers to draw from their emotional as well as their practical resources. The social worker should be able to understand the impact of her actions on the 'real well-being of individuals who are society.'57 Within this broad social work purpose, he defined secondary aims: 'to increase understanding of the conditions and processes of normal social life, with particular reference to modern industrial society; [and] to furnish some knowledge of the causes and possible treatment of the commonest abnormalities and failures.'58 According to Urwick, if social work practice was to focus on promoting social intelligence or intelligent social interest, then social science and social casework were inadequate knowledge bases for social workers. He felt that social work education was too often being reduced to technical training and methods of practice based on social science.59 For social workers to develop a complete social intelligence, they would have to study both social science and social philosophy, as well as the relationship between the two.60 His insistence on comprehensive education for social workers ran counter to the increasing demand during the Depression for social service personnel who were efficiently trained in method and who could meet an expanding need for social service personnel.61 Urwick was uncompromising in his belief that social work students must learn about matters such as justice, duty, interdependence, idealism, and purpose. He maintained that these topics must be considered in any effort to understand and promote social well-being. The study of social science would not facilitate such learning.62 He argued for a social work education that would help social workers develop a philosophical foundation that would justify their efforts. For Urwick it was imperative that social workers understand the reason for methods; it was not enough for them to accept these methods blindly as part of a prescribed technique.63 At the Canadian Conference of Social Workers in 1930, Urwick characterized social work as 'a study as limitless as the study of life itself.'64 Urwick was well aware that Canadian social work was being Americanized, and absorbing new techniques as they were developed in the United States. In the face of this trend, Urwick emphasized the importance of basic principles in social work practice - in other words, a philosophy of social work.65 In 1929, in a letter to Miss H.M. Kelly of the Charity Organization Society in London, England, Urwick complained that there was too much concentration in Canada on casework tech-

4O A Poetics of Social Work

nique. According to Urwick, the focus on technique meant that social workers were practising without considering underlying principles: 'even the best workers are losing any vision of the wider social facts of their work and the possibility of putting prevention before treatment.'66 The Rev. J.C. Pringle, secretary to the London Charity Organization Society, observed a similar tendency among British social workers. Pringle suggested that in Britain the issues of social work and the underlying principles of casework were obscured by the need to get cases through committee. He suggested that caseloads had to be limited at intake so that it was not so difficult for social workers to maintain an effective standard of casework. In Britain, committees were increasingly made up of representatives of agencies that were more interested in meeting immediate needs than in 'the possibilities of constructive work/67 According to Urwick, social work method was necessarily subjective. He argued that the critical causes of social change lay within individuals and groups, and therefore the causes could not be abstracted from humanity. To seek causes outside of the dynamic of human life was to deny vitality and to deaden the subject of discussion. Subjectivity in social work practice allowed the social worker to be open to the other's essence. Without the essence of the individual's nature, which gave meaning to the person, there would be 'no meaning in relation to the social process.'68 Urwick felt that the social worker's intervention could only be as strong as his or her ability to be open to dialogue. Dialogue was not really logical in nature but instead emotional. It was important for the social worker to experience feeling, since it was the dominant element in the process of social change. Discussion between the worker and the client was vital, since it enlarged both parties' experience and clarified the attempt to co-ordinate experience with fundamental shared values. Discussion also led to clarification of purposes and to the congruence of practice with those emerging purposes.69 The process of change was ongoing and was influenced by interaction between the client and the worker. This approach to practice was open to dianoia and nous as well as logismos. In his own practice, Urwick structured interactions so that he too could learn through dialogue and be open to the truths of others. In 1930 he accepted an invitation from Professor Bott of the University of Toronto's Department of Psychology to address the Graduate Journal

Social Thought of Edward Johns Urwick 41

Club on the topic 'Is Social Work a Science?' He refused, however, to 'lay down the law' by giving a formal address. Rather, he chose to 'test some of my critical and revolutionary ideas by hurling them at your heads and getting your uncompromising criticism.'70 George Mooney, assistant director of the Montreal Metropolitan Commission, Department of Planning and Research, in 1937 invited Urwick to present a formal paper to the Ottawa Planning and Housing Conference.71 Urwick, in reply, suggested that since there were two other speakers in the session, it would be monotonous to present a formal paper. His response, that he would rather be the third speaker and respond to what had been said,72 suggested his desire to be in dialogue rather than to lecture the participants. As a member of the Housing Centre board during the Depression, he showed that he valued the direct experience of social work practitioners and that he was interested in learning from that experience. He encouraged Housing Centre members to attend a meeting of social workers who wanted to discuss their involvement in housing issues. He was certain that the meeting would be beneficial to both the centre members and the social workers, since they could help one another to understand the housing situation and could also work together on future plans.73 Dialogue was significant to Urwick because it was congruent with a vital society in which everyone was engaged in defining the social ideal. In 1936, Urwick expressed concern that social workers were becoming too oligarchic, even fascistic, in their delivery of service. He suggested that this could be corrected by involving clients as equal allies within social work tasks. It was incumbent upon social workers to be open to possible new thoughts that might come up during consultations with those who were benefiting from social work services: 'The best board with which I have ever worked had among its most valued members some of the former beneficiaries of the agency as well as most of the professional staff; and all were on an equality. I know no surer way of getting rid of the odious taint of patronage which still clings to much of our welfare work.' In a vital society, the resources of clients would be recognized as contributing to 'the sum of knowledge and experience.'74 In spite of Urwick's interest in engagement and dialogue, he became alienated from alumni, faculty, and some students because of his uncompromising position against social science and professionalization. Sara Burke has argued that Urwick's suspicion of materialistic

42 A Poetics of Social Work

tendencies and his promotion of principled volunteers conflicted with a desire among some social workers to claim professional status that would help establish them in Canada's emerging bureaucratic welfare system.75 How, then, can we define the nature of social work practice in light of Urwick's understanding of human nature and social process? According to Urwick, the social work practitioner was to be interested, engaged, and subjective in his or her interventions. Social welfare practice was never to be defined by personal self-interest; rather, it was to focus on the good of the other. It was to be guided by philosophical principles and judged against an end point, the social good. Social work practice was to be dialogical so as to open it to the other person's whole experience and allow for reciprocity. Clearly, Urwick was an idealist, and his understanding of social interventions and social change was guided by an intellectual construct or idea.76 Burke has argued that the idealist philosophy based in Victorian thought was overly prescriptive in nature. By making intellectual thought central to an understanding of reality, academic males had trouble sorting what 'should be' from what actually exists socially. They constructed for themselves a type of moral authority that would define the true nature of a good society. Furthermore, the male academics' understanding that the essence of a political or social act or construct was in fact what it could be did not validate the work and thought of the many women who were the practitioners of social work. In fact, Burke argues that the male-dominated focus on broad moral principles helped devalue both the academic contribution and the social work casework of women.77 At the same time, Urwick's essentialist critique gave him a foundation from which to critique liberal democracy. He argued that 'spending both our powers and resources for the benefit of other people is the mark of a high civilization' and 'the bedrock of morality.' According to Urwick, 'community of feeling and experience, fellowship and sympathy, the will to share' were 'the essence of the moral life.' True virtue was marked by the desire to 'enjoy everything with others.'78 Furthermore, Urwick' thought that refusal to take action to rectify human needs had a meaning beyond the immediate situation. As he wrote to the Rev. Silcox of the Social Service Council in 1937, one effect of a do-nothing policy with respect to housing was the 'degeneration of values.'79 Urwick's philosophical and moral viewpoints also influenced his

Social Thought of Edward Johns Urwick 43

understanding of good social welfare and economic policy. He felt that in actions to guide social spending and economic growth during the Depression, the actualization of the concept of vitality was more important than the implementation of the notion of efficiency. He was skeptical of both public works projects and direct relief. He disparaged public works projects that focused on street widening to make the city 'a place to rush about in' and extravagant projects that were 'showy' but of limited social value.80 Public money spent on housing construction, in contrast, would contribute to community vitality based on home life. Housing was focused on peoples' vital interests, unlike relief measures, which were based solely on addressing immediate needs.81 He agreed that careful economy was necessary in light of the burden of debt, but he refused to believe that it compelled the state to stop spending on vital projects.82 In fact, he argued about housing that society could not wait for increased efficiency in the housing sector. A delay for the sake of improved building methods, the elimination of waste, and the guarantee of cheaper dwellings would 'mean waiting forever.' Urgent concern for humanity and the need to avoid moral degeneration, as well as sound economics, were the foundations of Urwick's call for a national housing program83 and his many direct interventions in the housing sector.84 Every action Urwick took was imbued with moral significance and philosophical intention. He knew well how important it was to be practically involved in social welfare and welfare administration.85 Urwick was 'the walking embodiment of the good life of which he had written as a philosopher.'86 His colleagues acknowledged that 'it was not alone what he did, but how he did it that counted, for he had such qualities of personal kindliness, of integrity, of industry, of youthful enthusiasm, of vitality and idealism as to inspire affection and respect on the part of those who came to know him.'87 He was remembered best for 'his respect for the person he was dealing with, the steady courtesy that always enhanced one's own self-respect. This was a liberating force.'88 His practice, based on philosophical principles, had profoundly influenced his associates. Harold Innis, political science professor and Urwick's successor as director of the University of Toronto's Department of Political Economy, observed that 'there burned through those piercing eyes of his the life about which he wrote and told.'89 Innis went on to describe a man who was 'Inspired by Plato, he was one of those released from the

44 A Poetics of Social Work

cave who returned to those still in chains and tried to persuade them to see the light. His untiring zeal in the interest of social reform was shown on every hand. His life illustrated the ideals described in his work.'90 Urwick's community work and academic career - and also his personal manner, attitude, and thought - reflected deeply felt philosophical principles. His philosophy informed his everyday life and practice. Urwick voiced the absolute necessity of basing human affairs on a philosophical understanding of the world. According to Urwick, social science could help us understand only the external and structural features of human life. Social science was revered by academics and social workers as the most correct truth, but for Urwick it was only a partial truth.91 Social science's epistemology was suspect, according to him, since the philosopher's central moral principle was the impassioned search for truth and the distrust of falsehood.92 Clearly, Urwick was troubled by the veneration of so incomplete a truth as social science. Many of his contemporaries had mistaken the partial understanding of logismos for wisdom. He was concerned that social work philosophy not be subordinated to 'the politics and the science and the progress in which we believe.'93 Only through philosophy could the purposes and ends of the multitude of inviolable individuals who make up society be harmonized.94 The harmonizing of values and ideals among individuals in relationships marked by respect, reciprocity, and openness provided true hope for progress and social well-being. Fulfilment of this sort could only be accomplished in the province of nous as defined by Plato. How, then, do we understand Urwick's legacy at the University of Toronto? Sara Burke contends that Urwick's considerable influence had a 'paralysing influence on the development of both social work and sociology' at the university. His insistence on Victorian, valuebased approaches to social work did not allow for professional and practice developments that would situate social workers well for work within the burgeoning bureaucratic welfare state. Because of his resistance to sociology as a discipline, the university's sociology department was not founded until after his departure.95 Urwick can also be understood as an important link in a strong Canadian tradition based in British idealism - a tradition that helped distinguish Canadian from American academic life. His position was in resistance to the spread of liberal individualism, individualized technologies of intervention, and mechanistic understandings of culture and social structure. He was committed to one of the central

Social Thought of Edward Johns Urwick 45

projects of academia - the creation, critique, and refinement of the idea.96 Urwick knew that the technologies of professional practice and social science were not the development of thought along a progressive path to enlightenment. Rather, he understood these ways of knowing as contingent, arbitrary, and potentially dangerous. He was able to articulate the relationship between technologies of governance and political rationalities. Although he differed from contemporary postmodern authors in his insistence that the bedrock of his critique was principles and ideals that lay outside history, it could be argued he anticipated the postmodern critique of social sciences and the professions.97 He left the university gravely concerned about the direction of knowledge development within academia and the premises of social service.98 Urwick represented an older generation of academics concerned with drawing from historical ways of knowing; Dorothy Livesay was a member of a new generation of thinkers who distrusted traditional thought, seeing it as limited in focus. She shared with Urwick, however, a critique of science and technology that was derived from the humanities. Her thought is considered in the next chapter.

3

Dorothy Livesay's Politics of Engagement

There were politics at play in the hiring of Dorothy Livesay to fill a social work position with the Welfare Field Service of British Columbia in 1936. At the time, that province's director of social welfare, Harry Cassidy, was pleading with E.J. Urwick for help in pushing forward a plan for founding an institute of socio-economic research at the University of Toronto. Although Cassidy had entertained Livesay in his home,1 he thought it necessary to seek Urwick's opinion before hiring her. Livesay had been a pupil of Urwick's at the Department of Social Service.2 When Cassidy finally decided to hire her, he carefully explained to Urwick that a desperate need for trained social workers in British Columbia forced this decision on him.3 Certainly Cassidy did not want the hiring of Livesay, a woman and an activist, to be misinterpreted by Urwick, who had some influence on whether the research institute would be established. Cassidy did not want anything - and specifically the hiring of Livesay - to damage the institute's prospects. Cassidy hesitated to hire Livesay, fearing she would be indiscreet.4 Dorothy Livesay is best known in Canada as a great poet. In the field of Canadian social work, she has prominence as both a political activist and a social critic. She was the only one of the four people considered in this book to have been both a student of social work and a social worker during the Depression. This chapter analyses the epistemological basis of Livesay's social work practice. Livesay's approach to knowledge was based on the need to value and understand concrete experience. According to Livesay, social issues must always be understood through a dialectic between the ideal of social relations and the concrete and real lives of those in need. As part of this interpretation of social relations, the interpersonal or personal was intermingled with

Dorothy Livesay's Politics of Engagement 47

public roles. This approach enabled Livesay to draw from deeply personal interpretations as well as from structural analysis. Her desire to be direct and honest in her expression resulted in beautiful, modernist literature that expressed in clear and specific language the lives of others. Livesay's interpretation of the power relations within capitalism was the basis of her critique of how human existence is objectified by relations of domination. Her rejection of a dogmatic, objective starting point for understanding human affairs, coupled with the integration of both and micro and macro realities in the construction of knowledge, presages contemporary feminist authors. Livesay was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1909. Her mother was a devout and conservative Anglican; her father was agnostic and a selfdefined radical. The differing belief systems of her parents created a tension within her. Although Livesay was a devout Anglican as an adolescent, she eventually abandoned formal religion.5 The influence of her parents is evident in the best-known aspect of her life, her long career as a poet. She credited her parents for her interest and education in writing: her mother was a columnist for the Winnipeg Free Press, while her father wrote for the Western Associated Press news service and eventually became general manager of Canadian Press.6 The first of many volumes of Livesay's poetry, The Green Pitcher, was published in 1928; a second volume, Signposts, was published in 1932, when she was only twenty-four.7 In 1927, Livesay started a degree in modern languages at Trinity College. She studied during 1929 and 1930 at the University Aix Marseilles, France, and eventually graduated with a BA from the University of Toronto. In 1931-2 she was again in France, doing postgraduate work at the Sorbonne. In the fall of 1932 she returned to the University of Toronto to study for a diploma in social work. After graduating as a social worker, Livesay was a caseworker in 'Montreal in 1933 and 1934/ and in Englewood, New Jersey, in 1934 and 1935. She then moved to Vancouver, where she carried on direct social work practice until 1937. It was after her move to Vancouver that Cassidy wrote to Urwick to explain why he had hired Livesay. During the Depression, Livesay's contempt for the social inequities and class disparities bred by capitalism prompted her to engage in social activism in addition to narrowly defined casework. In Toronto in the early 19305, Livesay became an active member of the Communist Party and the Progressive Arts Club. During this time she also wrote for the communist magazine Masses. In 1936, after she moved to

48 A Poetics of Social Work

Vancouver, she continued to express her politics by sitting on the editorial board of New Frontiers, a socialist journal, as western editor and reporter.8 Most discussions of Livesay focus on her role as poet without consideration of her many other roles. Writers tend to treat her active, practical work as tangential to her poetry. Lee Briscoe Thompson, Livesay's biographer, argues that her social activism reinforced her literary work instead of diluting it: her roles as social worker and poet, or poet and activist, were mutually supportive.9 This is so true that it is difficult to focus on a single aspect of Dorothy Livesay's endeavours, as I try to do in this chapter. Her father encouraged her early on to seek out people with alternative perspectives, and likely introduced her to the notion of stepping beyond conventional gender roles to engage in public struggles. When Livesay characterized her father as a radical, she meant he was one who went to the root of questions and was always open to new ideas. Livesay noted that even though she attended a conservative private school during the day, her father took her to radical lectures at night. Livesay remembers as a teenager during the 19205 attending with her father a lecture by Emma Goldman at Toronto's Labour Temple. Livesay greatly admired Goldman, who was a feminist interested in birth control as well as an anarchist with an interest in Russian writers. She credits Goldman with helping her understand that women can be individuals, fighters, and social activists.10 Livesay's education in a private school in the 19205 may have prompted her to choose literature as a vehicle for social analysis. In her era, few scientific subjects were offered to girls. When she attended St Mildred's, a private girls' school run by Anglican sisters, 'the only bow to science was a weekly class of nature study in which we found and pressed flowers.'11 When she attended Glen Mawr, a girls' finishing school, science was not taught at all. Livesay was concerned when her friend, Gina, decided to pursue a medical career, since the finishing school had prepared them so poorly in the sciences.12 A look at the roots of Livesay's attitude toward science and technology helps us understand how she viewed social welfare during the Depression; it also suggests how she perceived political power relations. While she was attending the University Aix Marseilles, she lived in a pension, where she met a fellow resident called the General, whose scientific perspective offered a useful counterpoint to her own ideas about knowledge. The General was convinced that humanity's

Dorothy Livesay's Politics of Engagement 49

future would be based on a marriage between faith and science. According to the General, the scientist would take sole credit for any new developments in human well-being. Livesay suggested that the General's claims were like proclaiming an interest in a picture's technique and then claiming a full understanding of the picture based on that interest. Livesay saw the General's stance as obnoxious - as akin to claiming a truer perception of art than could be attained by any other beholder's vision. Livesay's journal entries from that time show she had difficulty with the arrogance of the General's position, which effectively silenced her.13 According to the General, Christ was the first man of life and the Truth among chaos, falsehood, and death. Since Christ was a man, it followed that all of man's material creations, such as machinery, were sacred. The object of Christ's crucifixion was to show men truth and life.14 Science was the guiding force in this new era for humanity and would eventually lead to the elimination of war. The General argued, furthermore, that the scientific advancements during the 19205 had taken humanity further in a decade than it had gone for centuries previous. As science helped men to become more and more knowledgeable, they were also becoming increasingly moral. According to the man of science, intelligence, morality, and scientific knowledge reinforced one another.15 In reaction to the General's ideas, Livesay wrote in her diary that the source of morality is the very act of creation itself. In other words, morality is a product of creation, not of scientific knowledge about that creation. She contended that the artist explained men and women to themselves and therefore was involved in generating knowledge. According to Livesay, the artist was a co-creator of nature and wisdom. For her, creation was 'the birth of consciousness.' For example, she claimed that when she reviewed her own journal entries, she remembered each moment and her feeling at the point of creation; even the least successful entry had a meaning that had become rooted within her. The act of creation was an intimate need that was satisfied regardless of what anyone else thought.16 Livesay found nothing new in the General's thought and felt that his stance 'is still the savage seeking an explanation of himself through fable.'17 In turn, the General ridiculed Livesay's depiction of the artist's role as a co-creator of knowledge and morality. In response, she wrote, 'Curious to belong to the garbage heap in his mind.'18 Livesay agreed with the General that the expression of will and

5O A Poetics of Social Work

thought was of paramount importance. According to Livesay, however, the product of thought was as likely to be art as science.19 In a 1929 journal entry, she ruminated about the strength of nature relative to that of humanity; for her, it was not a pathetic fallacy to say that nature imposed its mood on humans. And she wondered how one could sincerely believe that humans could impose their mood on nature.20 After Livesay moved to Vancouver, she wrote the short story 'A Sojourn En Pension/ in which she described the social context of her discussion with the General. The man of science is living among French Roman Catholic women of resolute faith. She wrote: 'Whatever he [the General] saw, I realized dimly, it was something not vouchsafed to me. And on the other side of the mountains Mademoiselles view of life was also beyond my grasp/ Livesay ended the story with the comment that for the first time she felt totally alien in France.21 The General is a male in an all-female household. She blames him not just for disrupting but also for destroying the lives of the women there with his thoughts and unwavering views.22 Livesay understood that power, knowledge, and gender are interrelated in the name of science. She observed a similar relationship between power and knowledge within economic, technological, and social relations. Her observations were based on an epistemological frame that respected personal consciousness and emotional engagement. Involvement in social work was a complicated affair for Livesay. Her decision to become a social worker was largely based on her need to find work, but it was also a product of her broad commitment to social welfare. In a series of letters to her father from France in 1932, Livesay expressed anxiety about returning to Canada without a job.23 She wanted to have 'some real work to do and no more sitting around/24 Because 30 per cent of her age group was unemployed in the early 19305, she gave up her ambition to become a university lecturer in French and Italian. Enrolment in the social work program would make it easier for her to find a job.25 Later in life, Livesay complained that earning her living through social work consumed all her energy and time, leaving her few resources for the creative act of writing.26 Yet Livesay was committed to a social work career. During her sojourn in France at the end of the 19203, she wrote in her diary: 'What I most want to do with my life - and so, the desire I whisper only to myself - is first to teach in a country school preferably in the West; and

Dorothy Livesay's Politics of Engagement 51

second to do strictly practical work among the poor of the city/27 In her journal entries of the 19705 about her experiences during the Depression, she talks about her genuine 19305 commitment to both 'the career of social work and to the communist interpretation of capitalist society/28 Often, Livesay found unequivocal support for her poetic endeavours yet found her social service work challenged by others. Particularly among male confidants, she encountered more support for her poetry than for her practical work. Joe Wallace, a working class socialist poet, wrote regularly from 1936 to 1938 for the communist papers The Worker and the Daily Clarion.29 In 1935 correspondence, he asked Livesay about her social service work, but encouraged her to be a poet above all else. He reminded her that the revolutionary movement needed literary agents and agitators. According to Wallace, Livesay's literary talents enabled her to reach many more people 'than a dozen of us/30 William Lawson, editor of New Frontiers, agreed with her in 1937 correspondence that it was a shame for her to waste her time in social service.31 Her father complained that she had no right to bury her poetic gift under practical struggles for social betterment.32 Yet the most severe attack on her social service work came in 1936 from her future husband, Duncan Macnair, who disdained relief administration because of its imperialistic character. He wrote to Livesay in 1936: 'I deplore your acquisition of a new job ... You were wise in your generation when you studied social service! Bright young Canada! Three Hearty British Cheers. Rah! Rah! Rah!! And a tiger Rah! Hell!'33 Probably it was her insistence that real experience is the most valuable source of knowledge that allowed her to be comfortable in the roles of poet and communist agitator on the one hand, and social worker on the other. She wrote: 'What I call experience today is the suffering of millions of human beings, the conflict around the conception of liberty/ She included in her definition of 'absolutely concrete experience' the disconcerting callousness and indifference of some people toward those who were suffering. According to Livesay, vital questions such as whether there is an objective social truth could not be answered through abstract ideas for reform but only through concrete experience.34 In contrast to Urwick's insistence that the ideal must be defined ahead of practice, Livesay insisted on a dialectic between concrete lived relations and the ideal. Idealism abstracted from real relations was futile and decadent. Furthermore, Livesay's sense of engagement was not expressed

52 A Poetics of Social Work

solely through political causes or through her roles as social worker and poet. She explained that in England the word 'committed' had a political connotation during the Depression - a 'committed' person spoke for a particular political party. In France, however, the word 'engagement' had a broader connotation. In 1932, as a student in Paris, she admired the work of Henri Barbusse, who argued that the role of the writer is to illustrate how to live plainly and with dignity. According to Barbusse, the writer should avoid tackling the incurable ills of human nature and instead manifest optimism by focusing on curable ills within the social order. She also appreciated Jean-Paul Sartre's willingness to live with contradictions and to fight for both the individual and the socialist revolution.35 While Livesay was in Paris in the early 19305, she witnessed demonstrations against unemployment, against war, and against the fascist practices of the police. These demonstrations heightened her already strong interest in social issues and influenced her decision to study social work.36 In notes written during the 19705, she remembered especially a lengthy parade to the burial ground of the Paris Commune martyrs. At intervals along the parade route, young women and men in blue shirts shouted slogans, sang songs, and enacted documentary dramas of political events. It was with the philosophical stance of an engaged individual that Livesay returned to Canada to put her ideas into practice.37 Certainly, Livesay's experiences as a social worker and activist were a source for her writing. In correspondence to Duncan Macnair in 1936, she complained that the demands of working for a living were detracting from her writing;38 yet her job was also clearly a source of creativity. In retrospect, Livesay felt that writers of the Depression era benefited from working at other jobs: employment obliged the writer to 'step out of an ivory tower.' Confrontation with distress and misery, which were so widespread during the Depression, could only strengthen a writer's work.39 In fact, she was motivated to become a social worker by the desire to see how the poor were living and what the experience of unemployment was like.40 As a social work apprentice in Montreal, she came face to face with families who were not receiving relief. She learned about the desperation and complete powerlessness of the unemployed who were evicted from their homes and lived on the most meagre amount of food.41 And as a social worker in New Jersey, she was repulsed by the overt racism experienced by black Americans.42

Dorothy Livesay's Politics of Engagement 53

Social work experience informed her writing; contact with people in need shaped her activism; and her activism affected her social work. She explained in autobiographical notes that when she returned to Toronto from Montreal and New Jersey, she poured all her feelings and experience into her poetry.43 In the true spirit of the engagecl person, she did not keep the spheres of her life separate. Her direct experience with those in need was a source for her voice rather than material for her study. Livesay saw writing and practical experience as meaningful only when they were connected to social relations and social change. Both practical work and writing were suspect for Livesay unless approached with the proper sense of social commitment and political engagement. In a letter to her friend, Jean Morton, Livesay confessed that preoccupation with ego was uncomfortably familiar to her, and for this she despised herself. Livesay also thought that writing for the sake of writing was completely decadent and without purpose. The work of a writer without awareness of social relations was little more than an act of self-dramatization. She also cautioned Morton that a career was no more than 'a slogan of the nineteenth century feminists.' Livesay distrusted bourgeois introspection and felt that only through action defined by social consciousness could the pitfalls of the bourgeois world view be avoided. According to Livesay, 'the art of the present and the future must be functional, must be aware of social movements.'44 Livesay was also keenly aware of the constraining function of the social work role and state policy. In the poem 'Depression Suite/ the person in need seems to thrive in spite of helping structures rather than because of them: Even although the skimpy relief investigator Pressed by you in the hall, afraid of a hot glance And heard her thinking aloud: 'Why don't they get jobs?' You're alive, still, alive! Even although the woman you love is the one you can't marry You can fornicate and besmirch love, but never make it secure (That's not allowed by the government) You are standing erect and alive.45

Her exposure in Montreal to the plight of individuals and families prompted her to join the unemployed at demonstrations for work and

54 A Poetics of Social Work

wages and against repressive tactics such as political arrests by the Quebec government. She saw her writing as supporting the struggles of the families she worked with and of her fellow demonstrators.46 Her writing was socially relevant work, and a form of advocacy. Her next posting, in New Jersey, occurred at a time when Franklin Roosevelt was promoting social change and creating work through state programs such as the National Recovery Administration and Public Works Administration. Having been exposed to fear, hate, and trouble caused by insecurity, she regarded these initiatives as valiant. It was only natural to her that her experiences of upheaval and resolute action became part of her thoughts, and therefore her writing.47 The communist interpretation of North America helped Livesay understand the limits of social service during the Depression chaos. As an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, she sought out interpretations of social reality that could not be found in the classroom. For instance, she attended evening meetings at the home of economics professor Dr Van Der Spengel, who had been to the Soviet Union and who drew on that experience to lead discussions about socialism.48 On her return from the Sorbonne, she became an avid communist while holding down a job as a social worker. In the summer of 1932 she joined the Young Communist League; in 1933 she was promoted to membership in the Communist Party.49 At the height of its success the Young Communist League had 1,700 Canadian members, most of them in the major cities - Vancouver, Montreal, Winnipeg, and Toronto.50 While a caseworker in New Jersey, Livesay attended a class in Marxism-Leninism at the Workers' School in New York City.51 The Canadian Communist Party that Livesay joined was revolutionary in its stance. After the stock market crash of 1929, party members in Canada and around the world were convinced that a worldwide revolution was at hand. The contradictory forces of capitalism had created economic and social chaos. The Communist Party of Canada followed the Communist International, which was controlled by Stalin. Between 1928 to 1934 the party focused on 'class against class/ Some communists distrusted and demonized social democratic parties for their support of the capitalist ethos. Avid communists considered social democrats to be 'social fascists/52 World events and the threat of fascism led to a change in the party's official line: by 1934 it was favouring a popular front among left-leaning political parties.53 The Progressive Arts Club was founded in 1931 by a group of artists

Dorothy Livesay's Politics of Engagement 55

and writers associated with the Communist Party.54 Club members were firmly committed to the Communist Party line; they also were rebelling against their parents' conservative attitudes.55 Livesay became a member of the Progressive Arts Club with her university friends Ross Parmenter, Jocelyn Moore, Stanley Ryerson, Margaret Fairley, 'Jim' Watts, and Lons Lawson, Watts's husband.56 The objective of the club was to protest the economic conditions of the Depression era through the creation of militant, working class art. The club had a Workers' Experimental Theatre, a visual artists group, and a literary section. Between 1932 and 1934, it also published the journal Masses.57 In the club, Livesay belonged to the group that wrote agitational propaganda (agitprop)58 in the form of choral speeches or dramas.59 She also helped create proletarian literature (prolit) for Masses. These genres, agitprop and prolit, are unique to the socialist enterprise. Agitprop usually consisted of explicitly political short sketches, often performed by unemployed workers, that could be performed in theatres, on picket lines, or in the street. The poetry and short fiction of prolit was purposefully realistic and contemporary and was written for political purposes.60 As a devotee of left-wing politics in Toronto, Livesay was a participant in an erudite and cosmopolitan leftist community. The members of this community were well aware of the tensions among communists at the international level. In 1933 at the home of Harry Cassidy, a professor in the Department of Social Service at the time, she met the poet Earle Birney, who was studying English literature at the University of Toronto. Livesay recalls that Cassidy's guests were not so much concerned with literature as with employment opportunities, economics, and Marxism. Livesay, a Stalinist, got into a heated discussion with Birney, a Trotskyist, over the refusal of the German Communist Party to join with German socialists to try to defeat Hitler. Livesay was put in the position of having to defend this refusal, which Trotsky had predicted would mean the destruction of the left in Germany.61 As a writer of poetry,62 fiction,63 agitprop,64 and polemical nonfiction,65 Livesay felt herself part of an international political and economic movement that included artists, poets, and professionals. It was an idealistic movement engaged in building a struggle against fascism and war as well as against the economic injustices experienced by working people.66 While this international movement was idealistic, it was also based on a class interpretation of society and on the real

56 A Poetics of Social Work

struggles between the classes. Intellectuals and members of the bourgeoisie were welcome to participate, but according to communist theory they were not to act as leaders of the revolution.67 In the early 19305, in the wake of the capitalist system's collapse, the Soviet Union's planned economy and its other social and economic experiments were seen as achievements, as well as symbols of a hopeful alternative.68 A few years later, the Spanish Civil War would become the focus of the fight against fascism. A number of writers and intellectuals around the world, including Britain's George Orwell, journeyed to Spain to fight alongside the Republican forces.69 While living in the United States, Livesay discovered a bookstore in New York's Greenwich Village that carried the works of the British poets W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and C. Day Lewis.70 This group of writers had become politically engaged as a result of the social and economic chaos of the 19305. They were certain that the decline in bourgeois culture was creating the conditions for revolution. They were thrown into the antifascist cause through their commitment to freedom in their personal lives and in their written expression. In the face of the growing economic crisis, they felt compelled to take sides politically with Marxists, socialists, and communists.71 Spender would remember that during the 19205 his British colleagues, who included W.H. Auden, Day Lewis, Christopher Isherwood, and Archibald MacNeice, valorized literary modernists such as Henry James, James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot. They shared the belief with these older authors that Western civilization was in decline. Their commitment to modernist expression was based on a keen awareness of the troubling nature of Western civilization.72 The poetry was refreshing to Livesay, since it was free of Marxist dogmatism yet revolutionary in tone. She also valued the passion and lyricism in the British poets' work. These authors provided her with a sense of community.73 She found support in the work of these British poets, who 'were also aware of the terrifying conditions in the world, the need for change and who were not afraid to use that as subject matter for poetry.'74 The thinking of these authors was well suited to Livesay's amalgam of individualism, communal commitment, and social responsibility. In a letter to Duncan Macnair, she argued that individuals should strive to integrate poetry, which is personally lived, with a sense of the revolutionary movement.75 She believed that her Depression poetry represented her own amalgam; it was a poetry of both 'individual liberty and socialist revolution/ She felt that this personal

Dorothy Livesay's Politics of Engagement 57

synthesis made her writing suspect to people with a variety of different points of view.76 The British authors were concerned with personal expression and the nature of their selves as well as with social change. They were interested in being true to the 'inner law of our own nature' in terms of their manner of life, sexuality, and personal politics. 77 They did not separate their personal experience from international events. Spender, Livesay's contemporary, wrote that '[we] were terribly involved in events and oppressed by them, reacting to them at first enthusiastically and violently, later with difficulty and disgust/78 For many of Livesay's generation, there was no separation between the crimes of fascism and capitalism and their personal lives. Their personal lives were overtaken by public events.79 Spender recalled: 'Every morning I searched the newspapers for the German news. If I read of a fall in the German markets, or of some act which seemed to indicate that a spirit of defiance still existed in Germany, or even the arrest of an anti-Nazi, I felt an almost sobbing satisfaction. External things over which I had no control had usurped my own deepest personal life. So that my inner world became dependent on my outer one/80 Livesay approached the social circumstances of the Depression era with a similar sense of engagement - a type of emotional absorption in contemporary social issues. Livesay believed that since oppression within the capitalist system was continuous, so too must be the struggle against it. During her tenure as a social worker in Montreal, her father pointed out that she was being inconsistent by 'taking a philistine job while publicly writing against the system/81 She accused her father of 'blasphemous ignorance' for saying her life was marked by philistinism: 'If you think I enjoy working for my bread all day and my life all night; if you think the strain is easy, so be it/ She reminded her father of her commitment to social struggle and in particular to the Communist Party.82 Livesay herself had a commitment to work 'day and night/ Her personal and public struggle is summarized in the concluding stanza of 'Day and Night/ She explains: 'Perhaps we were just isolated "bourgeois intellectuals" but the impact of the times, the crises of social life, deeply moved us. The poetry was crying out/83 'Day and Night,' written in the middle of the Depression, is an indictment of the treatment of labourers in industrial North America. Throughout the poem, Livesay affirms the possibility of hope through work and struggle84 - a recipe she seems to have followed herself:

58 A Poetics of Social Work Day and night Night and day Till life is turned The other way!85

Much of Livesay's personal happiness in the 19305 came from working alongside people with the same perspective. Their common involvement in political struggle created a sense of oneness.86 As a student in Toronto girls' schools, she had few male friends; during the Depression, her activism became a source of friendships with men. Political struggle and personal love became intermingled for her. While in New Jersey, where she combined personal concerns with politics, a fellow communist cell member became her lover. Despite their physical intimacy, she still thought of him as a comrade rather than a lover.87 When she married Duncan Macnair in British Columbia in 1937, he was also her comrade in revolutionary struggle. The poem 'Comrade' ends with these lines: 'Sealed in struggle now, we are more close / Than if our bodies still were sealed in love.'88 Livesay's work during the Depression was as much concerned about one-to-one relationships as about social organization and power relations. This is one reason why her work never became doctrinaire.89 Lee Briscoe Thompson has argued that interpersonal relationships were always a dominant focus in Livesay's work.90 She had a particular concern for women's struggles, which demand a sense of both interpersonal and social relationships.91 Livesay's sense of passionate engagement was driven in part by her desire to be honest. As a child, she had been indoctrinated to be honest by her mother's relatives, particularly by her grandmother. Honesty was central to her world view and her interpretation of social work issues. Her drive to be honest was so great that she tried to be honest at all times, and any lapse would make her feel very guilty. Her sense of honesty dictated her response to the plight of others. Even as an adult, she felt guilty when she failed to help another person or group, as if failure to act was equivalent to a failure of faith.92 Her desire to be honest seems to have been the basis for many of her actions during the Depression. The strength of honesty and its gentle, natural quality is expressed in this Depression era poem: Your honesty Is a search light Small insects

Dorothy Livesay's Politics of Engagement 59 Trembling hares Cower and run Before it. A hungry lioness Scorn - but slink away. Only the young birch-tree by the roadside Sways all its loveliness towards you Rooted, and unperturbed.93

Her desire to reveal the plight of others in order to express the truth of the Depression era is evident in the following stanzas from 'Queen City': Shaped like a bugle My thoughts, swarming outwards In phalanx exultant Singing for these ones: For you, young lover Facing the chasm And plunging head downwards 'I had not the courage.' For you, girl crying For love had no wisdom No warm sleep, jobless No arms to build with For you, forerunner Outstripping darkness Your mind sharp as sunlight Piercing our shadows. For you, sea of faces Uniform, solemn Alert for the warning Whom hunger outpaces. Shaped like a bugle My thoughts split the framework

60 A Poetics of Social Work Of silence and weeping, Arise, and send singing This song to the sleeping.94

Again, her striving for honesty that identifies with and has faith in the disadvantaged is evident in the poem 'Canada to the Soviet Union': I believe in the beauty of your faces, brothers and sisters I receive the challenge from your eyes, and tremble with joy: Mine are restless millions, the women broken The furrowed faces, the struggle to live, to battle, Stamped on a child's thin body and her pale, old face Mine are the homeless, degenerater! Desperate young thieves, prostitutes Mine are the bread lines and the hostels -95

The honesty Livesay strove for in her practice and in her writing was never meant to be strictly objective. In 1929 she scribbled in her diary these words, by Virginia Woolf: Truth in social life is a very delicate instrument.'96 Woolf, a modernist feminist of an older generation, had difficulty understanding members of Livesay's generation, who wrote out of a sense of public duty and political necessity97; yet the beauty of Woolf's statement's prompted Livesay to comment on the need to explore Woolf's writing further.98 Livesay in fact loved to quote poet Emily Dickinson's aphorism: Tell the truth, but tell it slant/99 Livesay believed that clear communication and the improvement of social conditions are the main concerns of honest literature. Pamela Banting notes that when Livesay spoke of other writers' work, she stressed simplicity in language, a clear link between subject matter and ideas, a genuine connection to what was really happening, and, finally, a socially valuable meaning. She mistrusted communication based solely on aestheticism or obscurantism.100 For Livesay, cures for the aridity of bourgeois culture that were not based on social change or identification with the masses were suspect. She did not share the British poets' enthusiasm for T.S. Eliot; she felt that The Wasteland' invited escapism, since it suggested that social change could come about through spiritual rejuvenation. Livesay shared with Earle Birney a distrust of Eliot's obscure allusions and overly clever metaphysical imagery. Both felt that poets such as Eliot had abandoned communication with people in order to talk among themselves. In contrast, Livesay congratulated Birney on his ability to

Dorothy Livesay's Politics of Engagement 61

be both popular and a poet.101 Furthermore, as a communist she believed that formal religion was the people's opium, a narcotic that diverted their attention from their real needs.102 Livesay's concern with honesty, her tendency to associate honesty with others' needs, and her penchant for simple language placed her squarely within a Canadian modernist movement in poetry. During the 19205 and 19305 a struggle rose in Canadian literature between Victorian idealism and North American realism. Livesay took a swipe at the romantic tradition in Canada by noting that her poem 'Day and Night' was part of an important shift in Canadian poetry toward themes focused on 'living people rather than maple leaves.'103 By 1936, Canadian writers such as F.R. Scott, Leo Kennedy, E.J. Pratt, and Earle Birney were beginning to influence Canadian literature by moving toward modernism.104 In 1939, Birney grouped Livesay's poetry with the poetry of Leo Kennedy and the fiction of Morley Callaghan as examples of good Canadian literature. According to Birney, these authors advanced modernist poetry and fiction and moved it away from colonial romanticism.105 Livesay's modernist touch created some of the most vivid images we have of people's daily lives during the Depression. In the poem 'Montreal' she writes: Children are huddled four in a bed Till someone tosses a crust of bread Men stand restless on the street With bitter thoughts and idle feet ...106

In 'Unemployed,' she imagines the experience of the vagrant: The moon and the stars Have lit the dark As I slept on the ground In a city park. And morning has been Raw white and chill With an ache in the bones And my mind stock still. Yet there's a hunger

62 A Poetics of Social Work Worse than these: When the girl goes by Gay as you please And a fellow meets her And they smile deep That's a hunger Won't let me sleep. Makes me wonder If I'm just Like a lump Of trodden dust

She then contextualizes this experience within the industrial, modern, capitalistic world. The principle of efficiency and the objectification of labour create a false understanding of freedom: Sets me thinking Faster yet: Hurry, Mister Don't forget Thousands like us Lying in bed 'You have not heart' The boss once said: You've only arms And legs for me Time in, time out And then you're free.' Free: to stumble Down a street With sullen look And restless feet -107

Livesay evokes the poor's humanity in the following stanzas of 'Queen City/ The insecurity of the industrial age breeds fear:

Dorothy Livesay's Politics of Engagement

63

Fear of lying On the ground Underneath The feet that pound Fear of whirling With the wheel Crushed between The snapping steel Fear of being Without a bed Asking strangers For your bread.108

A portrait of an elderly man rifling for food among the bank towers is an emblem of the struggle for survival in a capitalistic technological system: It's a good food for the birds, the old man said Rifling a garbage can behind the Royal Bank. His round eyes gleaming under a battered hat He peered at dried out sandwiches, half-bitten crusts, And nervous twitches cut across his mouth. It's good food (where's the cop). Please lady, see I'm such a benefactor, though I'm poor (That can't be hid) - but see how kind I am! Believe, believe! It's good food for the birds ...109

Livesay's modernist literary focus led her to comment on technology on the basis of how it affected people's lives. She was especially concerned about the impact of technology and industrialization on working people's lives. Her penchant for direct experience and social relevance, and her concern about working people's vulnerability, undoubtedly prompted her to concentrate on technology's dehumanizing effects in the labourer's work environment. Her interest in the personal and social effects of technology is evident in some of her bestknown Depression era poems. 'Day and Night/ The Outrider,' and 'Depression Suite' all deal with themes related to mechanization and industrialization. These poems are less metaphysical discussions or

64 A Poetics of Social Work

abstract critiques of science than laments about the inhumane imposition of technology upon humans. She was curious about the impact of the machine age on people.110 Livesay wrote the poem 'Day and Night' after touring a steel mill in Newark, New Jersey. Newark, where she worked in the 19305 as a caseworker in a community centre, was a town of great steel mills with a high unemployment rate. The tour and discussions with the steel workers about their living conditions made a powerful, lasting impression on her.111 In this poem she links the tumult of the machines with black spirituals, the popular music of Cole Porter, and Marxist verse.112 Her central concern was with the desperate circumstances of people caught in the uncompromising conditions of a technological revolution.113 The introductory stanza to 'Day and Night' clearly expresses her critique of modernization and technological development: Dawn, red and angry, whistles loud and sends A geysered shaft of steam searching the air. Scream after scream announces that the churn Of life must move, the giant arm command. Men in a stream, a moving human belt Move into sockets, every one a bolt. The fun begins, a humming whirring drum Men do a dance in time to the machines.114

Throughout the poem, Livesay comments on how life's natural rhythms are distorted by the factory's mechanical rhythm.115 The themes of the poem, such as the subhuman treatment of workers, who are transformed into bolts within a larger human machine, and the distortion of the human dance by the imposed mechanical rhythms, are evident in this first stanza.116 'Case History' also speaks to the dehumanization of existence in the machine era: The clicking of machines hummed in our blood And pounded long before we could be eased Of it; before taut nerves relaxed, the head Grew cool, of the heart pumped as quietly As a creek flows between the swishing grass.117

Livesay understood the technological enterprise as a social, structural

Dorothy Livesay's Politics of Engagement 65

phenomenon. The imposition of factory rhythms on human lives is not accidental; rather, it is a product of power relations, as in these lines in 'Day and Night': We have ears Alert to seize A weakness In the foreman's ease We have eyes To look across The bosses' profit At our loss.118

In the hands of the owners of production, the factory or office becomes a place of subjugation. Efficiency becomes the imperative of the controlling class and is imposed on the working class. Fear of being seen as inefficient motivates and disciplines the worker, as depicted in these stanzas from 'Depression Suite,' which describes a stenographer at work: And faster faster, Sir, we have Your letter of the fifteenth instant How do you like my harmonies Better than jazz dear Sir, click click. Better than jazz and kisses are The pounding minutes, nickels, dimes The dancing whirling hours, the fear The keys, quick, quick, the fear!119

Social relations, aided by technology, operated to control workers' actions and thoughts within the capitalist system. According to Livesay, the dehumanization spawned by capitalist industrialization struck deep into peoples' constitutions.120 This process of dehumanization inheres in the mechanization process by creating an environment that totally controls the worker. In The Outrider,' an individual with a prophetic vision returns to rural Ontario in the 19305 and discovers the country changed by the impact of industrial life.121 He explains to his friends:

66 A Poetics of Social Work On lazier afternoons Deep in clover scent Neither beast nor I could dream What the speed-up meant. A thousand men go home And I a thousandth part Wedged in a work more sinister Than hitching a horse and cart. Dark because you're beaten By a boss's mind: A single move uneven turned Will set you in the wind. His mercy is a calculation Worse than a hurricane Weather you can grumble at But men can make you groan.122

These verses, which contrast the boss's technical calculation with the traditional notion of 'mercy/ evoke the sinister side of the technological revolution. Bureaucratic concern for economy also pervades the social service delivery system. In Livesay's story The Case Supervisor/ the caseworker's boss is caught between the bureaucracy's demands and the needs of the client. Her loyalty to the agency is also a matter of personal self-interest. The bureaucracy, with its focus on efficiency and economy, is unable to respond to the family's real needs, which are finally addressed when the caseworker uses her personal savings to buy fuel for the family.123 In her writing, Livesay concretely depicted personal struggle in the face of technological change. She wrote of real struggles in the office, the factory, and the social service agency. It might be said today that Livesay was exposing various manifestations of technique as defined by Ellul. Still, technique may be too abstract a concept to apply to the writings of Livesay, who was most interested in expressing experience directly. In 1937, Livesay was forced out of her job as a social worker with the British Columbia Welfare Field Service because it was illegal for a mar-

Dorothy Livesay's Politics of Engagement 67

ried woman to be employed in nursing, teaching, or social work. The central irony of Livesay's existence during the Depression did not escape her. She lamented that she had to give up after five years of useful work. She had worked for the unemployed, for women, and for peace, but now she had to leave the social work field. She became severely depressed when she no longer had an outlet for this interest and was herself unemployed.124 She was in the position she had most feared at the beginning of the Depression: she was without meaningful paid employment. Additionally, she had been cut off from her intellectual wellspring, which was direct experience, honestly expressed. For Livesay, truth did not need to be validated externally; the act of creation had its own inherent value. But to be fully meaningful, truth had to be concretized in social welfare concerns. According to Livesay, knowledge development and social action were valuable as long as they focused on the welfare of those who had been excluded from sharing in capitalism's benefits. Livesay's understanding of the world seems at first glance consistent with the argument that the social worker must understand how both the micro or personal and the macro or environmental aspects of a person's life influence that person's well-being. However, Livesay's thought does not make this dichotomous separation between micro and macro influences. Nor does Livesay separate the knower from the practice. Her understanding of social change and social movements based on struggle and work, personal engagement, lived experience, and personal relationships accomplishes a much fuller integration of personal responsibility and social change than the social scientific model. Her thought is also informed by personal consciousness, emotional engagement, and political commitment. Her world view can probably be better interpreted through the feminist principle that the personal is political.125 In this manner, she anticipated contemporary feminist thought. Livesay wrote in Right Hand/Left Hand: 'It is in the process of living that of working with and loving people - we learn the truth about life/126 In her continuing search for meaning amid the conditions of the Depression, she valued personal experience and relationships as much as she valued the theoretical interpretation of social conditions. For example, communism offered a vision for improving social conditions, but it also offered the opportunity to work with others towards the realization of that vision. Hope, for Livesay, was derived from the sense of engagement and involvement in a cause. A strength of Livesay's thought lay in her resolve to create an art

68 A Poetics of Social Work

and a practice based in her contemporary circumstances and worldly concerns. She shared this strength with other artists and activists both locally and internationally.127 Her contributions were not so much a blueprint for a social order; rather, she shared one of the great strengths of Marx as a thinker. He insisted that to find a way out of the contradictions of bourgeois capitalist modernism, we must face the modern condition squarely. She shared with him the imperative of stripping away religious, aesthetic, and sentimental veils. When thrown upon our own will within the throes of modernist social conditions, we will be thrown apart but may also develop new mutual bonds and identities.128 In this manner, Livesay represents an important tradition within the social work field - the tradition of the activist who is willing to take risks to experience social relations anew. The social scientific thought of Carl Dawson, director of the McGill social work school, contrasts sharply with Livesay's epistemology of engagement. In the next chapter I explore his argument for a rigorous social-scientific understanding of social welfare.

4

Social Science in a Secular Society: The Thought of Carl Addington Dawson

In 1930 the Canadian Conference on Social Work brought together Carl Dawson, director of McGill's social work school, E.J. Urwick, director of the University of Toronto's Department of Social Service, and Charlotte Whitton, executive director of the Canadian Council on Child and Family Welfare and lecturer at both McGill and the University of Toronto. In a session called 'Recruiting and Training Social Workers,' each presented a personal view of social work training requirements. Dawson argued for training in technique and research and also for the 'dignified control of professional entry' into the social work field of the type apparent in the medical and legal professions. Even as Dawson made the case for a six-year training period, he expressed grave doubts that resources would be available for such a program. He felt that inadequate funding, a shortage of facilities, and a lack of trained, established workers had created a 'vicious circle' for social work. At the same time, he lamented the lack of technical staff on the social work faculty.1 Indeed, the school at McGill closed the following year because of funding problems and also because social workers had not been recognized as intellectuals within a discipline worthy of the university setting. Carl Dawson was born in Augustine Cove, Prince Edward Island, in 1887 to a family of devout Baptists. In 1912, after graduating with a BA from Acadia College in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, he became a pastor for the Baptist Church. In 1914 he decided to attend the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, a school with a strong Baptist influence. Between 1915 and 1917, while a part-time student, Dawson was an assistant pastor in a Baptist parish in Chicago. In 1918 he took a leave from his studies to do war service with the Canadian contingent of the

70 A Poetics of Social Work

YMCA Transatlantic Staff. In 1919 he returned to his studies at the University of Chicago, taking sociology as an elective for his BD and as a major subject for his PhD. He received his BD in 1921 and his PhD in 1922. During his 1920-21 stint as a fellow in practical theology, he was a teaching assistant in the Department of Sociology; he then became head of the Sociology Department at Chicago's YMCA College.2 Dawson was later hired by McGill to build a sociology program and to act as director for the School for Social Workers.3 In the mid-i92Os he helped organize the Canadian Association of Social Workers and the annual Canadian Conference on Social and Health Work.4 He was a founding member of the Canadian Social Science Research Council5 and in 1941 became its chair.6 Dawson's works as an author include The Settlement of the Peace River Country: A Study of a Pioneer Area (1934), Group Settlement: Ethnic Communities in Western Canada (1936), and Pioneering in the Prairie Provinces (1940). These books were part of a series of studies about Canada's prairie regions called the 'Frontiers of Settlement' studies. In 1929 he co-authored a sociology textbook, Introduction to Sociology, with W.E. Gettys, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas. This chapter presents Carl Dawson's thought with specific reference to his championing of social science and sociology. Dawson developed his approach to knowledge during a time of controversy: the social work and sociology disciplines were contested forms of knowledge at McGill during the interwar years. He contributed to the development of the quasi-science of the ecological perspective on human affairs. For Dawson, the ecological perspective was a useful frame for understanding both social growth and human development. From the time of its founding, the social work school's status in the McGill academic community was tentative. Some members of McGill's faculty and administration considered the school marginal to the university's academic focus.7 The Department of Social Service, which was responsible for social worker training, had defined its purpose in pragmatic terms: the department's purpose was to train students in efficient social service administration.8 During the 19205, members of McGill's faculty and the administration argued that the university's primary role should be to research social problems rather than prepare students for practical work. In their view, research would better address the era's urgent social questions.9 As early as 1922, Howard Falk, director of the Department of Social Service, felt compelled to make a case to his colleagues for the school's

The Thought of Carl Addington Dawson 71

continued existence.10 In 1922, at a Committee of Management meeting, there was some pressure to close the Department of Social Service. Instead, the committee recommended integrating sociology into the arts faculty and linking it to the training of social workers.11 At a meeting attended by dean of arts Gordon Laing, principal Sir Arthur Currie, and Howard Falk, it was decided that the 'University is willing to appoint a Professor either as head of a new Department of Sociology in the Faculty of Arts or as an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics. This professor to be also the Director of the Social Service Department.'12 Dawson was hired by McGill in 1922 to develop a sociology department and to maintain the social workers' school. With his appointment, social work and sociology became linked at McGill. His hiring was not without controversy: the former director of the social work school, Howard Falk, felt that in hiring a sociologist, the administration was ignoring the growing need for teaching social work practice.13 Nevertheless, Dawson was expected to act both as director of the social work school and as professor of sociology. By 1926, Dawson was actively promoting his personal vision of social work at McGill. His insistence that social research be conducted within the social work field distinguished him from his predecessor, Howard Falk.14 Dawson felt that part of his mission was to dispel the notion that social work was a vocation for 'the untrained, the misfits and those with kind dispositions.' In his view, the Department of Social Service had moved beyond its pioneering stage, to a more mature stage as a department that could attract students with 'ambition, self confidence, efficiency and intelligence.'15 In spite of Dawson's new vision for social work, the social work school was to come under the administration's critical scrutiny. In 1930, Sir Arthur Currie announced a survey of McGill's departments. This survey suggests how knowledge was treated at McGill. In consultation with the deans, Currie appointed a committee within each faculty to pose questions about the university's future direction. He suggested a number of specific questions, including these: 'Are we training men in international outlook?'; Tn the friendly competition between Canadian universities, French as well as English, are we maintaining McGill's proud place?'; and 'Are we adjusting ourselves to all the new aspects of Canadian life?' He also asked university members to consider whether McGill was training leaders.16 It can be argued that struggle over the value of certain types of

72 A Poetics of Social Work

knowledge led to the closing of the McGill School for Social Workers. Minutes from meetings of the survey committee of the arts and science faculty show that the very nature of knowledge was being contested, particularly in the fields of social work and sociology. Gender was central to the arguments over which disciplines were valuable at the university. Currie set the tone by describing McGill as a 'fraternity, a corporation of loyal friends.'17 Some members of the committee felt that the rise in the number of women registered at McGill was creating problems. The Dean of Arts and Science, Ira MacKay, worried that the enlargement of the dormitories at Royal Victoria College, a women's college, was having a detrimental impact on the arts faculty. He was certain that the new dormitories would encourage more female students to attend McGill, and complained that the day would come when the faculty of arts 'would be regarded as a sort of headquarters for women/ An increase in the number of women in the arts faculty 'would be fatal/18 However, the survey committee did not agree with Dr Tait of the Department of Psychology, who recommended the complete abolition of co-education.19 It is no surprise that in this climate, schools that focused on practice and were dominated by women enjoyed little respect. Mr Stanley, a professor of Greek, felt that there was no place for female-dominated schools such as those for librarians and nurses. He complained that these schools were no more than 'side shows' and that they contributed to the community's criticism of the university as well as to its 'perilous condition/20 Dawson reported that during the 1929-30 academic year, there were twenty-seven female students and one male student in the McGill social work program.21 At the time of the committee's meetings, the School for Social Workers was a program for women. Clearly, the 'female' discipline of social work was being reevaluated for its academic merit at a time of strong gender bias. In fact, the committee singled out the School for Social Workers for condemnation. In March 1931, Dean MacKay argued that the School for Social Workers, which had no university requirements for admission, should not be McGill's responsibility, but rather should be housed within social agencies or taken over by city. In March 1931 he reported to the committee that Currie agreed with him that they could not afford the school any longer. One committee member suggested that the school of social work should be retooled as an extension program (i.e., should pay for itself); perhaps this was an effort to rescue the program. Committee members reached the conclusion,

The Thought of Carl Addington Dawson 73

however, that McGill's School for Social Workers should be eliminated.22 The committee also questioned the value of sociology at McGill. Dawson must have felt imperilled not only as director of the School for Social Workers but also as an associate professor of sociology. Dean MacKay defined English, the classics, mathematics, philosophy, and history as fundamental subjects within the expanding Faculty of Arts, and he deplored the tendency of students to be drawn to other subjects, such as sociology, political science, psychology, and economics, which were 'of current interest to the community, whether they be sound fundamental subjects of education or not.'23 MacKay wondered whether students were attracted to contemporary subject matter such as sociology because it required less discipline and work:24 I will be perfectly frank - there are some very interesting subjects that can be taught in a perfectly scientific way, there is room to break new ground in those subjects. I do not want to be too conservative, but the difficulty is that sociology goes abroad into other fields so much. For example the problem of immigration, the problem of population and settlement, hundreds of problems of that kind may be studied, but we cannot have a Department of Sociology that is going into all these problems.25

Some survey committee members argued that sociology was important26; even so, there was a consensus on the committee that sociology could not be given the same status as disciplines such as mathematics and history.27 Some committee members expressed alarm at the dramatic increase in the number of MA students in sociology. It was generally conceded that the discipline of sociology could be important in a student's final years if 'done conservatively and thoroughly in a scientific way.'28 In contrast to his attitude toward sociology, MacKay felt that mathematics was 'not only the key of the university but of the world.' According to him, mathematics was of greater importance than ever before and was wanted in every discipline.29 The trouble with sociology was that it had 'taken off by itself,' and that the work of sociology was being done in 'thin air.' Sociology, it was felt, should be done 'the proper way/ along with history, mathematics, and related subjects.30 Dawson was able to improve his personal situation at McGill in spite of the pressures on his chosen discipline. In June 1930 he was pro-

74 A Poetics of Social Work

moted from associate professor to professor of sociology.31 At the same time, new research opportunities were becoming available for him at McGill. During the winter and spring of 1930, the American-based Rockefeller Foundation was actively encouraging the development of social science by providing grant money to establish centres for training and research.32 Dawson attended a series of informal meetings along with people from other departments such as economics, psychology, education, public health, and philosophy. These meetings, held in Sir Arthur Currie's home, focused on the development of a research agenda that would involve a number of disciplines.33 In August 1931 the board of governors was told that the Rockefeller Foundation had awarded McGill University a major social research grant that would involve the departments of economics, sociology, psychology, and education for a five-year period.34 Dawson was a participant in this grant, which along with the 'Frontiers of Settlement' project in which he was involved, helped establish a research program at McGill.35 At the same time, Dawson's promise to seek financial support from federated charities to continue the social work school's activities suggests that he accepted the marginal position of the school within McGill.36 In spite of these fund-seeking efforts, on 3 August 1931 the McGill board of governors unanimously approved Currie's recommendation to close the social work school. Currie said 'that he was convinced that the university's contribution to the training of social workers should consist in teaching subjects related to social problems such as sociology, psychology and economics.'37 Marlene Shore argues in The Science of Social Redemption that the arrival of Dawson at McGill did not lead directly to the social work school's closure. As evidence of his commitment to the field, she points to Dawson's active involvement in the social work community. For example, he was active with national social work organizations and remained on the school's board even when it was forced to constitute itself as an independent organization in 1931.38 Yet Harry Hiller interprets the board's decision to disband the school in 1931 as the final step in social work's displacement at McGill by the discipline of sociology. He points out that McGill was the only Canadian university where social work was replaced by a sociology program. In fact, for many years McGill's department of sociology was the only sociology department in Canada.39 Certainly, the fortunes of sociology, social work, and social research

The Thought of Carl Addington Dawson 75

were linked at McGill. Dawson, as sociology professor and director of the social work school, was contending with strong biases within the university community against women students and applied knowledge. At the same time, his favoured field of sociology was often characterized as too expansive and vague, and as lacking the discipline, rigour, and focus of science and the fundamental humanities. Despite the tensions, Dawson was committed to the development of the discipline of sociology and the improvement of social research in Canadian academia.40 In the face of criticism at McGill, he continued to develop his science of social structures. He based his understanding of social forces, social science, and social work on the developing field of human ecology. Dawson's science of human affairs was based on an ecological understanding of the social structure.41 Human ecology, developed at the University of Chicago, was based on concepts borrowed from biology. Ecology's focus was on individual organisms and on how those organisms related to their environment. Ecologists focused on how organisms adjusted to their environment and how that adjustment affected the distribution of plant and animal communities. The ecological perspective not only offered a descriptive framework for biologists, but also helped describe and explain the processes that influence a community's structure and change.42 In human affairs, the ecological approach to social change provided a frame for understanding technological advances and social restructuring during the 19205 and 19305. In the ecological approach, technological trends in communication, transportation, and construction were assumed to be part of natural urban growth.43 It was also assumed that the spatial distribution of people and their institutions was defined by broader environmental forces such as communication, transportation, land values, and resource bases.44 Rapid changes in communication and transportation marked the interwar years. Dominant centres within regions grew as a result of these developments. This community development process was assumed to be natural. The differentiation of regions, the distribution of institutions within regions, and the complex integration of institutional units were all influenced by the dominant centres. In fact, Dawson likened social organization to a bodily organ whose parts were 'coordinated and controlled by means of the specialized and central cerebral cortex.'45 It is interesting that Dawson did not define war, government control, and economic depressions as natural to the process of social development,

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but instead depicted them as external influences that retarded a community's movement to stability.46 The growth of cities and regions, like the spatial organization of people, was thought to be an evolutionary process. Human ecology was based on the central concept of plant ecology, that is, that 'higher life forms succeeded the lower ones by pushing the existing population out of an area and forcing it to settle in a zone on the rim of its original habitat.'47 Concepts central to the ecological approach to human affairs include competitive co-operation, dominance, and succession.48 Competitive selection was the process that determined the spatial distribution of humans and institutions. According to Dawson, competitive forces reach an equilibrium when symbiosis has occurred. In the city, for example, 'natural areas' specialized by function were defined; in other words, differing parts of the city were inhabited by differing 'types' of humans. The process of sorting the human communities, and the resultant equilibrium at the point of symbiosis, were thought to occur through forces as impersonal as the living conditions for plants. Due to the 'intentional' nature of human beings, however, divisions of human labour were more dynamic and ever changing.49 The ecological concept of social development was congruent with a liberal focus on individualism, and assumed a progressive development of human relations. All the while, it claimed a scientific basis for understanding human affairs. For example, in his 1934 study of the Peace River District, Dawson conceptualized community development as a Darwinian process in which the T^est and brightest' were associated with more advanced stages of development. Dawson defined a series of stages in an agricultural region's development. The pioneer area evolved from outpost settlements, through isolated agricultural settlements, to the settlements' integration, and finally to a period of centralization that allowed for regional autonomy.50 According to Dawson, the natural trend in Peace River was toward 'true sons of the soil' who had a sense of husbandry and were 'truly drawn to the life on the land.'51 The final stage of social development was preferred, since at that stage a region became autonomous and independent. Furthermore, the settlement process, which was continuous and progressive, was influenced by developing world markets. Each development stage was assumed to be briefer than the previous one, because the region's development accelerated as it became increasingly accessible to world markets.52 In his study of the Peace River District, Dawson assumed

The Thought of Carl Addington Dawson 77

that the western regions' best accommodation to the future lay in creating metropolitan areas of dominance. He equated centralization with mature regional development. In such an arrangement, the dominant centre was linked to a constellation of subsidiary centres. Once a region had reached this stage of social organization, it 'settles down to its appropriate tasks with a minimum of trial and error.'53 According to Dawson, the natural development of western Canada's frontier regions was toward a dominance of regions by metropolitan centres, which was made possible by transportation technology. The railway created greater social stability through its impact on how population and institutions were distributed. The increasing concentration of population in metropolitan centres led to more complex economies. The immigration of new occupational and ethnic groups to the region strengthened the social structure.54 The development of the central city within a central region marked a district's change from a physiographic region to an economic region. The central city took the leading role in the hinterland's social and economic relations. The centre was vitally important since it was the focus for transportation and communication systems. Key social institutions, such as banks and railway and telegraph head offices, were developed along with enterprises that allowed the region's products to enter world markets.55 The metropolitan centre's dominant position was important, since it sped the arrival of new information and transportation technologies and heralded an advanced regional economy. The increasing speed of development and change was congruent with the increasingly efficient ordering of human relations. At the same time, centres of dominance were valued for the advanced social relations inherent in their development. Robert Park, a member of the Chicago school of human ecology, argued that ecological organization influenced a community's occupational patterns, which in turn affected its cultural and political organization.56 In 1929, Carl Dawson and Warner Gettys wrote an introductory sociology textbook that explained that the distance between individuals and the barriers between groups were lessened within dominant centres because relations were structured in a market context. The marketplace facilitated 'numerous, impersonal and free social relations.' Residents from settlement's fringe were drawn into the modern age, since they were forced to socialize with people in the dominant centres in order to take advantage of specialized services.57

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In the advanced stages of social development, adjustment was made to the 'universal tendency of social life to become more formal and selective as a district matures.' In fact, a social life of increasing complexity and more impersonal social interaction was inevitable, according to Dawson.58 If a person could keep pace with social change, the loss of some social values would be compensated for by other features such as 'the constancy of a more extensive social life.'59 Dawson argued that the centralization process in the agricultural district bred social relations that maximized both economic and social efficiency.60 Specialization by function was to be promoted, since a division of labour was required if a group was to act most efficiently. A specialization of particular concern was that of leadership expertise. According to Dawson and Gettys, the leader should be 'one man (who) shall exercise the highest leadership as director, executive or administrator.'61 In centres of dominance, expert leadership helped the population reach goals not only in specific spheres such as education, religion, and agriculture but also in the 'more general cultural life.'62 At this point the descriptive and explanatory functions of human ecology become prescriptive as well. In contrast to the expert male administrator, certain categories or types of people were associated with the earlier, less mature stages of social development. Some people lagged behind in adjusting to the increasingly modern social order. According to Dawson, their problem was poor adjustment to their environment. For example, in the initial stages of Peace River's development, outposts were considered unsuitable for white women and children. As a result of the 'absence of normal family life,' white men and aboriginal women became involved with each other. Dawson argued that 'progeny of mixed blood lose status with both white and native elements. They tend to become social misfits who make hazardous the evolution of moral sanction in the era of expanding settlement.'63 Bachelors were also misfits who were not well suited to the prairie region's natural development. In development's early stages, bachelors were useful because they filled the vacant spaces between families and helped fight back the wilderness. Dawson argued, however, that families would rather be surrounded by other families because they made a richer contribution to the community's social life. Bachelors, on the other hand, 'feel socially isolated and are suspicious of their neighbours. Others seldom leave their places except on business. Some are foreign born, a fact which adds to their isolation.'64

The Thought of Carl Addington Dawson 79

People who resisted the frontier's inevitable development were characterized as immature types who lacked knowledge of community relations; these people were found on the settlement's fringe. Dawson was suspicious, for example, of the settler who said, The pleasant, happy, careless days have changed since the railway has brought this district into closer competitive relationship with the outside world.' Dawson used a field investigator's research notes for this portrait of a 'ne'er do well': 'K. was found alone with his dog in his windowless bachelor cabin, "just thinking." He was thinking that he would be content with a small amount of cleared and broken land. He would not farm extensively like many others in the district. He just wanted enough to keep him going comfortably.' According to Dawson, these people were resisting the constraints and opportunities of civilization brought to them by technological developments such as the railway and communications.65 A balanced and complete social life would only be achieved when the appropriate spatial distribution of humans was attained through the process of competitive selection.66 According to Dawson, the basic distribution of population and economic structures defined social organization. Indigenous practices formed by religious affiliation and ethnicity should be modified to suit the more modern, efficient stages of development.67 The inevitable result of social development was the assimilation of ethnic groups by the broader culture. Assimilation was an unplanned consequence of external forces, which tended to eliminate distinctions among communities.68 For instance, innovations in communications and transportation helped break down social and physical distance.69 In his study of prairie settlement, Dawson characterized ethnic communities such as the Mennonites, Doukhobours, Mormons, and the German Catholics in Manitoba, as separatist communities. For him, the social organizations of these groups, based on a particular language, culture, and faith, amounted to a hindrance, because they aroused antagonism among those who were living a more secular and modern 'pattern of life.' He felt that attempts to incorporate ethnic communities into the prairies' broader economic and social structure had involved waste and delay. 'Mainstream' society's accommodation to these ethnic groups had placed a burden on all the inhabitants of the prairies.70 Dawson argued for a speedy accommodation to inevitable social forces. Such groups should be pressured to shift the configuration of their cultural and social relations.

8o A Poetics of Social Work

Supposedly natural forces such as specialization by function, and technological developments in communications and transport, as well as free market relations, were expected by Dawson to replace indigenous groups' sacred, sentimental ties. His world view created a tension between the culture of local ethnic groups and the 'natural' flow of history and social development.71 Although Dawson acknowledged that the stability of some ethnic communities had contributed to the prairies' development, he also perceived loyalties based on language, nationality, and religion as cumbersome and a hindrance to development.72 The ecological approach provided Dawson with a basis for understanding social development; it also helped him frame the social work role. The social worker dealt with the individual and his or her relationship to the environment. It was assumed that the person and the environment were continually adjusting to each other. According to Dawson, however, the greater adjustment was the individual's. Corporate society was based on tradition and organization and so had a momentum to which people must adjust. Social workers could help modify some social change, but for the most part their primary role was to help people adjust to natural social forces - that is, to the international market economy and a secular, modern, industrial economy.73 In some neighbourhoods, such as the slums of large American cities, the social worker shared responsibility with the police officer in maintaining social order. According to Dawson, social confusion reigned in the slums due to weakened family life and the lack of a larger social life for individuals. In the slums, social mores clashed because of the wide variety of cultural backgrounds and the concentration of 'defeated' and 'maladjusted' individuals in the neighbourhood. Dawson characterized slum residents' lives as 'sordid episodes.' The case records of the charity organizations and the 'police blotter' described the slum's cast of characters.74 According to Dawson, slum life was totally separate from conventional living. Vice, failure, and disease were the main causes of slum dwellers' marginalized existence. Other causes were the attitudes of the slum dwellers who chose to shut out the rest of the world. The social worker had to promote the adjustment of those who were psychopathic and maladjusted, and help bring poorly adjusted individuals in line with the conventional world.75 Situating the need for change in the individual and in marginalized

The Thought of Carl Addington Dawson 81

communities rather than in the social structure helps protect the myth of progressive social development. As social problems such as poverty grew increasingly obvious in slums during the Depression, ecological concepts such as competitive selection and succession helped maintain the myth of progress. Dawson had to believe that slum residents were deficient and in need of correction through cure, management, and control exercised by social workers. Had he placed the cause of problems elsewhere, he would have had to question the impact of social processes, such as the free market and new technologies, which served to frame his understanding of social forces; in other words, he would have had to resituate the locus of adjustment and social change. Dawson's theory of human ecology was congruent with the approach that measured human relations through scientific reductive means. Because he understood the social world in ecological terms, he believed in natural forces for change. Social science was a useful paradigm for measuring social relations and for claiming an understanding of 'natural' social forces. In this way, sociology could claim the rigour and discipline it required to earn a place among the other academic disciplines. Dawson never tired of promoting sociology and social work as scientific, research-based disciplines.76 Shore suggests that Dawson's understanding of social research 'may have accorded with the philosophy of science and efficiency that had attained such popularity at McGill in the aftermath of the First World War, but there was at the time little understanding in Canada what social research entailed.'77 The scientific approach was well suited to the ecological understanding of society. Scientific inquiry was the best means for determining the natural trends that were the basis of settlement. The purpose of intervention and research by academics within the social process was to make settlement and social development conform to natural trends. In the Peace River District, for example, scientific study would aid the expeditious settlement of permanent residents with minimum waste.78 In Introduction to Sociology, Dawson and Gettys defined sociology as the scientific study of the human group focusing on 'the institutional behaviour and the processes and mechanisms related thereto.'79 Sociological inquiry was based on an objective approach to groups and involved exploring hypotheses through the use of concrete data. In this way, Dawson and Gettys saw sociology as proceeding along the lines of science.80 In 1923 Dawson described social science as an undeveloped physical science that was three hundred years behind in its

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development.81 According to Dawson, every institution and every sociological unit had a natural history that could be determined by analyzing concrete social data.82 Dawson and Gettys aspired to 'precision, objectivity and critical attitude' in method, since these qualities were the 'powerful stimuli to a scientific approach to social phenomena.' The first step in the sociological process involved reducing 'unique events to typical events which can be given a generalized description/ The second step was 'the locating of these types of experience in their natural sequence. This orderly arrangement of "type-events" in their series is known as classification.' The third step was the conceptual definition of a class named for the series. Its definition involves a hypothesis that 'explains the relations of typical events to each other in their natural sequence.'83 In short, the sociologist worked from concrete data collection guided by hypotheses to create abstractions in an effort to discover the 'timeless elements in social phenomena' and the universal aspects of human life.84 The ability to compose a science of the social group had been facilitated by secularization, a broader social phenomenon of the 19305, according to Dawson. He observed that secularization was the major trend in social change. Secularization meant the 'rise of objects and objectives which are mundane, calculable and utilitarian. Such objects are divested of emotion and involve points of view which reflect, in a measure, the impersonal detachment of science. Ritual ceremony and beliefs born of emotional urgency have not been eliminated by this great extension of secular modes of life, but the areas in which the former are effective are greatly circumscribed.'85 Among secularization's numerous social effects was the freeing of people from cultural constraints so that they could practise the detachment necessary for science. In the secularized world, the separation between social groups was decreasing; with the aid of new technologies such as the railway, distant communities were increasingly in contact with one another. Increased contact encouraged ecological processes that led to specialization and diversification, to the organization of communities into dominant and subsidiary locales, and to an increasing diversity of occupations. Contact with others with differing occupational backgrounds, belief systems, and customs allowed for greater flexibility in the 'regulation of life by custom.' Dawson thought that the new openness to various ways of living released people from subservience to particular practices and ideas.86 Within this social context, 'detached ideas of science' were free to

The Thought of Carl Addington Dawson 83

develop, according to Dawson. For example, the variety of community experiences and forms of community allowed for comparisons among both individuals and groups. As well, the variety of social relations allowed for controlled observation by the social scientist. The emergence of the scientific attitude and scientific methods was also supported by the rise of a money economy and the increasing complexity of communities. Devices for observation, measurement, buying, and selling were multiplied, the result being a 'kind of life which is calculating and impersonal/87 Dawson's views on social science influenced his thinking about social research and methodology. At his alma mater, the University of Chicago School of Sociology, research was perceived as necessary for understanding social institutions and social conditions.88 During the 19205 and 19305, Dawson clearly emphasized research over action as the solution to social problems.89 In a 1923 article, 'Research and Social Action/ he wrote that social problems tended to be beyond the limits of current knowledge and technique. He felt that this deficiency could be overcome by greater investment in social research as a way of defining intelligent social action.90 The research that Dawson envisioned was detached from practice. Dawson and Gettys saw the increased emphasis on research methodology as of primary importance in sociology. According to them, good sociological method avoided matters of ethics and policy; the sociologist should instead focus on the scientific aspects of culture.91 The promising results of natural science research were evidence enough to make Dawson value research that was abstracted from practical causes.92 He wrote that change should be based on facts about social life and on scientific tools that 'get at yet more fundamental facts/93 Social work facts and processes could be developed only through this sort of detachment from practical goals.94 Dawson argued that the social work profession would be better placed to provide solutions for social ills if it was defined by productivity and efficiency. Accordingly, social work knowledge should be based on concrete and definitive facts separate from practice.95 The scientific approach to research was congruent with a social work profession based on the values of productivity and efficiency. This definition of the social work profession was couched within the terms of the broader liberal, technological culture. That culture's most cherished values - productivity and efficiency - became the framework for the social work discipline.

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Dawson likened the social worker's function to that of an engineer. The social worker's tasks included the rehabilitation of families and 'disintegrated persons' and the readjustment of 'social machinery' that contributed to 'crippling of the weak.'96 For example, he felt that the study of families from the scientific and sociological perspective would contribute to a better understanding of the normal individual and encourage family stability.97 In this way, social science took on a normative cultural purpose. Sociology's scientific perspective offered the hope of stability to a society in flux. Dawson felt that the comprehension of social facts would help in creating 'a large measure of control made effective on the basis of scientific knowledge. The value of such knowledge in adjusting human beings and their institutions to new circumstances is at once apparent. Human affairs may prove to be much less haphazard and frustrative when we come to understand social facts and processes/98 Within the emerging urban centres, where individualization was pronounced, solidarity was no longer based on tradition and sentiment but on knowledge and technique, according to Dawson. Urban life's misfortunes such as poverty, vice, and family disintegration could be accounted for by the lag in the development of knowledge and technique as groups' traditional loyalties declined.99 Dawson's argument for a scientific approach to social work takes on an apologetic, future-oriented tone. His perception of the ideal is a community where efficient institutions create joy, contentment, and vigourous service. He wishes for so complete a scientific understanding of life that life can be controlled and directed in such a way that reform and cure become unnecessary.100 In a world where old social institutions were declining and modern society based on international markets was being shaped, the primary role for the social worker, according to Dawson, was to aid people in social adjustment. In cultures or neighbourhoods outside of convention, the social worker's function became one of control as well as adjustment. The social worker was to help shape individual and community responses to the impersonal, natural forces of social development. Dawson suggested that too much social work intervention had been based on values, on what ought to be, and on legislating what must be rather than on ascertaining what actually existed and what was possible. Dawson separated the world into dichotomies such as the subjec-

The Thought of Carl Addington Dawson 85

tive versus the objective, and the emotional versus the disinterested. He had a technological, liberal bias toward control and intervention. He supported a scientific approach that was reductionist in nature.101 He shared the optimism of liberal professionals at a time when society's future was being defined by efficient professional groups with a technical, scientific understanding of social change. Dawson seemed to view social work as an institution that needed to move away from its religious, culturally defined stance toward a specialized leadership role. This would mean moving it away from its value-oriented, sentimental roots toward the status of a specialized, objective discipline. The social work researcher operates amid a number of natural forces beyond the individual's control. For example, Dawson and Gettys defined the process of competitive selection, which is so central to the ecological understanding of human affairs, so that 'the interaction germane to this process is continuous, impersonal and largely unconscious.'102 For them, this social force was self-evident and beyond question. The process of defining natural and impersonal focus was compatible with the objective scientific approach to social research. It was as if researchers, by creating universalizing categories, were removing themselves from the vagaries of social workers' daily struggles. Ultimately, the social science of social work and sociology was prescriptive, arguing for the timeless qualities of social structure, and the natural qualities of social development, preferred social relations, and the personal nature of modern man. Dawson was concerned that loyalties, beliefs, and ethical structures not crowd the voice of the scientist. Charlotte Whitton shared with Dawson an interest in the promotion of science. She argued for the importance of social science and professionalism as aids in the modernizing of the social work field. Her understanding of social work and social science is significantly different from Dawson's approach. In the next chapter her interpretation of science and professional responsibility is explored.

5

A Scientific and Philanthropic Christian Community: The Philosophy of Charlotte Whitton

Charlotte Whitton was an active member of the social work academic community during the 19205 and 19305. She lectured in social work at both McGill University and the University of Toronto,1 and regularly presented papers at social work conferences. At the 1930 Canadian Conference on Social Work, on a panel that was chaired by Harry Cassidy and also included E.J. Urwick and Carl Dawson, she presented a paper about social workers' recruitment and training.2 By the mid-i93Os, Whitton was so influential in the field of social welfare that she acted as a social policy consultant to Prime Minister R.B. Bennett.3 Whitton had direct contact with Dawson and Urwick, and also knew Livesay's family. J.F.B. Livesay, Dorothy's father, wrote to Whitton when he left his Canadian Press position in 1939, lamenting his departure but looking forward to staying in touch with old friends such as Whitton. One can imagine how chagrined Dorothy would have been had she known that her father had written to Whitton telling her that he appreciated Very much the wonderful job you are doing.'4 Whitton's conservative approach to social welfare would surely have been in tension with Dorothy's communist interpretation of Canadian society. Charlotte Whitton was born in Renfrew, Ontario, in 1896. Her father was a merchant and caterer for lumber companies in northern Canada; her mother was the family caregiver. Her father was born a Methodist; her mother was a devout Roman Catholic. Charlotte chose to be confirmed an Anglican despite her mother's wish that she join the Catholic Church.5 Whitton received a BA from Queen's University in 1917 and began her public life working for the Social Service Council of Canada. She left that organization in 1922 to become director of the Canadian Wei-

The Philosophy of Charlotte Whitton 87 fare Council. In this role she became a major influence in Canadian child welfare. Whitton ended her social work career in 1941 when she retired from the council. Throughout the 19405 she continued working as lecturer, publicist, and journalist. For a time she was a commissioner of public welfare. In 1943 she wrote The Dawn of Ampler Life, a study on social security. In 1950 she started her second career as a politician, when she was elected mayor of Ottawa.6 This chapter outlines Whitton's social welfare thinking, which was based on her philosophy of Christian community and her understanding of social work as a scientific vocation. Because of her particular construction of social work, Whitton was critical of social work as it was defined within an increasingly bureaucratized, technological Canadian culture. In their biography of Whitton, No Bleeding Heart: Charlotte Whitton, A Feminist on the Right, Rooke and Schnell show that the threads of a social philosophy were evident in Whitton's work during the 19205 and 19305. Yet it was not until the end of the 19305 that Whitton began to express her understanding of society as a unified philosophy. That philosophy is best characterized as a form of subsidiarity or solidarism. Solidarism treats the state and society as an organic whole; within it, each individual has both rights and obligations. An individual's social reality is created by his or her experience of a community, which is defined in moral terms. The community can enhance an individual's existence without violating his or her integrity as an individual. Natural laws help order relations between the individual and the community so that the interests of the individual can be in solidarity with the interests of the broader community and of the state.7 Society is understood in metaphysical terms under which participants are bound by a law of reciprocity.' For example, private enterprise is valued as long as it is not opposed to the common good. Certain individual activities, such as work and the exercise of practical freedom, are not only valued but have special moral significance within the social context. Since work is considered a form of stewardship or service, citizens are accountable on moral grounds for their full and proper engagement in the workplace.8 In her 1939 report about her activities with the League of Nations, Whitton made certain assumptions about social evolution. Her religious faith and her understanding of society as a metaphysical entity led her to assume that human development followed in a positive, progressive path even when it was wrought with struggle: 'At times car-

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ried forward on mankind's enthusiasm and rushing hopes, at times thrown back in dim lulls of unapparent growth but steadily, slowly, surely carrying humanity forward into the ages tide/9 This philosophy allowed her to find meaning in the suffering of the Depression era. She was confident that God appreciated our struggles even when their end was not immediately in sight. She suggested that heroic struggles, which were 'heard by God at once,' would inevitably be heard by people in the future.10 Whitton constructed her philosophy of social work in such a way that micro or personal issues were collapsed into macro or social forces. She often wrote of society as if it were an organism that could exist at the community, the national, or the international level. For example, she argued that war and economic collapse had permanently damaged but not completely disabled the social organism.11 She pointed out how the 'crippled child' appealed to the 'heart and mind of humanity' as if all people who constitute the social organism had a single reaction.12 The well-being of the young was a social concern not only because of children's individual needs, but also because the transfer of civilization from generation to generation was only possible through children.13 The organic integrity of the community or social organism placed a burden of responsibility on the state as well as on individuals. The main function of the state was to ensure 'stable and happy conditions of living.' According to Whitton, the state had to help ensure that those who sought gainful employment were successful, especially since work was a form of stewardship. When external forces beyond the individual's personal control and responsibility blocked that simple objective, then the government had to ensure that subsistence would be provided.14 In Whitton's view, the state had a clear and direct responsibility in matters of child protection; the government had an obligation to ensure that each child received adequate guardianship and nurturing. When exigencies such as poverty and misfortune affected the capability or desire of the parents to take the parenting role, the state was obligated to attack these conditions.15 At the same time, individual citizens should not remain dependent on the state, for they share in social responsibility. In her 1943 report to the prime minister, The Dawn of Ampler Life, Whitton argued that the stability of the social structure depended on 'intelligent, responsible citizenry/ That was how she justified care of the 'feeble minded and mentally affected/16 The individual and the state were engaged in mutual stewardship of civilization's resources.

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In turn, people receiving assistance had a responsibility to the social group. Whitton was concerned, for example, that the Mothers' Allowance was not preserving the proper balance of social justice. She argued that those who received social assistance should realize that the funds to pay for it were being raised by taxing those who were not receiving social assistance.17 Good citizenship, it seems, required the proper balance of self-reliance, hard work, and care for the disadvantaged. In this manner, Canadians were stewards for the broader community. The state's function to protect the community should be limited, according to Whitton. She believed that the individual right to property and liberty was 'instinctually defended' by the 'British subject' against arbitrary state control. When regulated social provisions were imposed, the social order was threatened, since public provision of social services raised the risk that individual freedom would be restricted. Whitton was especially concerned that the state should provide social security in a way that respected the initiative and integrity of the individual and of the community as a whole. The protection of the labourer against risk must never be at the expense of the 'ancient verities' of individual freedom, initiative, and integrity.18 Whitton was concerned that the preoccupation with individual material security could impede the spiritual and cultural development of both the individual and the whole community. There was a type of symbiotic relationship between the spiritual life of the community and that of the individual. Thus she argued for a delicate balance between the interests of the individual and those of the broader community.19 Whitton's world view was based on the assumption that Canada was a Christian community. The limits and opportunities of Canadian social development were set by Christian precepts.20 Rooke and Schnell note that she was frustrated with the lack of faith and spiritual development in Canada and felt that God's significance was being minimized. For Whitton, proper social development involved the reconstruction of morals. Canadians needed to reconsider their relationship to God and to acknowledge a power outside themselves in order to develop the right fit of relationships and to ensure the good life.21 For Whitton, the individual and the community were linked as one organism, and the entire natural world was part of a divine plan. She described an 'incomprehensible Power which holds the stars poised in their course and makes possible the gauze on the midge's wing.'22 Fur-

9O A Poetics of Social Work

thermore, human development was part of an eternal plan. Individuals' needs and desires existed within a spiritual setting, in which there was an underlying harmony based on the divine.23 An immanent God was central to Whitton's understanding of human nature. According to her, the increasing insecurity faced by individuals and families and the complications of modern living called for introspection. People must search their own selves for strength. There existed a power and strength beyond the capacity of each human; personal virtues and 'thoughts of holiness' belonged to the greater power and not to the individual.24 The acknowledgement of a greater power created a certainty for each person through the existence 'of an eternal current from which inner strength and power can come.' For a child, the source of this current was righteous and God-fearing parents. This current was certain to be there, as it flowed through the individual's ancestry.25 In Whitton's world view, suffering could be virtuous. She contended that social workers should bring forward knowledge born of their experience working with the disadvantaged. She hoped that social workers would be able to draw from this experience to make a contribution to knowledge that would enrich the heritage of Canada. Social workers' clients shared a greater strength due to their experience of suffering. Whitton quoted Francis Bacon: The virtue of Prosperity is Temperance; the Virtue of Adversity is Fortitude, which in Morals is the more heroical virtue. For Prosperity doth best discover Vice but Adversity doth best discover Virtue.'26 Christian faith informed the unquestionable truths she held about human relationships. Dorothy Livesay learned the importance of honesty from her grandmother; Whitton learned from her own grandmother immutable truths based on biblical stories. One of those truths was that all people were servants of God. The weaker members of society - the handicapped, the elderly, and the ill - deserved courteous and respectful treatment because of their spiritual integrity. She also learned from her grandmother that one was tied to the community through moral obligation, a sense of discipline, and a desire to do right.27 Rooke and Schnell explain that as a devout Anglican, Whitton 'was immersed in the apostolic and catholic tradition of Christianity, a tradition which embraced in its systematic theology a rational view of the world, individual volition, and human society.'28 Good citizenship was denned by active and informed practice. Whitton valued citizen-

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ship so highly that she felt it close to a sacred calling.29 She understood religion as a way of life based on certain beliefs and on striving for truths. Religion fostered an attitude to life that inculcated awareness of a greater power. Religion was expressed through 'loving confidence' in the strength of a superior power.30 Each member of society was responsible for nurturing and enhancing the welfare of the social body as a whole. Whitton's particular understanding of how society was structured influenced her understanding of social work. Social workers, while pursuing social knowledge scientifically, must build their work on a moral foundation. Their duty to improve the social whole was a noble religious expression, and their life of action based on duty and devotion was a 'God given' opportunity. The religious person sought out opportunities for religious expression through acts of kindness made possible only through self-forgetfulness.31 According to Whitton, the social worker's function was based on Christian faith. Social work was a vocation whereby the worker acted from a sense of duty based on moral Tightness and religious belief. In 1921, Whitton wrote that social work involved helping clients figure out the right relationship between their spiritual being and their religious impulses. The right relationship involved clients admitting their 'utter and finite helplessness upon the permeating Deity of the universe.'32 In 1939, Whitton still continues to characterize the social worker's role as an exercise in religious adjustment. According to her, the social worker's role was to help people with their spiritual and religious consciousness and to aid the needy in the spiritual adjustment of their souls. Since part of social work craftsmanship was to offer spiritual guidance and advice, social workers needed to be open to God's influence. She quoted the following passage to explain how the social worker derived understanding about the exercise of spiritual adjustment: Here, work enough to watch, The Master work, And catch hints of the proper craft, Tricks of the tools to play.33

Because it easily fostered a duty-bound sense of commitment, the social work profession was well suited for the acting out of religious impulses. Whitton found a group of women in the field who shared

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her faith perspective and who understood social work as a vocation. She and prominent social workers Ethel Dodds Parker and Dorothy King expressed the purpose of social work in the following pledge, published in 1936: 'I pledge myself to the service of those whose responsibility is entrusted to me. I promise to place their needs before my own desires. I vow my loyalty to the service in which I am retained and should my honour conflict with this duty, I promise to withdraw from, and as far as in me lies, to bear myself without malice towards it. And I ask my God to give me knowledge of truth, faith in goodness and the power to do good in His service/34 This interesting pledge presented what might be termed a maternal feminist view of social work; these social workers shared a sense of responsibility and caring informed by a religious understanding of the world.35 Whitton defined social work as a religious calling chosen in relationship to God. Thus, social work epistemology was based on shared principles of faith. The role of the social worker was to help people make spiritual adjustments for their own personal well-being. Even while arguing for a religious understanding of the role of the social worker, Whitton promoted social work as a scientific endeavour. In her 1935 manuscript 'A Social Worker Pleads for Faith/ she explained at length the relationship between science and faith in the social work field. She asserted that in practice, social workers drew from an epistemology based on the dual foundations of spiritual truths and scientific truths.36 However, she clearly delineated the limits of science in helping people make social adjustments. According to Whitton, science could contribute to the material aspects of mind and body adjustment, but emotional health was a spiritual matter. Emotional adjustment could never be accomplished solely through scientific interventions.37 Whitton did not consider science to be in conflict with her faith. Rather, she saw scientific method as a way of introducing necessary rigour to social work. In her view, science was not a separate sphere of knowledge uncontaminated by metaphysical interpretations of the social world; rather, it was evidence of the immutable truths underlying nature and the social structure: 'Are not our mathematics and our science the outward and visible evidence of a great universe moving in a planned harmony, within its great life, as we within our little lives, all moving in accord with definite rules and principles which can be ignored only with disaster?'38 According to Whitton, mathematics (for example) was based on

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integrity, honesty, and truth. When these mathematical fundamentals were ignored, the resulting error and deception were proofs of the truth's unchanging nature, not evidence of a weakness in the mathematical knowledge base. For Whitton, underlying spiritual truths permeated all personal and shared constructions for understanding the world. As long as all ends were congruent with the ends of a person's country, of God, and of the Truth, the knowledge base was not suspect.39 Whitton presented social work science as a new science defined by the application of scientific principles to problems of social and mental maladjustment. Yet as a science, social work was akin to the science of dogmatic theology; social work separated from the expression of faith became meaningless. While social workers needed training in scientific principles and method, the 'sustaining strength' of social work was charity. Only through acknowledging the 'permeating strength from its affinity with the spiritual forces of man and the universe does it give any hope of abiding achievement.' God, the source of social work's and society's sustaining strength, was timeless, unchangeable, and steadfast.40 How then could social work be treated as both a vocation and a scientific practice? The pursuit of sacred ends and scientific ends did not happen in separate spheres, nor in practice did the sacred and the scientific subsume each other. For the social worker, there was a dual imperative: the social worker's responsibility was to lift the profession to the rank of vocation and proclaim its wellsprings of spirituality; at the same time, the social worker had to subject her vocation to scientific technique. Whitton's understanding of the science of social work contrasts with Dawson's science of social relations. Dawson believed that the social scientist could separate fact from value; Whitton seemed to be suggesting that fact and value were inseparable. Her view was that science and morality were completely interwoven. She dealt with a secularized society by helping organize a community of female social workers who shared basic sacred principles. At the same time, she promoted the development of powerful scientific tools within that community. The bedrock of her science was her God. She understood God as immanent - as existing behind all laws and principles, whether scientific or sacred.41 According to Whitton, science was not distinct from a divine social plan or a spiritual foundation, and in fact could be used to direct social

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relations. Through the proper application of science, human potential could be 'cultured and directed/ and economic and social waste could be avoided. For example, she argued during the Depression that the proper application of scientific social work principles could result in better control of the unemployed's dependency and a decrease in relief costs.42 The problems with Canada's Depression era social structure were really part of the problem of all humanity, 'unlimited in time as it is in extent.' Whitton suggested that new knowledge and methods enabled social workers to diagnose social problems more accurately, just as doctors could diagnose physical illness. The apparent increase in social distress might be accounted for by the new tools available to social workers, which allowed them to elucidate the full extent of social problems for the first time in history.43 Science could not replace the good intentions and deep convictions associated with social work practice; even so, science was still necessary to educate the public about social workers' principles and methods. Whitton urged social workers to prove that their practice drew on irreproachable laws of science. She was certain these laws of scientific social work could be universally accepted as true. The Depression era was the time, she proclaimed, to justify the social work field not only through qualities like good intentions, which appeal to the heart, but also through social work practices, such as the gathering of facts, which appeal to the head.44 By following the methods of scientific investigation, the social work community would make itself accountable to the broad Canadian community. The social worker needed to make a case for what she advocated, for the costs of her services, and for her accomplishments. Whitton suggested, for example, that scientific investigation would help social workers break down the incidence of delinquency according to the offenders' race, sex, economic conditions, and occupation. Such a study might facilitate predictions about the occurrence of delinquency in other groups.45 Whitton believed that through scientific study the proper, intricate balance among broad social forces could be achieved. Scientific discipline would create the proper balance for comment and opinion, and ensure that opinion was fair. In a 1939 manuscript she quoted a British journalist who suggested that a profession's ethical base came from the assumption that 'comment must be free, but facts are sacred.'46 In this way science contributed to her understanding of social solidarity. For example, national levels of production could be ascertained in order to

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decide what demands might be made on individuals. Production levels should be scientifically determined to avoid sapping personal strength and family life, and to maximize individuals' productive potential: 'One human working unit, with allowance for depreciation of human as well as other power can produce for his own needs and some relatively greater ratio. That ratio will fix what in goods and wealth, a people can hope to have as its maximum available national income/47 Careful investigation in the name of economy and efficiency could also be useful in assessing the private, familial sphere. Social workers could help enforce the virtue of efficiency within families. Whitton argued that a parent's or guardian's inefficiency was sufficient reason for apprehending a child.48 Social services must fit into this intricate interpretation of national economy. She believed that the 'Canadian community' could use scientific study to make the proper adjustment between social services and private sector earnings. Science would set the point of fair compensation for a dependent person, relative to the struggles of the taxpayer and the working person to pay for that compensation and other public services.49 Repeatedly, Whitton described Canada as a young country, the suggestion being that the nation had a youthful vitality and spirit. She was concerned that the reorganization of social relations might sap its youthful energy and verve. In The Dawn of Ampler Life she hinged her discussion of social security on the following description of Canada. Foundational to Canada's development was 'the achievement of a small people with a great faith in their own strength.' The virtues of initiative and enterprise were essential to the nation's strength. Although the interwar years had been difficult, Canadians had sustained their confidence in destiny and in 'essential vigour and buoyancy of the country.'50 Her conception of Canada was consistent with her metaphysical understanding of the world. The country's vitality manifested itself both in the people and in the countryside: 'For there is vitality in the land itself, in the vibrant silence of the forests, in the quiet sense of growth in the prairie soil, the pounding power of the rushing streams.'51 In other words she believed that nature, including humans, was part of the organic whole and the divine plan. It was difficult for her to imagine imposing a plan for social security on the people of such a land. The reorganization of life to ensure a minimum of material goods for all would surely run counter to Canada's dynamic ideal.52

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At the same time, Whitton acknowledged that technological change was creating hardship for individuals. In 1939, in 'Changing Concepts in Social Welfare/ she discussed the social dislocation created by new technologies. She acknowledged that internationally, workers were being displaced by technological advances. She also noted that increasing rates of production were shortening the years when a person could earn a living. In this way a cohort of displaced older workers was being created.53 Yet for Whitton the most troubling aspect of social change during the Depression was that social services were being bureaucratized. Her main complaint in this regard related to the impact that bureaucratic provision of service had on the individual's place in the social structure. She saw danger in creating an autonomous state without proper checks on its power over the individual. According to Whitton, individualism and freedom were part of Canada's heritage from the British Isles, and the British subject valued individualism and freedom more highly even than life and health. When a person turned to the state for both spiritual and material goods, the state became the arbitrator of all resources.54 Whitton equated the benevolent bureaucracy with the fascist regime or the communist empire, seeing all three as particular forms of the authoritarian state. The problem was that the state bureaucracy ignored the 'eternal diversity of every human being' and the 'free play of individualism.'55 Whitton insisted that when a state-operated bureaucracy provided social services, it was at a dire cost to social relations in general. She looked to misuses of power in the year 1938, such as the military use of German financial resources, the Spanish civil war, and the invasion of Ethiopia, as examples of how those in command of states used the principle of the greatest good for the greatest number for ill ends. In these exercises of state control, the individual's soul became secondary. Whitton argued that although intrusions into a person's private affairs were welcome in Italy and Russia, they were completely incompatible with British traditions. In fact, the struggle for individual liberty and the rule of the law was instinctive to the Britisher. The price of social security was the loss of this highly prized individual freedom.56 According to Whitton, 'energy, ambition and the instinct of thrift are bred in the people, as a whole, born of their background.'57 Bureaucratization was also troubling because it narrowed the under-

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standing of social security to a person's financial well-being. Whitton felt that social, spiritual, and emotional well-being should also be considered important elements of social security. Proper relations in a secure society allowed for initiative and freedom. In turn, initiative and freedom required risk, sacrifice, and at times pain. True satisfaction was not possible for the person who was protected from these experiences.58 Whitton constructed a sophisticated interpretation of how bureaucracy affected the social worker. When large social-service delivery systems were created during the Depression, social work staffing needs were reinterpreted. The only quality now demanded of stateemployed social workers was reasonable efficiency. She worried that the entire ethos of social work as it had evolved historically could be overlooked. Now that large state organizations staffed with civil servants had been established, it was important to state clearly the central principles that should govern social work. Also, key positions in social service bureaucracies should be given to those who had proven themselves through social work experience.59 Whitton argued that 'the survival of social work depended in large part upon common sense, just plain reasonable common sense which social workers prove themselves capable of exhibiting and exercising.'60 Clearly, Whitton felt that social work practice was incompatible with technocratic relations based on efficiency, such as were demanded by bureaucratic structures. The public delivery of services posed another threat to social work. Whitton pointed out that by the mid-i93os, men had discovered the field, which until then had been the preserve of women. Men began to transfer into social work from other courses of study, such as theology and the arts. When these men graduated, they were given 'fast track' treatment within social work bureaucracies.61 Once men began invading the discipline of social work, inequities within the field were heightened. Whitton complained that social work faculties were already a 'closed lodge';62 even a woman as well situated as Whitton, with all her expertise in child welfare, would never rise above the position of occasional lecturer. The question arises whether she was referring to Dawson, the sociologist, and Urwick, the political economist, when she complained that leadership within the field had been given over to people from other disciplines.63 James Struthers has documented how Whitton continually promoted the skills of social workers as the most effective for dealing with

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the Depression's social ills. For example, she made the case to Prime Minister Bennett that 40 per cent of the people on relief in the western provinces did not need any financial assistance. Furthermore, she argued that relief provisions were maintaining communities that would otherwise be in decline. Especially in northern mining towns, relief was working against natural focus of disintegration. From all this, she argued that the distribution of relief was inefficient.64 Throughout the Depression, Whitton argued in favour of limiting social welfare costs, as well as increasing surveillance of the unemployed to ensure that they looked for work instead of staying on the dole. Struthers has contended that by appealing to conservatives in the government and the business community, Whitton was advancing her own career and social workers' opportunities rather than the welfare of the unemployed.65 Whatever her motives, Whitton clearly struggled to maintain the social work profession as an entity separate from the public bureaucratic service. An entity that made better sense in an organic community defined by values and ideals. She worked at keeping alive the vocation of social work, with its distinct expression and claims to service. Perhaps one of the ways to advance this struggle was to stake out social work's claim to unique experience and technique. Whitton vigorously promoted the specialized, technical side of social work. To convince Prime Minister Bennett that social work had its own technique, she used an analogy to engineering and construction: a contractor could not be switched with an engineer without an increase in possible mismanagement and the need for adjustment. In the same way, social work processes and methods were not interchangeable with other professional techniques.66 The science of social work might be informed by other sciences such as medicine, political science, and economics, but according to Whitton it was not a lesser science. Social work technique had a unique place alongside, not subservient to, the other sciences. The fact that social work - a pursuit inspired by charity - was informed as much by philosophy as by science did not weaken its knowledge base.67 Whitton ultimately assembled a type of technological argument for social work. She combined techne with logos in arguing that 'wisdom is born of the union of experience with knowledge.' Social workers might be guided by this motto: 'Strength lies in wisdom rather than knowledge.' Through the particular shape of her argument, she promoted the introduction of rigour to social workers' practical experience, in the

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form of 'standards of practice and principles of work/68 Perhaps unwittingly, she was pressing for a technological approach to practice, one that linked knowing with doing through the regulations and techniques of the social work field. Perhaps she thought that through this informed and technically expert practice, social work might still fend off the mundane tasks of bureaucratic civil service. In Whitton's concept of the social work knowledge base, we repeatedly see the mixture of technique, science, skill, and metaphysics. In 1941 she promoted voluntary community effort in Canadian social welfare since it 'retains its close association with the religious springs of its birth and faith/69 Free society placed a high value on private philanthropy because it relied on the human instinct of sympathy for others. The social worker in the community setting could draw from an amalgam of social work skills, intuition, and personal aptitude in order to respond humanely to those in need.70 Near the end of the Depression, Whitton was forced out of her position as executive secretary of the Canadian Welfare Council. Her successor, George Davidson, suggested that a man was chosen to replace her because her difficult disposition made it impossible for other women to work with her.71 Whitton's amalgam of science and metaphysics and her conservative views had been sidelined by those who were promoting the development of a social welfare state.72 Certainly, gender was also a factor in her being forced out of her position, as was the case with Livesay. During this period, Whitton became alienated from many of her colleagues. She could not identify with the new sense of technocratic professionalism in the social work field, and she felt that the growing welfare state was at odds with democracy.73 New developments in the Canadian social welfare sector were a threat to her philosophy, the unity of her thought, her understanding of the British people, her conception of society, and her way of living. All this may help explain why, by the end of the Depression, Whitton was 'on the verge of a nervous breakdown/74 Like Dorothy Livesay, Whitton suffered emotional turmoil after being separated from her life's work. What better way could there be to silence these women than to threaten their source of support? Rooke and Schnell summarize her struggle: 'By 1939 she was tired - Whitton's life seemed to reflect the uncertain nature of the times of the Depression decade/75 Whitton based her understanding of social forces and social work on metaphysical interdependence within the living world. In the social

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organism based on Christian faith, each individual had social duties and obligations. The moral imperative of community created constraints for social service workers and for those who depended on social services. Science was not separate from this set of moral relations. Rather, it was evidence of the divine order, and helped determine and elaborate the proper social adjustment. Social work was a calling with a rigorous technique based on two kinds of truths: the truths of the scientific and of the sacred.

Conclusion

All of the subjects in this study had an Anglo-Saxon, middle-class, Christian background. The dominance of white Anglo-Saxon middleclass leaders in social work probably reflects Canada's class and ethnic relations during the interwar years. In some respects, their arguments about social relations circulated within a closed group. Access to leadership, and therefore access to discussions about the social worker's proper role in social relations, was granted to those of a particular religion, and ethnic background. Although each of the subjects was committed to social work, all were involved in other fields as well. Dawson, who was a leader in the social work field, clearly was positioning himself for a place in the community of male academics whose interest was social science. Urwick was also a leader in social work, while belonging to a broader community of male academics defined by their commitment to philosophical idealism. Urwick held authority not only in social work but also in academia. While practising social work, Livesay was deeply committed to her community of communist comrades. Whitton's commitment to a community of women social workers was as strong as her commitment to the social work field as a whole. The men were securely situated in their field. Dawson's opportunities multiplied as he uncritically accepted the precepts of the liberal, technological point of view. Urwick was part of an older tradition in the humanities and held a central position in the University of Toronto's administrative structure. In the late 19305, Livesay and Whitton were forced to leave paid employment in the social service field. Both were denied basic economic resources and at the same time were separated from meaningful work. By the end of the Depression, their voices

1O2 A Poetics of Social Work

had been marginalized. They went on, however, to reconstruct their public roles in other social fields. The fact that both left the field involuntarily, and that both experienced emotional turmoil as a result, was a serendipitous discovery of this research. This discovery invites further research whereby historical knowledge is constructed from single cases. The historical fact, which suggests repression based on gender, ought to be made the focus of historical research in social welfare history; it would be worth learning the intracies of how these women were marginalized and silenced. It must be added that by the end of the Depression the sense of exhaustion did cross gender lines. Urwick became more and more disillusioned with the knowledge claims of others in the field of social work,1 which reminds us that the interwar era should not be romanticized: the social struggle these people engaged in was difficult and had definite emotional and material ramifications for them. To be an idealist during this era, one had to adjust to a sense of loss.2 It would be an error to treat this group's thought as monolithic. For example, practical experience in social work fell mainly on one side of the gender line. The women had roles that involved practice and service delivery; the men were not involved in paid social work practice. The women were less comfortable with purely abstract conceptions of social work. According to Livesay, for example, abstract knowledge that was not based on direct experience with those in need was suspect because it was potentially exploitative. Both Livesay and Whitton insisted that direct experience had a special meaning in social work. Since they favoured 'hands on,' intelligent practice and specific, personal interactions, they were less likely to make abstract, impersonal claims for caring that could be applied in a generalized manner.3 There was a wide diversity of opinion among the subjects, and little consensus about how best to define, study, and approach social ills. For example, Livesay rejected any formal religion during the time of study, since it impeded social change. Whitton thought that social study and social change must be informed by moral and religious principles. Urwick was convinced that both social service and social change were best understood in spiritual terms. Dawson treated faith perspectives as primitive and unsophisticated. Both Whitton and Dawson promoted social scientific study, but they did not agree on the basic assumptions of the scientific paradigm. Livesay and Urwick were not convinced that a science of social affairs had any utility. I believe that this lack of consensus is a hopeful sign, since it suggests that many

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ways of understanding social issues can exist contemporaneously in a single social field. One might be tempted to characterize the thought of these four individuals as if they were from different eras. Urwick and Whitton were concerned about the loss of a way of practice from the progressive era that included elements such as intuition, emotion, and history. Both feared that developments during the 19205 and 19305 in practical social work were leading to a strictly instrumental understanding of practice. Livesay and Dawson were relative newcomers to the field who challenged the shared assumptions of social work practitioners. Neither Livesay nor Dawson was nostalgic about the history of social work and how it had evolved. Rather, they were impatient to reconstruct the field in order to overcome social workers' naive assumptions.4 Whitton and Urwick could be thought of as Victorians, in that both were idealists and tended to make moral prescriptions. Livesay and Dawson might be characterized as modernists, in that both were searching for new truths to inform personal agency and social reconstruction. The difficulty with treating thought as if it occurs in eras, such as the Victorian era and the modernist era, is that subtleties and tensions in thought can be overlooked. The desire to look for a single form of thought associated with a particular time may lead historians to force complex discourse and thought into overly simplistic categories. Furthermore, to characterize a subject's thinking as if it were formulated in a specific era is to suggest that some of that thinking is a 'relic' of limited efficacy. For example, there seems to have been an implicit understanding among the men in this study that women's practical work and social interpretations were limiting the advancement of knowledge. Actually, all of the subjects' ways of knowing helped to illuminate the social concerns of the time. Their differing perspectives gave a depth and substance to discussions of social science and technology. The discussion of knowledge is further enriched by the complicated nature of each personal knowledge claim. It seems to me that each of the four figures drew from a wide variety of sources and interwove empirical evidence with metaphysical understandings. A review of their different world views shows that for none was there an absolute separation between metaphysics and a science of social affairs. A useful approach to understanding knowledge development for practice would be to conceptualize the knowledge claim as one that mixes a variety of discourses or texts. Within the social worker's text coexist a

1O4 A Poetics of Social Work

variety of texts derived from a variety of paradigmatic influences.5 We can achieve better understanding of how the social world of the worker and the client is constructed when we bear in mind that the claim to knowing is not a closed and coherent paradigm. Sometimes thought is the product of a technical rationality that is not separate from an intuitive sense of faith. Various influences can sometimes mesh to the point that it is difficult to clearly characterize the knowledge claim. Most analyses of social work knowledge are presented as if the knowledge can be separated into dichotomous categories and polarized taxonomies. Knowledge is defined according to opposing categories - for example, micro versus macro phenomena, structural versus personal issues, or left versus right ideology. Social analysis structured on dualisms is a legacy of classical science. The problem with knowledge structured on dualisms is that it encourages social analysis based on polarized opposites.6 Researchers have tended to pursue social work questions as if they were specialists in either the micro or the macro interpretation of a client's well-being. Generally speaking, social work interventions focused on micro concerns are characterized as conservative and clinical; whereas social work that focuses on macro concerns is often considered to be progressive and policy-oriented. Practitioners who focus on micro interventions are often pictured as female; practitioners who focus on macro concerns are most often assumed to be male. These stereotypes have recently been questioned, especially by feminist social workers.7 All the figures in this study interpreted the world in ways that acknowledged both micro and macro conceptions of human development. I had expected to discover that Whitton was preoccupied with administrative detail and the personal causes of need. I found that in fact she had written numerous tracts about the most general social forces, such as international markets and the influence of technology on the labour force. Livesay, who was the only person to have direct contact with families and children as a social worker, developed a clear socio-political position on how macro forces fostered disadvantage and group marginalization. She also resolutely insisted on the value of direct practice. Urwick, though he viewed the world in philosophical terms, was quite specific about how healthy interpersonal bonds could develop. Dawson endeavoured to develop a science of human groups, yet he constantly drew from specific cases; he also wrote about the personal qualities that influenced social change and social development.

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To situate any of these people within either a micro-focused or a macro-focused paradigm of social work practice would be to falsify the integrity of her or his thought. Similarly, the subjects cannot easily be grouped according to political ideology. Certainly, Dawson and Whitton believed in free-market capitalism. However, Whitton's ideology was based on a paradigm within which social obligations and commitment to the community were central. Livesay integrated her argument against technology and technique within a leftist interpretation of capitalist structures; she also argued for the integrity of the individual. The most unrelenting critic of science and technique was Urwick, who refused to base his argument within the frame of either the individualist, liberal or the collectivist, socialist interpretations of social progress. In my research, I had created a dichotomy of my own: I had expected to find two distinct world views associated with the social work and social service fields. In the past, I argued that altruism and technique existed in tension within the social work epistemology.8 In my research for this book, I had expected that social work epistemology would generally be characterized in one of two ways: the technocratic point of view, defined by distance in relations, rigour in interpretation, reductionism, and a preoccupation with control; and a knowledge based in social responsibility defined by a historical horizon of significance, an openness to interpretation, and a preoccupation with democratization. Indeed, there was tension within the discipline of social work along these lines, but this did not mean that knowledge claims should be reified by separating them into distinct and mutually exclusive categories. Ultimately I found a grouping of interlinked subjectivities that contributed to patterns of thinking, rather than evidence of two distinct points of view. Each subject's understanding of social work epistemology was so unique that it raised questions about whether a paradigm called the social work knowledge base could be constructed at all.9 The development of social workers' knowledge could not be characterized as dichotomous in nature, yet a tension did exist around the nexus of technology, technique, and social science. All four subjects of this research treated science and technology as essential aspects of discussions about social relations in a modern, industrial context.10 They were actively engaged in discussions of technology. The tensions surrounding the technological approach to social work centred on the development of knowledge and values. In promoting standards of practice, principles of work, and rigour in

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social work practice, Whitton was promulgating a technology of social work. She wanted people outside the social work field to understand that social work was a specialized technical function. The social worker's methods and processes, she argued, were not interchangeable with those of any other profession. Whitton and Dawson both felt that science and technology contributed to the progressive, civilizing forces in Western capitalist culture, and came closest to defining themselves as scientists and researchers; yet their bases for understanding science were quite different. Dawson was adamant that science originated in secular knowledge; Whitton was confident that science helped us see the spiritual structure of natural relations. Throughout this book I have used Ellul's concept of technique as a central point of reference for understanding the nature of technology. According to Ellul, technique is the collection of practices that utilize resources to achieve certain valued ends; specifically, it is all those means that have efficiency as their ultimate purpose and that are derived through rational thought.11 A preoccupation with technique and method posed a special problem for Urwick, who felt that it brushed aside the matters most relevant to human affairs. To comprehend human affairs, the social worker must understand justice, interdependence, idealism, and purpose. Since questions of moral philosophy were excluded from the structure of technique, social wellbeing could not be achieved through technique alone. The training of social workers in technical knowledge was linked to the demand for efficient social workers who were well versed in methods suitable for developing social service bureaucracies. Urwick feared that if practice came to be seen solely in terms of technique, social workers could lose sight of the need to develop an adequate justification for their actions. According to Urwick, technique narrowed the social worker's vision by particularizing human problems, and also by divesting them of emotion. He thought that social workers were losing sight of the broad perspective. Social workers were also missing the value of complete engagement - both emotional and intellectual - in other people's lives. A preoccupation with technique prevented workers from developing a total concern for a person's well-being, a concern that could in turn contribute to society's moral development. According to Urwick, the most troubling aspect of social work technique was that it divested human phenomena of vitality. When we search for the sources of human nature outside the human dynamic itself, we are denying that human life has agency. Subjects are deadened when the worker pre-

Conclusion 107

pares for an intervention that entails manipulating people as if they were lifeless. Technique also had troubling limits for Livesay, who insisted that knowledge must be derived from direct experience and from social relations focused on social welfare. Technique did not foster understanding of the callousness she observed toward those in need, or of the urgency of the needs of those who were suffering. For Livesay, knowledge was validated through its social relevance rather than through its promotion of efficiency. Social work technique was suspect because of its distance from the lived experience of the working class. In fact, technique was constructed to preserve the power relations between classes. Efficiency, the imperative of the controlling class, created an environment of total control. For Livesay, techniques to control working people were evident in the office, the factory, and the social service bureaucracy. Technique involved distorting the worker's natural rhythms; the controlled workplace dehumanized those subjected to it. Technique divested social interaction of humanity; it also entrenched the process of dehumanization. Dawson took a deterministic approach to social relations and the development of technique. He argued in favour of the development of technique combined with scientific research within the field of social work. During the 19305, he lamented the lack of technical staff at social work schools. He was active in developing a view of the social worker as someone who was ambitious, self-confident, and efficient. Central to his deterministic approach was the assumption that technological developments were natural. Technological forces such as communications and transportation were the determinants for human factors in social relations. In fact, Dawson argued that technological forces determined the spatial distribution of people and their institutions. The processes that sorted people by type were assumed to be as impersonal as the biological processes that distinguished plant life. Dawson's idea that social relations developed naturally invited a technical approach to human affairs. He argued that the universal tendency in social life was toward mature relations that were increasingly formal and selective. The contemporary social context was growing more and more complex - a process that increased impersonal types of social interaction. Most important was the fact that all relations were becoming increasingly efficient in both the economic and social spheres. Efficiency had enhanced the specialization of individuals, who were directed by male expert leaders. According to Dawson, the

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true and honest course of human relations was secularization. Secularization reconstructed lifestyles so that relations were calculating and impersonal. It replaced relations based in faith and emotion with relations divested of emotion and defined by impersonal detachment. Realities that were mundane, calculable, and utilitarian were on the rise. The way Dawson construed social change and human relations invited social tensions. For example, he set up moral categories of people who he felt resisted natural social development, such as the slum dweller and the bachelor. He also blamed groups whose identity was constructed around ethnicity for creating social tensions among those people who had accepted North America's modern, technological, secular society. According to Dawson, the social worker had to draw on technique in order to help people outside technological development adjust to social change. Social ills such as poverty arose because of the lag in the development of technique, which would eventually take over the role once played by tradition and sentiment. By drawing from comprehensive social facts and scientific evidence, the social worker could control social relations. The controlled adjustment of humans and social institutions would make social change less haphazard and frustrating. According to Dawson, a profession driven by the goals of productivity and efficiency was best suited to help individuals adjust and to maintain social order. Whitton was ambivalent about technique in social work practice. On certain issues, such as the bureaucratic delivery of social services, she was quite distrustful of technique. Regulated social provisions such as the family allowance and state delivery of services were at odds with her understanding of human nature. She assumed that there was unlimited diversity among individuals and that each had his or her own spiritual integrity. The repetition of interventions based on a reasonable level of efficiency did not respect the 'ancient truths' of individual freedom, initiative, and integrity. According to Whitton, this approach also disregarded that social security was holistic in nature, in that it involved the financial, social, emotional, and spiritual aspects of a person's existence. In other matters, such as the professionalization of social work practice, Whitton actively promoted the technical development of social work. Whitton had great confidence in the potential of science to inform practice. She felt that human potential could be cultured and directed through properly used methods informed by a scientific social

Conclusion 109

work. She argued for the control of dependent populations through the development of more effective and efficient social work. Her propensity for technique is evident in her proposal to determine scientifically the maximum demand that can be placed on the 'human working unit' in order to maximize its productive potential. She replaced moral judgment with a technique to determine fair compensation for the dependent person relative to taxpayers' struggles to pay for that compensation. This review of the four social work leaders' views on technique suggests that a broader interpretation of technique in human services can be constructed. I now expand on the definition of technique as it applies to social work, social sciences, and the human services. In the field of human services, technique has at least these five elements: • Technique involves the management of human behaviour for instrumental ends. • Technique is based on an understanding of human well-being that invokes rational thought to legitimize itself. • Technique involves the control of behaviours and attitudes, including the behaviours of the person developing or utilizing the technique (most often users of the technique direct the control at others). • Technique generally has productivity, efficiency, or the management of human behaviour as its goals. • Technique is meant to be an interaction divested of emotion, and is assumed to be replicable from one interaction to the next.12 Technique, as defined above, is integrated within the canon of social work knowledge. Historically, discussions among social welfare practitioners of technique's role has been central to our understanding of the social work profession and its knowledge base. Social science, along with technology and technique, was central to discussions of social service and social work during the interwar years. For the scientific method to be accepted as valid for understanding humans, a particular notion of the social structure was required. Dawson and Whitton treated the social structure as a natural organism. The methods of social science, with its basis in the natural sciences, supported the assumption that social life has natural qualities. It could be argued that Whitton and Dawson were promoting and actively helping develop a modern system of power relations in the Western industrial world. Michel Foucault's analyses of power are based on the

no

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concept that power is domination and is maintained through disguise and illusion. By this interpretation, systems of power are not named as such, but instead are understood to be science. Power is scattered broadly and exercised by helping professions such as social work. The illusion of power is that it is characterized as liberation and as a necessity to historical fulfilment.13 Foucault's analysis suggests that the avid promotion of science by Whitton and Dawson during the unsettled Depression era amounted to a promotion of bourgeois social control. It is reasonable to assume in advance that a troubling feature of a social work science would be technical tinkering of the neutral manipulator at the level of personal intervention. Instead, it seems that the main limitation of the scientific approach was that each social scientist defined the limits of science according to his or her broad interpretation of social relations. The scientist then tried to make those biases invisible by claiming an objectivity based in rational and logical thought. The first step in the development of a science of society is decision making about what is natural in social relations. Once a phenomenon, social construction, or value is assumed to be natural, it is no longer open to contention. Science's role then is to determine how to support and enhance those natural systems. Scientific research in social work is also expected to foster the search for instrumental means to help those outside the 'natural' to become more adjusted. In their attempts to make the science of social relations a natural science, Dawson and Whitton made assumptions about which social forces were natural. Their approach was conducive to categorizing the disadvantaged or marginalized according to normative judgments. Since the development of international markets was for Dawson a natural development, the bachelor who grew only enough food for subsistence was suspect. Since the British tradition, based on principles such as sacrifice for the community, was natural for Whitton, the unemployed labourer was to be distrusted. Thus Whitton and Dawson seem to have mixed concepts of the general and the specific in a troubling way. Beneath a thin veil of objectivity and science was a distrust of people who do not fit within the social whole. The arguments they presented as products of disinterested professionalism were often based on vested interests and deeply emotional principles. My research suggests that social science is predictive and controlling in nature. All four subjects in this book treated social science as a way to promote change. For Urwick and Livesay, social science was suspect because of the power relations it fostered. For Dawson and Whitton,

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social science was a useful means for ushering in a structure of social relations that they personally valued. For good or ill, they were clearly using science to promote guided social change, with an emphasis on the future. Since social science is clearly a future-oriented discipline focused on change, it should be open to critical evaluation to prevent its being reconstructed as an ideology. Ideology focuses on what ought to be done or valued; it is a normative, future-oriented pursuit. Science is diagnostic or critical; ideology is apologetic and concerned with defending patterns of value and belief.14 Roger Hutchinson has pointed out that Dawson's social scientific approach undermined the values of those reformers who challenged the dominant assumptions about technological development. By taking a deterministic, environmental approach to human behaviour, Dawson avoided questioning the assumptions that the dominant group made about racial superiority and technological progress. The dominant group's meaning systems legitimated the move towards a commercial, industrial way of life. Dawson assumed that the values of the dominant social sector were the result of detached, scientific reflection, and he went on to argue for a social structure conducive to commercial development. Dawson's claim to objectivity and for a neutral place in the history of social development was tantamount to claiming a world view that did not reside in the world that created it. He presented his point of view as if he stood outside the limits of culture, time, and lived experience. His desire to promote the supposedly civilizing influences of the free market, secularization, and Anglicization did not arise from a rigorous and unbiased position. In fact, these influences were embedded in the technological, liberal context that anchored his own personal fortunes. Having taken a superior position, he was able to attack the situated knowledge and values of the ethnic groups he studied. By refusing to situate himself within real time and social relations, he sidestepped the struggle for social development. His position also hid that his knowledge base was tentative, transient, and socially constructed.15 We have had a tendency to split our understanding of human phenomena so that everything that is not directed to instrumental ends must be metaphysical.16 This dichotomy is based on the naive assumption that the scientific investigation of humans is separate from metaphysical questions and therefore need not be interrogated from that perspective. It also exempts from critical inquiry the a priori assumptions of the social work researcher's approach. An epistemological-

112 A Poetics of Social Work

discussion of social science should include a critique of science's ideological side. The empirical/metaphysical split in social work knowledge allows social scientists to redefine the metaphysical assumptions of their practice as personal. Once metaphysical claims are redefined as personal, they are no longer open to public discourse. These metaphysical claims then become defined as an exercise of individual freedom within the liberal, technological context.17 The reification of knowledge types - for example, the making of closed, self-evidential claims for certain systems of knowledge, and the resort to categories such as empirical versus metaphysical - becomes irrelevant in practice. A logical positivist approach to practice based on technical rationality needs to be examined to uncover the metaphysical assumptions implicit in the approach; in the same vein, the metaphysical, philosophical stance needs to be questioned when it makes empirical claims. The way we intellectually categorize our interventions - be they scientific or philosophical - sets the limits of our tolerance and the breadth of our perspective. Fascism, a major international issue during the interwar years, was an extreme expression of the calculated approach to human affairs. Three of the subjects in this study expressed their concern that the roots of this dangerous thinking could be found in the epistemological base of the social work profession. Whitton, Urwick, and Livesay were concerned about the threats of fascism and state control, and argued for a certain diligence to prevent its full expression. Whitton feared that the uniqueness of each individual would be lost within the impersonal structures of bureaucracy. Urwick was troubled that interventions based on method or efficiency were dehumanizing and manipulative in nature. Livesay saw dangers in the raw exercise of power for the sake of profit and capitalist gain. Although their concerns varied widely, they shared an interest in the limits of the Western capitalist state to act humanely. Each had an interpretation of how interpersonal relations between worker and client fit the broader patterns of the government of the poor and marginalized. All four felt that the reconsideration and reconstitution of morals was a central feature of healthy social development. For Livesay, ethical reconstruction necessarily involved a practice focus directed to the 'other.' For Urwick, ethical practice was understood as the possibility of working toward the end point of social good. For Whitton, ethical practice reflected limits imposed by the social organism and the right

Conclusion 113

relation to God. Only Dawson tried to divest ethics of vitality by suggesting that they could be reconstructed in objective relations. During the interwar years, all four engaged in public discussions about how to reconstruct shared, social ethics. Their ethical positions supported the contention that ethics are constructed publicly by people in relationship with one another. This fluid interpretation of ethics assumes that a public sphere can exist in which public participation in ethical development can occur. This notion of ethics removes ethical discussion from the exclusive domain of professional expertise in which personal ethics are publicly reinforced.18 The subjects of this study offered some hints for the ethical reconstruction of social relations. I borrow from Livesay to argue that human creation directed toward the needs of another has a moral quality in its own right. For example, the creation of a new understanding of a person's disadvantage or well-being by the social worker and the disadvantaged person can be a creative moment with ethical significance. I borrow from Urwick to argue that the most effective way to create this new understanding is for the social worker to engage as an enthusiastic participant in a reciprocal relationship with the client. All four subjects held the modernist notion that it was possible to improve social relations through personal agency. This was not necessarily based on a blind confidence in North American progress. In fact, Urwick distrusted the facile assumption that the development of thought is progressive. Livesay was so distressed by the declining fortunes of the working class that she could not champion progress. However, these two, along with Whitton and Dawson, shared a faith in the possibility that human agency can lead to social improvement. Each subject was striving to reconstruct existing paradigms to enhance their relevance to the social world. The Depression and international tensions such as the rise of fascism caused a tremendous rupture in the social fabric. This rupture created a sense of urgency that prompted people to develop new intellectual understandings about the nature of the social world and how to correct social failings. In their desire to bring about change, people sought irrefutible truths. Each of the subjects of this book claimed a foundational truth that could serve as a guide to understanding practice. Whitton claimed a religious base; Livesay's truth was based in political economy; Dawson's claim to truth was science; Urwick based his claim on philosophy. However, such truths were elusive, since they were meant to correct past social

114 A Poetics of Social Work

thought and rectify troubling social relations. All four were caught in a contradiction: they promoted change by seeking foundational understandings of human relations, even while promoting change that shifted the nature of thinking.19 At the present time there is a strong push for social workers and educators to embrace information technologies. The reasons behind this are reminiscent of Dawson's ideas about social science, secularization, and the progressive quality of international markets. The social forces associated with information technology are assumed to be progressive; it is assumed that social change is not only natural but also inevitable.20 For social workers, the central purpose of the technology is to achieve better control of the marginal classes during times of significant social, political, and economic change. Information collected about social work clients is reductive, and quantitative in nature, and the knowledge thereby created is manipulated at sites far removed from the interpersonal interaction.21 The ideas associated with the spread of new technologies opened up a rich debate during the 19205 and 19305. A similar discussion would be useful today to help us understand contemporary technologies and how they relate to social science and technique. Multiple ways of knowing - religion, poetry, fiction, philosophy, and science - enrich our understanding of how technology influences social services in the present day. This research illustrates that the notion of developing a contemporary, singular world view to better adjust to the impact of technology is historically incorrect. As this study of social thought during the interwar years illustrates, there is no one single notion of personal and social well-being that can guide us through social change. Furthermore, in our present-day search for an irrefutable truth to guide technological change, we are likely shifting the intellectual terrain. Since a singular truth is elusive, we require knowledge constructions that help us understand the arbitrary and the transitional as well as those matters that are not yet fully comprehended. This study of social work knowledge during the interwar years has uncovered a richness of interpretation about social life and the nature of social work. The way we approach history can constrain the discussion of social change, or it can open up discourse for public deliberation from a variety of perspectives. As social work historians, we are invited to reinvestigate the past in a way that treats social work practice and knowledge as a rich and complex tapestry. Furthermore, this study asserts the necessity for a history, philosophy, and a fictional lit-

Conclusion 115

erature of social work and social science. As Allan Irving has argued, the humanities are most likely to provide a guide through uncertain times, since they allow for the discussion of values and human will through literature, philosophy, and history.22 Philosophy, ethical study, and knowledge development need not be reified exercises worked out in isolation from practice. Nor should male-defined notions of philosophy or science have a privileged position in terms of informing social work practice. The value of any form of knowledge in social welfare is determined through its ability to explain concrete, daily lived relations.23 Social workers, because of the nature of their working environments, biases about knowledge development, and their positions of power relative to marginalized groups, must be diligent in constructing socially relevant knowledge. They need to correct their knowledge claims so that they are situated within history's struggle; they must not attempt to develop a disconnected and privileged sphere from which struggle may be observed. For each of the social workers in this study, creating an intellectual understanding of social change and personal agency was a moral imperative. The willingness of social workers to understand personal and social agency from a variety of perspectives may have contributed to social work being viewed as an ill-defined profession with a soft knowledge base. At the same time, however, the focus on personal agency and social renewal is a strength of the field, since it allows social workers to continually imagine the field anew. We can work to protect those in need by drawing on the rich heritage of the modernist concern for social reconstruction. Troubling contemporary social conditions - the concentration of power, the extreme poverty of some Canadians, the internationalization of markets, and the accepted wisdom of technological development - are similar to the social concerns faced during the iriterwar years. At that time, social service work was reconstituted as a new field of endeavour. A present-day reconstitution of the social work field can draw on the historical patterns of knowing such as those presented in this book. The historical record offers insights into the thinking behind the present-day promotion of free markets and liberal individualism. Furthermore, it offers suggestions for how to open up our patterns of thinking and democratize the discussion. I would suggest that personal and social memory is not linear and categorical. It is in our interest to explore how concepts of social change, social good, and social service have been expressed through

n6 A Poetics of Social Work

time. This historical exercise may help us avoid intractible grand narratives that lead to technical manipulation of the disadvantaged person. The resulting reinterpretation of the social work field is likely to lead to surprising conclusions about how to aid the marginalized and the poor.

Notes

Introduction 1 See, for example, Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, 'A Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State,' Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 19, no. 2 (winter 1994): 309-36. Also, Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973). 2 See, for example, Carol Baines, The Professions and the Ethic of Care,' in Women's Caring: Feminist Perspectives on Social Welfare, ed. Carol Baines, Patricia Evans, and Sheila Neysmith (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1991); Carol Baines, 'From Women's Benevolence to Professional Social Work: The Case of the Wimodausis Club and the Earlscourt Children's Home, 1902-1971' (PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 1990); Sara Burke, Seeking the Highest Good: Social Service and Gender at the University of Toronto, 1888-1937 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996); Clarke Chambers, 'Women in the Creation of the Profession of Social Work,' Social Service Review (March 1986): 1-33; Mariana Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885-1925 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1991); and Gale Wills, A Marriage of Convenience: Business and Social Work in Toronto, 1918-1957 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995). 3 James Struthers, The Limits of Affluence: Welfare in Ontario, 1920-1970 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 12-13, 77-98. 4 Allan Irving, The Scientific Imperative in Canadian Social Work: Social Work and Social Welfare Research in Canada, 1897-1945,' Canadian Social Work Review 9, no. i (winter 1992): 9-25. 5 University of Toronto Archives (hereafter UTA), Office of the President,

n8 Notes to pages 5-8 Falconer Papers, A6y-cxx)7 (hereafter FP), Box 123, File EJ. Urwick. 'Some Reasons Why the Department of Social Science Needs Professor Urwick's Guidance.' 6 See Dorothy Livesay, Journey with My Selves: A Memoir, 1909-1963 (Vancouver: Douglas & Mclntyre, 1991). 7 Marlene Shore, The Science of Social Redemption: McGill, the Chicago School, and the Origins of Social Research in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 66-7,70-2. 8 P.T. Rooke and R.L. Schnell, No Bleeding Heart: Charlotte Whitton, A Feminist on the Right (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1987), i. 9 For a discussion of struggles within a social field see Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). 10 See, for example, Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, The Postmodern Turn (New York: Guilford Press, 1997); Stephen Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). 11 Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Concord, ON: Anansi, 1991), 106-8. 12 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: the Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988), 16. 13 Roberta Wells Imre, 'Social Work and Philosophy/ Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 18, no. 4, Special Issue on Philosophical Issues in Social Work (December 1991), 11-12; Mary Ellen Kondrat, 'Reclaiming the Practical: Formal and Substantive Rationality in Social Work Practice/ Social Service Review 66, no. 2 (June 1992): 237-55. 14 For the discussion of this tension in social work from a historical perspective, see John Ehrenreich, The Altruistic Imagination: A History of Social Work And Social Policy in the United States (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Struthers, The Limits. 15 George Grant, English Speaking Justice (Toronto: Anansi, 1974), 82. 16 John Hittinger, 'Philosophy and the Quest for Ethical Foundations: An Overview/ Social Thought 15, no. 314 (summer-fall 1989): 18-31; Dennis Saleebey, 'Technological Fix: Altering the Consciousness of the Social Work Profession/ Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 18, no. 4 (December 1991): 62. Roger Hutchinson, Personal communication with author, April 1995. 17 Wills, A Marriage, 56-79,135-42; Irving, The Scientific.' 18 Ursula Franklin, The Real World of Technology (Toronto: Anansi, 1992), 15-17. 19 Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage, 1964), 19-21.

Notes to pages 8-14 119 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Foucault, The Order, xx-xxiv, 50-7. Shore, The Science, 31-4. Irving, The Scientific/ 9-25. Baines, 'From Women's Benevolence'; Ken Moffatt, The Influence of Technology upon the Emerging Profession of Social Work/ Canadian Social Work Review 10, no. i (winter 1993): 43-55; Wills, A Marriage. Struthers, The Limits, 5. Wills, A Marriage, 139-40. Burke, Seeking. For further discussion on the gendered nature of social service work and social work, see Baines, The Professions'; Baines, 'From Women's Benevolence'; Burke, Seeking; Wills, A Marriage. Burke, Seeking, 6-7. Berman, All That Is Solid, 16-20, 35-6. Livesay, Journey, 156. Burke, Seeking, 127-29. Rooke and Schnell, No Bleeding Heart, 103. Burke, Seeking, 127-29; Livesay, Journey, 156; Rooke and Schnell, No Bleeding Heart, 103. Harry Hiller, 'Paradigmatic Shifts, Indigenization and the Development of Sociology in Canada/ Journal of the History of Behavioural Sciences 16 (1980): 263-74; Shore, The Science.

i: The Contested Concepts of Social Service and Social Change 1 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: the Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988), 149-71. 2 John H. Thompson with Allen Seager, Canada, 1922-1939: Decades of Discord (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1985), 330-2. 3 Richard Allen, The Social Passion: Religion and Social Reform', 1914-1928 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), 86-7. 4 John H. Thompson, The Harvests of War: The Prairie West, 1914-1918 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1978), 160-9. 5 Allen, Social Passion, 88. 6 Maria Tippett, Making Culture: English-Canadian Institutions and the Arts before the Massey Commission (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 127-54. 7 Stephen Spender, World within World (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), 242. 8 James Struthers, The Limits of Affluence: Welfare in Ontario, 1920-1970 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 79-81.

120 Notes to pages 14-18 9 Spender, World, 253. 10 Thompson with Seager, Canada, 230-2. 11 Kenneth McNaught, 'Socialism and the Canadian Political Tradition/ in On F.R. Scott, ed. Sandra Djwa and R. St J. Macdonald (Montreal: McGillQueen's University Press, 1983), 92. 12 Tippett, Making Culture, 10-13. 13 Thompson with Seager, Canada, 161. 14 Ibid., 168-70; Tippett, Making Culture, 27-8. 15 University of Manitoba, Department of Archives and Special Collections (hereafter UMA) Manuscript Series 37 (hereafter MSS 37), Box 100, folder 25, Dorothy Livesay, "The Documentary Poem: A Canadian Genre," paper presented to ACUTE at the Learneds Societies, York University, 12 June 1969; Thompson with Seager, Canada, 165-9; Tippett, Making Culture, 25-30; Leon Edel, The Young Warrior in the Twenties,' in On F.R. Scott, ed. Djwa and Macdonald, 6-16. 16 Thompson with Seager, Canada, 158-9. 17 Sandra Djwa, introduction to On F.R. Scott, ed. Djwa and Macdonald, xiv; Allan Irving, 'A Canadian Fabian: The Life and Work of Harry Cassidy' (PhD dissertation, Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto, 1982), 133. 18 J. King Gordon, The Politics of Poetry,' in On F.R. Scott, ed. Djwa and Macdonald, 21-8; Michiel Horn, 'F.R. Scott, the Great Depression, and the League for Social Reconstruction,' in ibid., 73-5. 19 League for Social Reconstruction Manifesto (1931), quoted in Djwa, introduction, xiv. 20 Horn, 'F.R. Scott,' 74-5; Irving, 'A Canadian,' 133. 21 Gordon, The Politics/ 21; Djwa, introduction, x. 22 Gordon, The Politics/ 20. 23 Ibid., 21. 24 Ibid., 27. 25 Edel, The Young/ 6-16. 26 F.R. Scott quoted in Edel, The Young/ 7: originally quoted in Sandra Djwa/ F.R. Scott: A Canadian in the Twenties.' Papers of the Bibliographical Society in Canada 19 (1980). 27 Edel, The Young/ 7. 28 UTA, Office of the President, Cody Papers (A68-ooo6) (hereafter CP) Box 013, file 11. CAPUT, W. Delmas Clark to Dr H.J. Cody, 21 March 1933. 29 Ibid., Box 25, CAPUT, Harold Acker, Secretary protem, Communist Club to the CAPUT, 26 October 1935. 30 Ibid., Harold Acker to Dr H.J. Cody, 18 November 1935. 31 Michel Gauvreau, 'Philosophy, Psychology, and History: George Sidney

Notes to pages 18-22 121 Brett and the Quest for a Social Science at the University of Toronto, 192040.' Canadian Historical Association Historical Papers (1988): 209-36. 32 McGill University Archives (hereafter MUA), Record Group 2 (hereafter RG 2), Container 36, File 121, 'Report of the Special Survey Committee, 1930-31, McGill University, Faculty of Arts and Science.' 33 UTA, Political Economy Papers, Accession A69-OOO7 (hereafter PE, A690007), File 13, potential communication Professor Mcllworth, Department of Anthropology, to Dr Speakman, Ontario Research Foundation, 8 January 1930. 34 Ibid., correspondence E.J. Urwick to Dr Speakman, Ontario Research Foundation, 28 January 1930. 35 MUA, Scrapbooks, Volume 7, Montreal Gazette, 13 March 1931, 'Social Science is Theme of Address, Dr. Dawson Stresses the Importance of Subject for Curriculum of Colleges.' 36 MUA, Record Group 4, Container 10, Board of Governors Minute Books. 37 Gauvreau, 'Philosophy,' 209-36. 38 Brian McKillop, Contours of Canadian Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987). 39 Gauvreau, 'Philosophy,' 234. 40 MUA, RG 2, Container 58, File 902, Dean of Arts and Science, communication from Ira MacKay to Sir Arthur Currie, 5 January 1927. 41 MUA, Record Group 32 (hereafter RG 32), Container 22, 'Sociology and Social Science/ Stephen Leacock, 'A Memorandum on a Department of Sociology and Social Service,' 13 February 1922. 42 Allen, Social Passion. 43 Ramsay Cook, The Regenerators: Social Criticism in Late Victorian English Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 175-6. 44 Richard Allen, The Social Gospel and the Reform Tradition in Canada, 1890-1928,' Canadian Historical Review 69 (December 1968): 381-99. 45 Ibid. 46 Randi Warne, 'Nellie McClung's Social Gospel,' in Changing Roles of Women within the Christian Church in Canada, ed. Elizabeth Gillan Muir and Marilyn Fardig Whiteley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 339~5447 Carol Baines, 'Women's Reform Organizations in Canada, 1870-1930: A Historical Perspective,' in Working Papers on Social Welfare in Canada (Toronto: Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto, 1988), 54. 48 See Baines, 'Women's Reform Organizations.' 49 Warne, 'Nellie McClung,' 339, 349. 50 Allen, The Social Passion, 287-8. 51 Cook, The Regenerators; McKillop, Contours.

122 Notes to pages 22-4 52 Phyllis Airhart, Serving the Present Age: Revivalism, Progressivism, and the Methodist Tradition in Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1992); Michel Gauvreau, The Evangelical Century: College and Creed in English Canada from the Great Revival to the Great Depression (Montreal: McGillQueen's University Press, 1991); Roger Hutchinson, The Canadian Social Gospel in the Context of Christian Ethics,' The Social Gospel in Canada: Papers of the Inter-Disciplinary Conference on the Social Gospel in Canada, ed. Richard Allen (Ottawa: National Museums of Canada, 1975), 286-316; Mariana Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885-1925 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1991). 53 Jacqueline Gayle Wills, 'Efficiency, Feminism, and Cooperative Democracy: Origins of the Toronto Social Planning Council, 1918-1957' (PhD dissertation, Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto, 1989), 317-23. 54 Carol Baines, 'From Womens' Benevolence to Professional Social Work: The Case of the Wimodausis Club and the Earlscourt Children's Home, 1902-1971' (PhD disseration, Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto, 1990), 229. 55 Gauvreau, 'Philosophy/ 213. 56 Sara Burke, Seeking the Highest Good: Social Service and Gender at the University of Toronto, 1888-1937 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 5-6. 57 Ibid., 8-15 58 Ibid., 98-9. 59 Ibid., 41-2, 59-60. 60 Irving, 'A Canadian/ 59. 61 UTA, FP, Box 133, File EJ. Urwick, correspondence H.A. Logan, Professor and Head of Department of Economic and Political Science, University of Western Ontario, to Professor E.J. Urwick, Department of Political and Social Science, 26 November 1931. 62 Marlene Shore, The Science of Social Redemption: McGill, the Chicago School, and the Origins of Social Research in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 67. 63 Irving, 'A Canadian/ 61-2. 64 Ibid., 62. 65 Lorna Hurl, 'Building a Profession: The Origin and Development of the Department of Social Service in the University of Toronto, 1914-1928,' Working Papers on Social Welfare in Canada (University of Toronto, 1983), 40. 66 UTA, FP, Box 123, file E.J. Urwick, correspondence E.J. Urwick, Director of Department of Social Service, to Dr Falconer, President, University of Toronto; Box 123, file E.J. Urwick, The Education of Social Workers' by E.J. Urwick.

Notes to pages 24-7 123 67 Ibid., file E.J. Urwick, The Education of Social Workers' by E.J. Urwick. 68 University Settlement 1911 Pamphlet quoted in Allan Irving, Harriet Parsons, and Donald Bellamy, eds., Neighbours: Three Social Settlements in Downtown Toronto (Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press, 1995), 85-6. 69 Shore, The Science, 43,48-49. 70 Allen, Social Passion, 127. 71 UTA, FP, Box 133, Urwick Correspondence, E.J. Urwick to Sir Robert Falconer, 11 February 1932. 72 Carl Dawson, 'Research and Social Action,' Social Welfare 5, no. 5 (February 1923): 93-5; Carl Dawson, The Settlement of the Peace River Country: A Study of a Pioneer Area (Toronto: Macmillan, 1934); Irving, 'A Canadian'; Shore, 'The Science.' 73 Hurl, 'Building.' 74 John Ehrenreich, The Altruistic Imagination: A History of Social Work and Social Policy in the United States (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 55-6; Doug Owram, The Government Generation: Canadian Intellectuals and the State, 1900-1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 123-5. 75 Ethel Dodds Parker, 'A Code of Ethics for Social Workers,' Social Welfare 8, no. 8 (June-July 1926): 196-9; Harold Wilensky and Charles Lebeaux, Industrial Society and Social Welfare (London: Collier Macmillan, 1965), 287. 76 Owram, Government Generation, 123-5. 77 G.B. Clarke, 'A Word from the Chairman,' Social Welfare 9, no. 2 (November 1926): 303. 78 J.A. Dale, 'Social Work's Coming of Age,' Social Welfare 9, no. 3 (December 1926): 323. 79 Ruth Hill, The Spirit of Casework as a Philosophy for Life,' Social Welfare 8, no. 8 (June-July 1926): 181-4. 80 Dale, 'Social Work's,' 323 81 Dennis Guest, The Emergence of Social Security in Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1985), 48-61; Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (London: Routledge, 1989), 115-170; Wilensky and Lebeaux, Industrial Society, 286, 303. 82 James Pitsula, The Emergence of Social Work in Toronto,' Journal of Canadian Studies 14 (spring 1979): 35-42. 83 'Official Announcement in Respect to the Organization of Canadian Association of Social Workers,' Social Welfare 8, no. i (October 1926): 284. 84 Irving, 'A Canadian,' 493. 85 Ehrenreich, The Altruistic, 57,71,76-7. 86 George Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1988), 53-67.

124 Notes to pages 27-31 87 John P. Hittinger, 'Philosophy and the Quest for Ethical Foundations: An Overview/ Social Thought 15, no. 314 (summer-fall 1989): 18-31. 88 National Archives of Canada (hereafter NAC), Whitton Papers (hereafter WP), Manuscript Group 30 (hereafter MG 30), £256, Volume 36, 'Professional Training for Social Work: The Report of a Joint National Committee representing The Canadian Association of Social Workers and The Canadian Council on Child and Family Welfare/ 1932,12. 89 Shore, The Science, 43-5. 90 Hill, 'The Spirit/ 181; Wilensky and Lebeaux, Industrial Society, 288. 91 NAC, WP, MG 30, £256, Volume 18, Correspondence Charlotte Whitton, Executive Director, Canadian Council on Child Welfare, to Mr C.E. Tait, Chairman, Calgary Committee on Community Planning, 18 December 1939. 92 Owram, Government Generation, 124. 93 Baines, 'From Women's/ 88,115,127. 94 Gale Wills, A Marriage of Convenience: Business and Social Work in Toronto, 1918-1957 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 135-40. 95 Elspeth Anne Latimer, 'An Analysis of the Social Action Behaviour of the Canadian Association of Social Workers from Its Organizational Beginning to the Modern Period' (PhD dissertation, Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto, 1972), 77, 335. 2: Social Work Practice Informed by Philosophy: The Social Thought of Edward Johns Urwick 1 Dorothy Livesay, Right Hand Left Hand. A True Life of the Thirties (Erin, ON: Press Porcepic, 1977), 73. 2 H.J. Cody, introduction to Essays in Political Economy in Honour of E.J. Urwick, ed. H. A. Innis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1938), v. 3 John A. Irving, 'Introductory Essay on the Social Philosophy of E.J. Urwick/ in The Values of Life by E.J. Urwick (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1948), xiv. 4 Cody, introduction, ix. 5 Irving, 'Introductory Essay/ xiv. 6 Ibid., xv-xxiii. 7 Harold Innis, 'Edward Johns Urwick, 1867-1945,' Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 11 (February-November 1945): 266. 8 Irving, 'Introductory Essay/ xxiv; Livesay, Right Hand Left Hand, 73. 9 UTA, PE, A69-OOO7, Box 001, file 25, E.J. Urwick to Lowell Dorn, graduate student, Knox College, 15 November 1929.

Notes to pages 31-5

125

10 Canadian Welfare Council, Tribute to a Pioneer/ Canadian Welfare (October 1946), 36; Cody, introduction, vii. 11 Edward J. Urwick, The Social Good (London: Methuen, 1927), 5. 12 Ibid., 98. 13 Ibid., 2. 14 UTA, PE, A69-0007, Box 001, file 25, E.J. Urwick to Lowell Dorn, Knox College, 15 November 1929. 15 Urwick, Social Good, 7. 16 Ibid., 83. 17 Ibid., 98. 18 Edward J. Urwick, The Message of Plato: A Reinterpretation of the Republic (London: Methuen, 1920), 225. 19 Edward J. Urwick, 'First Principles First/ Social Welfare 13, no. 2 (November 1930): 29. 20 Edward J. Urwick, 'The Role of Intelligence in the Social Process/ Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science i (February-November 1935): 64. 21 Urwick, The Message, 226. 22 Ibid., 230. 23 Urwick, Social Good, 83. 24 Urwick, The Message, 235-6. 25 UTA, PE, A69-OOO7, Box 001, file 01, Swami Achokarranda, Prabuddha Bhavatu Editorial Office, to E.J. Urwick, 12 May 1930. 26 Ibid., E.J. Urwick to Swami Achokarranda, May 1930. 27 Urwick, Social Good, 90. 28 Urwick, The Message, 226-32. 29 Urwick, Social Good, 90-3. 30 Ibid., 93. 31 Ibid. 32 UTA, FP, Box 128, file Urwick, E.J. Urwick to President Falconer, 22 November 1930. 33 Urwick, Social Good, 7. 34 Ken Moffatt and Allan Irving, '"Living for the Brethren": Protestant Theology, Philosophy, and Social Service Work, 1875-1940.' Paper presented to the Council on Social Work Education, 45th Annual Program Meeting, San Francisco, California, 1999. See also Sara Burke, Seeking the Highest Good: Social Service and Gender at the University of Toronto, 1888-1937 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). 35 Burke, Seeking, 113-16. 36 Ibid., 115. 37 Irving, 'Introductory Essay/ xii.

126 Notes to pages 35-9 38 Edward J. Urwick, The Training of Social Workers' in Canadian Conference on Social Work Proceedings (Toronto, 28 April-i May 1930), 240. 39 Edward J. Urwick, The Values of Life (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1948), 145. 40 Ibid., 72. 41 Ibid., 69. 42 Edward J. Urwick, Ts There a Scientific Sociology?' Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 4, no. 2 (May 1938): 239-40; Urwick, The Values of Life, 149. 43 Ibid., 69-70. 44 Urwick, 'Scientific Sociology,' 234. 45 Urwick, The Values, 151. 46 Ibid., 157. 47 Ibid., 144. 48 Irving, 'Introductory Essay,' xli. 49 Edward J. Urwick, 'Liberalism True and False/ University of Toronto Quarterly 7, no. 3 (April 1938): 289-90. 50 Ibid., 294. 51 Urwick, The Message, 26. 52 Burke, Seeking, 125-6. 53 UTA, PE, A69-O007, Box 001, file 28, J.G. Perold to EJ. Urwick, 19 June 1929. 54 Irving, 'Introductory Essay,' xix; UTA, Press Clippings (A73-OO26) (hereafter PC), Box 482, file 66, 'Resolution Adopted by the Senate of the University of Toronto on April 13,1945 on Motion of Professor H.M. Cassidy, Seconded by H.A. Innis.' 55 Urwick, The Message, 239. 56 UTA, CP, Box 29, file Correspondence T-V, E.J. Urwick to President Cody, 21 August 1936. 57 Irving, 'Introductory Essay,' lix. 58 UTA, FP, Box 123, file Correspondence, E.J. Urwick, E.J. Urwick to Sir Robert Falconer, President, University of Toronto, The Education of Social Workers/ 4 October 1929. 59 Canadian Welfare Council, Tribute/ 35. 60 Irving, 'Introductory Essay/ lix. 61 UTA, PC, Box 482, file 66, 'Resolution Adopted'; Box 482, file 66, 'Big Demand Noted for Social Workers, The Globe, 16 January 1929. 62 Urwick, The Training/ 239. 63 Urwick, 'First Principles/ 29. 64 Urwick, The Training/ 241. 65 Irving, 'Introductory Essay/ xix.

Notes to pages 40-4 127 66 UTA, PE, A69-OOO7, Box 01, file 11, E.J. Urwick to Miss Kelly, 31 January 1929. 67 Ibid., Box 001, file 05, the Rev. J.C. Pringle to E.J. Urwick, 21 February 1929. 68 Urwick, The Role/ 67-8. 69 Ibid., 75. 70 UTA, PE, A69-OOO7, Box 001, file 01, E.J. Urwick to Professor E.A. Bott, Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, 14 February 1930. 71 UTA, Political Economy Papers ^76-0025) (hereafter PE, A76-OO25), Box 001, file 06, George Mooney, Assistant Director, Montreal Metropolitan Commission, Department of Planning and Research, 10 March 1937. 72 Ibid., E.J. Urwick to George Mooney, 12 March 1937. 73 Ibid., Box 001, file 06. E.J. Urwick to Mrs W.L. Grant, 15 January 1937; E.J. Urwick to Mr Shearson, 15 January 1937. 74 Edward J. Urwick, The Building of Community: Address to the Toronto Conference of Social Welfare, April 24,1936,' Social Welfare 16, no. 4 (September 1936): 106. 75 Burke, Seeking, 129. 76 See Moffatt and Irving, 'Living.' 77 Burke, Seeking, 138-40. 78 Urwick, The Building,' 105. 79 UTA, PE, A76-0025, Box 001, file 06, E.J. Urwick to the Rev. C.E. Silcox, Social Service Council, 18 May 1937. 80 Ibid., file 05, Memorandum, Toronto and Its Slums.' 81 Ibid. 82 Urwick, 'The Building,' 105. 83 Edward J. Urwick, The Economics of the Housing Problem/ Social Welfare 17, nos. 2/3 (June-September 1937), 38-9. 84 See UTA, PE A76-OO25, Box 001, file 05, for the many roles that Urwick took with regard to housing. 85 Canadian Welfare Council, Tribute/ 34. 86 Ibid., 36. 87 UTA, PC, A73-0026, Box 482, file 66, 'Resolution Adopted.' 88 Marjorie King, 'E.J. Urwick/ Canadian Welfare 43, no. 2 (March-April 1967): 32. 89 Innis, 'Edward Johns/ 268. 90 Ibid., 266. 91 Ibid., 268. 92 Urwick, The Message, 128. 93 Ibid., 224.

128 Notes to pages 44-50 94 95 96 97

Urwick, 'Liberalism/ 293. Burke, Seeking, 129. Moffatt and Irving, 'Living,' 2-3. See, for example, Adrienne S. Chambon, Allan Irving, and Laura Epstein, eds., Reading Foucaultfor Social Work (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Peter Leonard, Postmodern Welfare: Reconstructing an Emancipatory Project (London: Sage, 1997); Nigel Parton, The Nature of Social Work under the Condition of (Post)Modernity/ Social Work and Social Sciences Review 5, no. 2 (1994): 93-112. 98 Burke, Seeking, 127-9. 3: Dorothy Livesay's Politics of Engagement

1 Elspeth Cameron, Earle Birney: A Life (Toronto: Viking, 1994), 99-101. 2 UTA, PE (A76-OO25), Box 001, file 7. Correspondence, Harry Cassidy to E.J. Urwick, 7 August 1936. 3 Ibid., Harry Cassidy to E.J. Urwick, 27 August 1936. 4 Ibid., Cassidy to E.J. Urwick, 7 August 1936. 5 Dorothy Livesay, Journey with My Selves: A Memoir, 1909-1963 (Vancouver: Douglas & Mclntyre, 1991), 55-8. 6 Ibid., 17-28. 7 Peter Stevens, Dorothy Livesay: Patterns in a Poetic Life (Toronto: ECW Press, 1992), 9. 8 Ibid., 9-11; Desmond Pacey, introduction, to Selected Poems of Dorothy Livesay, 1926-1956 (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1957), xi-xvii. 9 Lee Briscoe Thompson, Dorothy Livesay (Boston: Twayne, 1987), 42-3. 10 University of Manitoba, Department of Archives and Special Collections, Tape Collection 31 (hereafter TC 31), tape 22, 'Interview with Dorothy Livesay.' 11 Livesay, Journey, 28-9. 12 Ibid., 68. 13 UMA, MSS 37, Box 3, folder 3. 'Diaries 1929-31.' Diary entry, 21 January 1930. 14 Ibid., Diary entry, 25 February 1930. 15 Ibid., Diary entry, 21 January 1930. 16 Ibid., Diary entry, 10 March 1930. 17 Ibid., Diary entry, 25 February 1930. 18 Ibid., Diary entry, 21 January 1930. 19 Ibid., Diary entry, 25 February 1930. 20 Ibid., Diary entry, 22 November 1929.

Notes to pages 50-2 129 21 UMA, MSS 37, Box 91, folder 12. Dorothy Livesay, 'A Soujourn en Pension/ 16. 22 Ibid. 23 UMA, MSS 37, Box 37, folder 3. Correspondence, Dorothy Livesay to John Frederick Bligh Livesay, 7 January 1932; Dorothy Livesay to John Frederick Bligh Livesay, 24 February 1932; Dorothy Livesay to John Frederick Bligh Livesay, 23 March 1932. 24 Ibid., Dorothy Livesay to John Frederick Bligh Livesay, 24 February 1932. 25 Ibid., Box 106, file 12. Dorothy Livesay, Talk: Poetry Is History Imaginatively Conceived/ 1981. 26 Ibid., folder 14. Dorothy Livesay, Talk: The Problems of the Writer in Canada.' Address given to the Massey Commission, undated. 27 Ibid., Box 3, file 3, 'Diaries 1929-31.' Diary entry, 23 February 1930. 28 Ibid., Box 2, folder i, Dorothy Livesay, "Journal Entries on the Thirties written December 1973 to 2 January 1974.' 29 Sean Purdy, Radicals and Revolutionaries: The History of Canadian Communism from the Robert S. Kenny Collection (Toronto: University of Toronto Library, 1998), 51. 30 UMA, MSS 37, Box 73, folder 44. Correspondence, Joe Wallace, communist poet, to Dorothy Livesay, 18 January 1935. 31 Ibid., Box 60, folder 37. Correspondence, William Lawson, editor, New Frontier, to Dorothy Livesay, 6 May 1937. 32 Ibid., Box 37, folder 3. Correspondence, John Frederick Bligh Livesay to Dorothy Livesay, 4 June 1934. 33 Ibid., Box 41, folder i. Correspondence, Duncan Cameron Macnair to Dorothy Livesay, 17 August 1936. 34 Ibid., Box 107, folder 9. Dorothy Livesay, 'Early Writings on Economic Situation/ undated. 35 Ibid., Box 106, folder 31. Dorothy Livesay, 'On Dorothy Livesay's Own 19305 Poetry and Its Relation to Social Activism.' 36 Dorothy Livesay, The Documentaries: Selected Longer Poems (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1968), 15. 37 UMA, MSS 37, Box 2, folder i. Dorothy Livesay, 'Journal entries.' 38 Ibid., Box 41, folder i. Correspondence, Dorothy Livesay to Duncan Cameron Macnair, 1936. 39 Ibid., Box i, folder 5. 'Autobiographical Statements, 1937-1980.' 40 UMA, TC 31, Tape 46. 'CBC Interview/ undated. 41 Ibid. 42 UMA, MSS 37, Box i, folder 5. 'Autobiographical statements.'

130 Notes to pages 53-6 43 Ibid. 44 Correspondence, Dorothy Livesay to Jean Morton, in Dorothy Livesay, Right Hand Left Hand: A True Life of the Thirties (Erin, ON: Press Porcepic, I977)/ 59-60. 45 Dorothy Livesay, 'Depression Suite/ in Collected Poems: The Two Seasons (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1972), 91. 46 MUA, MSS 37, Box 106, folder 31. Dorothy Livesay, 'On Dorothy Livesay's own 19305 poetry/ 47 Ibid., Box 2, folder i. Dorothy Livesay, 'Journal entries/ 48 UMA, TC 31, tape 22. 'Interview with Dorothy Livesay/ 49 Livesay, Journey, 81. 50 Cameron, Earle Birney, 99. 51 UMA, MSS 37, Box 2, folder i. Dorothy Livesay, 'Journal Entries/ 52 Norman Penner, Canadian Communism: The Stalin Years and Beyond (Toronto: Methuen, 1988), 97-127. 53 Ibid., 128-34. 54 Purdy, Radicals, 46. 55 UMA, MSS 37, Box 2, folder i. Dorothy Livesay, 'Journal entries/ 56 Ibid., Box 80, folder 4, number 11, 'Livesay 3O's Poetry.' 57 Purdy, Radicals, 46. 58 Livesay, Journey, 81. 59 UMA, MSS 37, Box 2, folder i. Dorothy Livesay, 'Journal Entries/ 60 Purdy, Radicals, 47. 61 Cameron, Earle Birney, 99-101. 62 See, for example, Dorothy Livesay, 'Montreal: 1933,' in Collected Poems, 76-7; Livesay, 'An Immigrant,' ibid., 77-9; Livesay, 'Queen City,' ibid., 80-5; Livesay, 'Dominion Day at Regina,' ibid., 92. 63 See for example, UMA, MSS 37, Box 91, folder 20. Two Women/ Box 90, folder 34, 'No Address,' Box 91, folder 21, 'Unchanging Times/ 64 See for example, ibid., Box 9, folder 23, 'The Way Out,' Box 96, folder 2, 'Carol,' Box 96, folder i, 'Struggle - a Mass Chant,' Box 96, folder 4, 'The House That Jack Built/ 65 See, for example, ibid., Box 107, folder 11. 'Proletarians in Canada/ Box 107, folder 9, 'Corbin - 49 A Company Town Fights for Its Life/ 66 Livesay, Journey, 81. 67 UMA, MSS 37, Box 2, folder i. Livesay, 'Journal entries/ 68 Ibid. 69 See Livesay, 'Lorca,' in Collected Poems, 125-7; UMA, MSS 37, Box 100, folder 23, Livesay, 'Canadian Poetry: Our Debt to Spain/ 70 UMA, MSS 37, Box 2, folder i, Dorothy Livesay, 'Journal entries/

Notes to pages 56-60 131 71 Stephen Spender, World within World (London: Faber & Faber, 1997), xii, 136-8. 72 Ibid., xi. 73 Livesay, The Documentaries, 16-17. 74 UMA, MSS 37, Box i, folder 5, 'Autobiographical Statements, 1937-1980.' 75 Ibid., Box 41, folder i, Correspondence, Dorothy Livesay to Duncan Macnair, 1936, postmarked Sunday evening. 76 Ibid., Box 106, folder 31. 'On Dorothy Livesay's own 19305 poetry.' 77 Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1976), 2. 78 Spender, World, 155. 79 Ibid., 187. 80 Ibid., 186. 81 UMA, MSS 37, Box 37, folder 3, Correspondence, John Frederick Bligh Livesay to Dorothy Livesay, 30 May 1934. 82 UMA, MSS 37, Box 37, folder 3, 'Dorothy Livesay's Letters to JFBL, 19305.' Correspondence, Dorothy Livesay to John Frederick Bligh Livesay, undated. 83 Livesay, The Documentaries, 17. 84 Paul Denham, Dorothy Livesay and Her Works (Toronto: ECW Press, 1993), 22. 85 Livesay, 'Day and Night,' in Day and Night: Poems by Dorothy Livesay (Toronto: Ryerson, 1944), 21. 86 Livesay, The Documentaries, 15-16. 87 Livesay, Journey, 149. 88 UMA, TC 31, tape 22; Livesay, 'Comrade,' in Collected Poems, 93. 89 UMA, TC 31, tape 22. 90 Thompson, Dorothy Livesay, 118. 91 Ibid., 140. 92 UMA, MSS 37, Box 2, folder i, Dorothy Livesay, 'Autob Notes.' 93 Ibid., Box 80, folder 3, Dorothy Livesay, 'Untitled/ unpublished poem, 26 February 1932. 94 Livesay, 'Queen City,' in Collected Poems, 80. 95 UMA, MSS 37, Box 80, folder 4, Dorothy Livesay, 'Canada to the Soviet Union,' 1934-5. 96 Ibid., Box 3, folder 3, 'Diaries 1929-1931.' Virginia Woolf as quoted in Dorothy Livesay's diary, 26 May 1929. 97 Spender, World, 187. 98 UMA, MSS 37, Box 3, folder 3, 'Diaries 1929-1931.' 99 Pamela Banting, 'Essays,' in The Papers of Dorothy Livesay (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1986), 219.

132 Notes to pages 60-9 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 no 111 112 113

Ibid., 229-30. Cameron, Earle Birney, 201-2. UMA, M.S.S. 37, Box 2, folder i. Livesay, 'Journal entries.' Livesay, Journey, 151. Cameron, Earle Birney, 164. Ibid., 181. UMA, MSS 37, Box 80, folder 4, 'Poems of the 30's.' Livesay, 'Montreal.' Ibid., 'Unemployed.' Livesay, 'Queen City/ in Collected Poems, 83. Ibid., 84. UMA, TC 31, tape 46, 'CBC Interview/ Livesay, Journey, 150; UMA, TC 31, tape 46, 'CBC Interview.' Livesay, Journey, 151. Dorothy Livesay, 'Song and Dance/ Canadian Literature 41 (summer 1969), 44114 Livesay, 'Day and Night/ in Day and Night, 16. 115 Denham, 'Lyric and Documentary/ 94. 116 Thompson, Dorothy Livesay, 46. 117 UMA, MSS 37, Box 80, folder 4. Dorothy Livesay, 'Case History/ October 1933. 118 Livesay, 'Day and Night/ in Day and Night, 20. 119 Livesay, The Depression Suite/ Collected Poems, 87. 120 Thompson, Dorothy Livesay, 46; Denham, 'Lyric and Documentary/ 98. 121 Livesay, The Documentaries, 2-3. 122 Livesay, The Outrider/ in Day and Night, 11. 123 Livesay, The Case Supervisor/ Right Hand, 103-11. 124 Livesay, Journey, 156. 125 For similar points of view, see Thompson, Dorothy Livesay; Paul Denham, 'Lyric and Documentary'; and Jonathan C. Pierce, 'A Tale of Two Generations: The Public and Private Voices of Dorothy Livesay/ in A Public, 19-32. 126 Livesay, Right Hand, 56. 127 Spender, World, 94. 128 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988), 129. 4: Social Science in a Secular Society: The Thought of Carl Addington Dawson i Carl Dawson, E.J. Urwick, and Charlotte Whitton, 'Recruiting and Training

Notes to pages 70-2 133 Social Workers/ Canadian Conference on Social Work Proceedings (Toronto, 28 April-i May 1930), 242. 2 Marlene Shore, The Science of Social Redemption: McGill, the Chicago School, and the Origins of Social Research in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 70-3. 3 Ibid., 122. 4 Ibid., 171. 5 Ibid., 271. 6 MUA, Scrapbooks File. Star, 10 November 1941. 7 Shore, The Science, 50. 8 MUA, RG 32, Container 22, Sociology and Social Science, Howard J. Falk, Department of Social Service, McGill University, 'A Review of the Social Work Situation in Montreal from August 1918 to October, 1921 from the Standpoint of the Department of Social Service.' 9 MUA, RG 32, Container 22, 'Sociology and Social Science,' Stephen Leacock, 'A Memorandum on a Department of Sociology and Social Service,' 13 February 1922. 10 MUA, Record Group 62 (hereafter RG 62), Container 62, file 1060. Department of Sociology Genesis, 1920-25, Correspondence, Howard Falk, Director, Department of Social Service, to A.P.S. Glassco, Secretary and Bursar, McGill University, 9 February 1922; Correspondence, Howard Falk, 13 February 1922. MUA, RG 2, Container 62, file 1058, Memorandum from Helen R.Y. Reid submitted to the members of the Committee of Management of the Social Service Department, 15 April 1922. 11 MUA, RG 2, Container 62, file 1058, 'Minutes of the Meeting of the Committee of Management held in the Office of the Principal,' 19 April 1922. 12 Ibid., file 1060, Correspondence, Howard Falk, 13 February 1922. 13 Shore, The Science, 65. 14 Ibid., 67. 15 MUA, RG 32, Container 22, file Sociology and Social Science, Carl Dawson, 'Report for the Opening Session, School for Social Workers, McGill. 1926-27.' 16 MUA, RG 2, Container 58, Survey - General - Principal Currie, 1930-31, Correspondence, Sir Arthur Currie to the Deans, 26 November 1930. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., file 872, 'Minutes of the Arts Survey Committee/ 13 April 1931. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 6 March 1931. 21 MUA, RG 32, Container 22, Sociology and Social Science, Carl Dawson,

134 Notes to pages 73-6

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47

'Report of the Director of the McGill School for Social Workers. First Term, 1929-30.' MUA, RG 2, Container 58, file 872, 'Arts Survey Committee Minutes/ 27 March 1931. Ibid., 'Arts Survey Committee Minutes,' Friday 6 March 1931. Ibid. Ibid., 'Arts Survey Committee Minutes,' 27 March 1931. Ibid. Ibid., 'Arts Survey Committee Minutes/ 6 March 1931. Ibid., 'Arts Survey Committee Minutes/ 27 March 1931. Ibid. Ibid. MUA, RG 4, Container 10, 'Board of Governor's Minute Book/ 23 June 1930. Allan Irving, 'Leonard Marsh and the McGill Social Science Research Project/ Journal of Canadian Studies 21, no. 2 (summer 1986): 34. Ibid., 7. MUA, RG 4, Container 10, 'Board of Governor's Minute Books/ August 1931. Harry Hiller, 'Paradigmatic Shifts, Indigenization, and the Development of Sociology in Canada/ Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences 16 (1980): 264; Allan Irving, 'Leonard Marsh/ 7. MUA, RG 4, Container 10, 'Board of Governor's Minute Book/ 23 June 1930. Ibid., Reel 4, 'Board of Governor's Minute Books/ 3 August 1931. Shore, The Science, 67. Hiller, 'Paradigmatic Shifts/ 264. For a full discussion of Dawson's promotion of social science, see Shore, The Science; Harry Hiller, 'Paradigmatic Shifts.' Carl Dawson and Warner Gettys, An Introduction to Sociology (New York: Ronald Press, 1929), 820. Shore, The Science, xv. Lawton R. Burns, 'The Chicago School and the Study of OrganizationEnvironment Relations/ Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences 16 (1980): 342. Burns, The Chicago School/ 345. Carl Dawson, 'Human Ecology/ in The Field and Methods of Sociology, ed. L.L. Bernard (New York: Ray Lang and Richard Smith, 1934), 294-5. Carl Dawson, The Settlement of the Peace River Country: A Study of a Pioneer Area (Toronto: Macmillan, 1934), 13. Shore, The Science, xv.

Notes to pages 76-82 135 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

Burns, The Chicago School/ 345. Dawson, 'Human/ 293. Dawson, The Settlement, 3. Ibid., 244. Ibid., 12-13. Ibid., 11. Dawson, 'Human/ 297-8. Carl Dawson, Pioneering in the Prairie Provinces: The Social Side of the Settlement Process (Toronto: Macmillan, 1940), 39. 56 Burns, The Chicago School/ 345. 57 Dawson and Gettys, An Introduction (1929), 310. 58 Dawson, The Settlement, 246. 59 Ibid., 247. 60 Ibid., 12. 61 Dawson and Gettys, An Introduction (1929), 488. 62 Dawson, The Settlement, 12. 63 Ibid., 3. 64 Ibid., 246. 65 Ibid., 241. 66 Dawson and Gettys, An Introduction (1929), 227. 67 Dawson, The Settlement, 12. 68 Carl Dawson, Group Settlement: Ethnic Communities in Western Canada (Toronto: Macmillan 1936), 380. 69 Dawson and Gettys, An Introduction (1929), 227. 70 Dawson, Group Settlement, 379-80. 71 Roger Hutchinson, The Public Faith of a Democratic Socialist/ Journal of Canadian Studies 21 (summer 1986): 26-37. 72 Dawson, Group Settlement, 379-80. 73 Carl Dawson, 'Social Work as a National Institution/ Social Welfare 10 (July 1928): 226. 74 Dawson and Gettys, An Introduction (1929), 20. 75 Ibid., 23. 76 Shore, The Science, 72. 77 Ibid., 69. 78 Dawson, The Settlement, 255-6. 79 Dawson and Gettys, An Introduction (1929), 824. 80 Ibid., 825-926. 81 Carl Dawson, 'Research and Social Action/ Social Welfare 5 (February 1923): 93-582 Dawson and Gettys, An Introduction (1929), 827. 83 Ibid., 826-7.

136 Notes to pages 82-7 84 Ibid., 819-20. 85 Carl Dawson and Warner Gettys, An Introduction to Sociology, rev. ed. (New York: Ronald Press, 1935). 86 Ibid., 61. 87 Ibid. 88 Shore, The Science, 85. 89 Carl Dawson, 'Social Research in Canada/ Social Welfare 9 (July 1927): 470. 90 Dawson, 'Research and Social Action/ 93. 91 Dawson and Gettys, An Introduction (1935), 819-20. 92 Shore, The Science, 69. 93 Dawson, 'Research and Social Action/ 93. 94 Dawson, 'Social Research/ 470. 95 Shore, The Science, 122-4. 96 MUA, RG 32, Container 22, Sociology and Social Science, Carl Dawson, Report for the Opening of the Session, School for Social Workers, McGill, 1926-27. 97 MUA, Scrapbook file, Volume 7, Carl Dawson, 'Family Life Given Greater Attention, Influence of Home Environment on Child Shown' Gazetteer, 1931,183. 98 Dawson and Gettys, An Introduction (1929), 826-7. 99 Ibid., 30. 100 Dawson, 'Research and Social Action/ 95. 101 Hutchinson, 'The Public Faith/ 26-37. 102 Dawson and Gettys, An Introduction (1929), 227. 5: A Scientific and Philanthropic Christian Community: The Philosophy of Charlotte Whitton 1 NAC, WP, MG 30, E. 256, Vol. 18, Correspondence, Charlotte Whitton to N.M. Moffatt, undated. 2 Carl Dawson, E J. Urwick, and Charlotte Whitton, 'Recruiting and Training Social Workers/ Canadian Conference on Social Work Proceedings (Toronto, 28 April-i May 1930), 242. 3 James Struthers, 'A Profession in Crisis: Charlotte Whitton and Canadian Social Work in the 19303,' in The Benevolent State, ed. Alan Moscovitch and Jim Albert (Toronto: Garamond Press, 1987), 111-12. 4 NAC, WP, MG 30, E. 256, Vol. 18, Correspondence, J.F.B. Livesay to Charlotte Whitton, 8 May 1939. 5 P.T. Rooke and R.L. Schnell, No Bleeding Heart: Charlotte Whitton, A Feminist on the Right (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1987), 5-6. 6 Ibid., i.

Notes to pages 87-92 137 7 Ibid., 113. 8 Ibid., 113-14. 9 NAC, WP, MG 30, E. 256, Vol. 19, Charlotte Whitton, 'Changing Concepts in Social Welfare/ 1939, 8. 10 Ibid., 8. 11 Ibid., 9. 12 NAC, WP, MG 30, E. 256, Vol. 19, 'Memorandum re: Child Welfare in the Province of Ontario-i93O,' i. 13 Ibid., 'Fundamental Welfare Legislation -1939,' Women's Institute of Central Ontario, Toronto, 23 November 1939. 14 Ibid., E. 256, Vol. 18, Charlotte Whitton, 'Government in Social Well Being 1938,' 5. 15 Ibid., Vol. 19, Charlotte Whitton, The Religious Education of the Child,' an address given to the Home and School Council, Kingston, Ontario, 11 February 1936; E. 256, Charlotte Whitton, 'Fundamental Welfare.' 16 Charlotte Whitton, The Dawn of Ampler Life: Some Aids to Social Security (Toronto: Macmillan, 1943), 25. 17 Rooke and Schnell, No Bleeding Heart, 81. 18 NAC, WP, MG 30, E. 256, Vol. 18, Whitton, 'Government in Social Well Being,' 1938, 42. 19 Ibid., Vol. 19, Whitton, 'Changing Concepts in Social Welfare,' 1939,11. 20 Ibid., Whitton, The Religious Education,' unnumbered page. 21 Rooke and Schnell, No Bleeding Heart, 103. 22 NAC, WP, MG 30, E. 256, Vol. 19, Whitton, The Religious Education,' 9. 23 Rooke and Schnell, No Bleeding Heart, 103; NAC, WP, MG 30, E. 256, Vol. 19, Whitton, 'Changing Concepts,' unnumbered page. 24 NAC, WP, MG 30, E. 256, Vol. 19, Whitton, The Religious Education,' 17. 25 Ibid., 10. 26 NAC, WP, MG 30, E. 256, Vol. 19, Whitton, 'Changing Concepts,' 18. 27 Ibid., Whitton, The Religious Education,' 13. 28 Rooke and Schnell, No Bleeding Heart, 112. 29 Ibid., 112-13. 30 NAC, WP, MG 30, E. 256, Vol. 19, Whitton, The Religious Education,' 10. 31 Ibid., 15. 32 Charlotte Whitton, 'On Taking Leave,' Social Welfare 4, no. 10 (December 1921): 207. 33 NAC, WP, MG 30, E. 256, Vol. 19, Whitton, 'Changing Concepts,' unnumbered page. 34 Quoted in Rooke and Schnell, No Bleeding Heart, 100. 35 For a discussion of maternal feminism, see Carol Baines, 'Women's Reform

138 Notes to pages 92-7 Organizations in Canada, 1870-1930: A Historical Perspective/ Working Papers on Social Welfare in Canada (Toronto: Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto, 1988). 36 NAC, WP, MG 30, E. 256, Vol. 19, Charlotte Whitton, The Social Worker Pleads for Faith/ 1935,21. 37 Ibid., 17. 38 NAC, WP, MG 30, E. 256, Vol. 19, Whitton, The Religious Education/ 16. 39 Ibid., 16. 40 NAC, WP, MG 30, E. 256, Vol. 19, Whitton, The Social Worker/ 15. 41 Ibid., 16. 42 NAC, WP, MG 30, E. 256, Vol. 19, Whitton, The Child - A Factor in National Economy/ undated. 43 Ibid., Whitton, 'Changing Concepts/ 12. 44 Ibid., Whitton, The Child/ 16. 45 Ibid., 5. 46 NAC, WP, MG 30, E. 256, Vol. 19, Whitton, 'Changing Concepts/ unnumbered page. 47 Whitton, The Dawn, 16. 48 NAC, WP, MG 30, E. 256, Vol. 19, Whitton, The Religious Education/ unnumbered page. 49 Charlotte Whitton, The Bewildered Community To-day, Canada, 1934 (Ottawa: Canadian Council on Child and Family Welfare, 1934), 6. 50 Whitton, The Dawn, 4. 51 Ibid., 4. 52 Ibid., 4,15. 53 NAC, WP, MG 30, E. 256, Vol. 19, Whitton, 'Changing Concepts/ unnumbered page. 54 Ibid., Whitton, 'Government/ 41. 55 Ibid., 5-6. 56 Ibid., 41-2. 57 Whitton, The Dawn, 4. 58 NAC, WP, MG 30, E. 256, Vol. 19, Whitton, 'Government/ 441-2. 59 Ibid., Whitton, "The Social Worker/ 14. 60 Ibid., 10. 61 James Struthers, 'Lord Give Us Men: Women and Social Work in English Canada, 1918 to 1953,' in The Benevolent State, ed. Alan Moscovitch and Jim Albert (Toronto: Garamond Press, 1987), 126. 62 NAC, WP, MG 30, E. 256, Vol. 18, Correspondence, Charlotte Whitton to Miss May McPhredan, Director, Family Welfare Bureau of Vancouver, 23 January 1937.

Notes to pages 97-104 139 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

Struthers, 'Lord Give Us Men/ 126. Struthers, 'A Profession in Crisis/ 115-16. Ibid., 122. Ibid., 115. NAC, WP, MG 30, E. 256, Whitton, The Social Worker/ 17-18. Ibid., 16. Whitton, The Dawn, 71. Ibid., 71-2. Struthers, 'Lord Give Us Men/ 136. Rooke and Schnell, No Bleeding Heart, 102-4. Ibid., 103. Struthers, 'Lord Give Us Men/ 130. Rooke and Schnell, No Bleeding Heart, 104.

Conclusion 1 Sara Burke, Seeking the Highest Good: Social Service and Gender at the University of Toronto, 1888-1937 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). 2 Stephen Spender, World within World (London: Faber & Faber, 1997), 31. 3 Lorraine Code, 'Who Cares? The Poverty of Objectivism for a Moral Epistemology/ in Rethinking Objectivity, ed. Allan Megill (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 182. 4 Pierrre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). 5 Adrienne Chambon, 'Postmodernity and Social Work Discourse(s): Notes on Changing Language of a Profession/ in Essays on Postmodernism and Social Work, ed. Allan Irving and Adrienne Chambon (Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press, 1994), 71-2; Adrienne Chambon and Allan Irving, 'Conclusion: Issues to Look Forward To/ in Reading Foucault for Social Work, ed. Adrienne Chambon, Allan Irving, and Laura Epstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 6 Barbara Adam, 'Time for Feminist Approaches to Technology, "Nature" and Work/ Arena Journal 4 (1994/95): 93; Christopher Lasch, 'Communitarianism or Populism? The Ethic of Compassion and the Ethic of Respect/ in The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), 92-116. 7 See Carol Baines, The Professions and an Ethic of Care/ in Women's Caring: Feminist Perspectives on Social Welfare, ed. Carol Baines, Patricia Evans anda Sheila Neysmith (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1991), 36-72.

140 Notes to pages 105-15 8 Ken Moffatt, The Impact of Technology upon the Emerging Profession of Social Work/ Canadian Social Work Review 10, no. i (winter 1993): 43-55. 9 Allan Irving, 'From Image to Simulacra: The Modern/Postmodern Divide and Social Work/ in Essays on Postmodernism and Social Work, ed. Chambon and Irving, 18-30. 10 See also Burke, Seeking; P.T. Rooke and R.L. Schnell, No Bleeding Heart: Charlotte Whitton, A Feminist on the Right (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1987); Marlene Shore, The Science of Social Redemption: McGill, the Chicago School, and the Origins of Social Research in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987); Gayle Wills, A Marriage of Convenience: Business and Social Work in Toronto, 1918-1957 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995). 11 Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage, 1964), 19-21. 12 See also, Stephen Shechter, The AIDS Notebooks (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 1-18; John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1995). 13 Charles Taylor, 'Foucault on Freedom and Truth/ Political Theory 12, no. 2 (May 1984): 152; Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980). 14 Roger Hutchinson, The Public Faith of a Democratic Socialist/ Journal of Canadian Studies 21 (summer 1986): 26-37. 15 Ibid. 16 Schecter, AIDS, 1-6. 17 Hutchinson, 'Public Faith.' 18 Chambon, 'Postmodernity and Social Work/ 61-72. 19 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988). 20 George Grant, English Speaking Justice (Toronto: Anansi, 1974); Margaret Benston, 'A New Technology but the Same Old Story/ Canadian Woman Studies, Special Edition: Women in Science and Technology 13, no. 2 (winter 1993): 66-80. 21 Ken Moffatt, 'Surveillance and Government of the Welfare Recipient/ in Reading Foucault for Social Work, ed. Chambon, Irving, and Epstein. Nigel Parton, The Nature of Social Work Under the Condition of (Post)Modernity/ Social Work and Social Sciences Review 5, no. 2 (1994): 93-112. 22 Allan Irving, 'From Image/ 30. 23 Gibson Winter, Elements for a Social Ethic: Scientific and Ethical Perspectives on Social Process (New York: Macmillan, 1966).

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Bibliography 145 Hiller, Harry. 'Paradigmatic Shifts, Indigenization and the Development of Sociology in Canada.' Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences 16 (1980): 263-74. Hittinger, John P. 'Philosophy and the Quest for Ethical Foundations: An Overview.' Social Thought 15, no. 314 (summer-fall 1989): 18-31. Horn, Michiel, T.R. Scott, the Great Depression, and the League for Social Reconstruction.' In On F.R. Scott. Edited by Sandra Djwa and R. St. J. Macdonald. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1983. Hurl, Lorna. 'Building a Profession: The Origin and Development of the Department of Social Service in the University of Toronto, 1914-1928.' Working Papers on Social Welfare in Canada. Toronto: Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto, 1983. Hutchinson, Roger. The Canadian Social Gospel in the Context of Christian Ethics.' In The Social Gospel in Canada: Papers of the Inter-Disciplinary Conference on the Social Gospel in Canada. Edited by Richard Allen. Ottawa: National Museums of Canada, 1975. - 'The Public Faith of a Democratic Socialist.' Journal of Canadian Studies 21 (summer 1986): 26-37. Imre, Roberta Wells. 'Social Work and Philosophy.' Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 18, no. 4 (December 1991): 3-12. Innis, Harold. 'Edward Johns Urwick, 1867-1945.' Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 11 (February-November 1945): 266. Irving, Allan. 'From Image to Simulcra: The Modern/Postmodern Divide and Social Work.' In Essays on Postmodernism and Social Work. Edited by Adrienne Chambon and Allan Irving. Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press, 1995. - 'Leonard Marsh and the McGill Social Science Research Project.' Journal of Canadian Studies 21, no. 2 (summer 1986): 6-37. - 'The Scientific Imperative in Canadian Social Work: Social Work and Social Welfare Research in Canada, 1897-1945.' Canadian Social Work Review 9, no. i (winter 1992): 9-25. Irving, Allan, Harriet Parsons, and Donald Bellamy, eds. Neighbours: Three Social Settlements in Downtown Toronto. Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press, 1995. Irving, John. 'Introductory Essay on the Social Philosophy of E.J. Urwick.' In The Values of Life, by E.J. Urwick. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1948. Isherwood, Christopher. Christopher and His Kind. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1976. King, Marjorie. 'E. J. Urwick.' Canadian Welfare 43, no. 2 (March-April 1967): 28-33Kondrat, Mary Ellen. 'Reclaiming the Practical: Formal and Substantive Ratio-

146 Bibliography nality in Social Work Practice.' Social Service Review 66, no. 2 (June 1992): 237-55Lasch, Christopher. "Communitarism or Populism? The Ethic of Compassion and the Ethic of Respect.' In The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995. Leonard, Peter. Postmodern Welfare: Reconstructing an Emancipatory Project. London: Sage, 1997. Livesay, Dorothy. Collected Poems: The Two Seasons. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1972. - Day and Night: Poems by Dorothy Livesay. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1944. - The Documentaries: Selected Longer Poems. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1968. - Journey with My Selves: A Memoir, 1909-1963. Vancouver: Douglas and Mclntyre, 1991. - Right Hand Left Hand. A True Life of the Thirties. Erin, ON: Press Porcepic, 1977. - 'Song and Dance.' Canadian Literature no. 41 (summer 1969): 40-8. McKillop, Brian. Contours of Canadian Thought. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987. McNaught, Kenneth. 'Socialism and the Canadian Political Tradition.' In On F.R. Scott. Edited by Sandra Djwa and R. St. J. Macdonald. Montreal: McGillQueen's University Press, 1983. Moffatt, Ken. The Impact of Technology upon the Emerging Profession of Social Work.' Canadian Social Work Review 10, no. i (winter 1993): 43-55. - 'Surveillance and Government of the Welfare Recipient.' In Reading Foucault for Social Work. Edited by Adrienne Chambon, Allan Irving, and Laura Epstein. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. 'Official Announcement in Respect to the Organization of Canadian Association of Social Workers.' Social Welfare 9, no. i (October 1926): 284-6. Owram, Doug. The Government Generation: Canadian Intellectuals and the State, 1900-1945. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986. Pacey, Desmond. Introduction to Selected Poems of Dorothy Livesay, 1926-1956. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1957. Parton, Nigel. 'The Nature of Social Work under the Condition of (Post)Modernity/ Social Work and Social Sciences Review 5, no. 2 (1994): 93-112. Penner, Norman. Canadian Communism: The Stalin Years and Beyond. Toronto: Methuen, 1988. Perkin, Harold. The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880. London: Routledge, 1989. Pierce, Jonathon C. 'A Tale of Two Generations: The Public and Private Voices

Bibliography 147 of Dorothy Livesay.' In A Public and Private Voice: Essays on the Life and Work of Dorothy Livesay. Edited by Lindsay Dorney, Gerald Noonan, and Paul Tiessen. Waterloo, ON: University of Waterloo Press, 1986. Pitsula, James. 'The Emergence of Social Work in Toronto.' Journal of Canadian Studies 14 (spring 1979): 35-42. Purdy, Sean. Radicals and Revolutionaries: The History of Canadian Communism from the Robert S. Kenny Collection. Toronto: University of Toronto Library, 1998. Rooke, P.T., and R.L. Schnell. No Bleeding Heart: Charlotte Whitton, A Feminist on the Right. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1987. Russell, Mary Nomme. 'Feminist Social Work Skills.' Canadian Social Work Review 6, no. i (winter 1989): 69-81. Rutherford, Paul. 'Tomorrow's Metropolis: The Urban Reform Movement in Canada, 1880-1920.' In The Social Development of Canada: Readings. Edited by Peter Ward. Richmond: Open Learning Institute, 1983. Saleebey, Dennis. Technological Fix: Altering the Consciousness of the Social Work Profession.' Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 18, no. 4 (December 1991): 51-67. Saul, John Ralston. The Unconscious Civilization. Toronto: Anansi Press, 1995. Shechter, Stephen. The AIDS Notebooks. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. Shore, Marlene. The Science of Social Redemption: McGill, the Chicago School, and the Origins of Social Research in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987. Spender, Stephen. 'Looking Back in 1994.' In World within World. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. - World within World. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. Stapleford, F.N. 'The Contribution of Social Work to Social Progress.' Social Welfare 8, no. 8 (June-July 1926): 189-91. Stevens, Peter. Dorothy Livesay: Patterns in a Poetic Life. Toronto: ECW Press, 1992. Struthers, James. The Limits of Affluence: Welfare in Ontario, 1920-1970. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. - '"Lord Give Us Men": Women and Social Work in English Canada, 1918 to 1953.' In The Benevolent State. Edited by Alan Moscovitch and Jim Albert. Toronto: Garamond Press, 1987. - 'A Profession in Crisis: Charlotte Whitton and Canadian Social Work in the 19305.' In The Benevolent State. Edited by Alan Moscovitch and Jim Albert. Toronto: Garamond Press, 1987.

148 Bibliography Taylor, Charles. 'Foucault on Freedom and Truth.' Political Theory 12, no. 2 (May 1984): 152-83. - The Malaise of Modernity. Concord, ON: Anansi Press, 1991. Thompson, John H. "The Beginning of Our Regeneration": The Great War and the Western Canadian Reform Movements.' In The Social Development of Canada: Readings. Edited by Peter Ward. Richmond: Open Learning Institute, 1983. - The Harvests of War: The Prairie West, 1914-1918. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1978. Thompson, John H., with Allen Seager. Canada, 1922-1939: Decades of Discord. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1985. Thompson, Lee Briscoe. Dorothy Livesay. Boston: Twayne, 1987. Tippett, Maria. Making Culture: English-Canadianlnstitutions and the Arts before the Massey Commission. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990. Urwick, Edward J. The Building of Community: Address to the Conference of Social Welfare, April 24,1936.' Social Welfare 16, no. 4 (September 1936): 103-7. - The Economics of the Housing Problem.' Social Welfare 17, nos. 2 and 3 (June-September 1937): 38-9. - 'First Principles First.' Social Welfare 13, no. 2 (November 1930): 29-30, 32. - 'Is There a Scientific Sociology?' Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 4, no. 2 (May 1938): 231-40. - 'Liberalism True and False.' University of Toronto Quarterly 7, no. 3 (April 1938): 289-97. - The Message of Plato: A Reinterpretation of the Republic. London: Methuen, 1920. - The Role of Intelligence in the Social Process.' Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science i (February-November 1935): 64-76. - The Social Good. London: Methuen, 1927. - The Values of Life. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1948. Valverde, Mariana. The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885-1925. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1991. Walker, Jean C. The Cult of Specialization.' Social Welfare 10, no. 3 (December 1927): 67-8. Warne, Randi R. 'Nellie McClung's Social Gospel.' In Changing Roles of Women within the Christian Church in Canada. Edited by Elizabeth Gillan Muir and Marilyn Fardig Whiteley. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995. Whitton, Charlotte. The Bewildered Community To-day: Canada, 1934. Ottawa: Canadian Council on Child and Family Welfare, 1934. - The Dawn of Ampler Life: Some Aids to Social Security. Toronto: Macmillan, 1943-

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Index

Acadia College, 69 Achokarranda, Swami, 33 agitational propaganda, 55 Airhart, Phyllis, 22 arts survey (McGill University), 71-3 Auden, W.H., 56 bachelors, 78-9,108, no Bacon, Francis, 90 Baines, Carol, 22 Banting, Pamela, 60 Barbusse, Henri, 52 Barnett, Samuel, 30 Bennett, R.B., 86, 98 Birney, Earle, 55,60, 61 Biss, Irene, 15 Bosanquet, Bernard, 31 Buck, Tim, 14,17 bureaucracy, 4, 26, 42, 44, 66, 96-9, 106-8,112 Burke, Sara, 41, 44 Callaghan, Morley, 61 'Canada to the Soviet Union' (Livesay), 60 Canadian Association of Social Workers, 21,25-8,70

Canadian Conference of Social Workers 39 Canadian Conference on Social and Health Work, 70 Canadian Conference on Social Work, 21,69,86 Canadian Council on Child and Family Welfare, 27,69 Canadian Social Science Research Council, 70 Canadian Welfare Council, 4,10,86, 99 capitalism, 9,16,21-2,57,62-3,65-8, 112 Carnegie Foundation, 13 Carson, Libby, 25 'Case History' (Livesay), 64 'Case Supervisor' (Livesay), 66 casework, social, 27-8, 39,40, 42 Cassidy, Harry, 15, 26, 38, 46, 55, 86 charity organization societies, 27 Charity Organization Society (London), 39-40 Christian Social Order, 17 Clark, W. Delmas, 17 Clarke, G.B., 25 class, 107, no, 113

152 Index communism, 37, 51, 54-6, 58,61, 67, 96,101 Communist International, 54 Communist Party of Canada, 4,14, 17, 47, 54-5, 57 Communist Party of Germany, 55 'Comrade' (Livesay), 58 contradiction, 68,114 Cook, Ramsay, 21 Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, 14 Currie, Sir Arthur, 20, 71 Daily Clarion, 51 Dale,J.A.,26 Darwin, Charles, 21 Davidson, George, 26, 99 Davis, R.E.G., 26 'Day and Night' (Livesay), 57,61, 63-5 The Depression Suite' (Livesay), 53, 63,65 dialectic, 46 dialogue, 40-2 Dickinson, Emily, 60 Earlscourt Children's Home, 22 ecology, human, 70, 75-6,80-1,85 Edel, Leon, 15 efficiency: and bureaucracy, 66,97, 112; and human ecology, 77-8; and labour, 65; McGill University, 23, 81; and social worker role, 4,26-7, 39, 83, 85, 95, 98; and technique, 8, 66,106-9; and technology, 7; as a value base, 43,62 Eliot, T.S., 15, 56,60 Ellul, Jacques, 8,66,106 engagement, 52-3, 57-8, 67,106 ethics, 113

Ethiopia, 96 ethnic groups, 79-80,84-5,101,108, 111 expertise, 10,27 Fabian Club, 17 fabian thought, 15,24 Fairley, Margaret, 55 Falconer, Sir Robert, 18,24 Falk, Howard, 70-1 fascism, 13,37,41,52,54-7,96,112-13 feminism, 28, 47, 53,60,67,104; maternal feminism, 22, 92 Finlayson, Barbara, 25 First World War, 7,13, 35,81 'Frontiers of Settlement' studies (Dawson), 70, 74 Fyfe, Hamilton, 32 Gauvreau, Michel, 22 Germany, 57, 96 Gettys, Warner, 70,77,81 Goldman, Emma, 48 Gordon, J. K., 16 Green, T.H., 22 Group of Seven, 16 Havelock, Eric, 15 Hegel, Georg, 22 Hill, Ruth, 26 Hiller, Harry, 74 Hitler, Adolf, 55 Hobhouse, L.T., 31 Hobson, J. A., 31 Housing Centre, 38,41 humanities, 3,6,10,19,24, 30,115 Hutchinson, Roger, 22 idealism, 20,22,25,29-31, 34-9, 42, 44, 51, 55,101-2,106

Index 153 ideology, 111 imperialism, 13-15,39 Innis, Harold, 19, 43 international markets, 76-7,84,104, no, 115 Irving, Allan, 24,115 Isherwood, Christopher, 56 Italy, 96 James, Henry, 56 Joyce, James, 56 Karma Yoga, 38 Kelly, H, M., 39 Kennedy, Leo, 15,61 Kern, Jerome, 16 King, Dorothy, 92 King's College London, 31 labour, 13 Laing, Gordon, 71 Latimer, Elspeth, 28 Lawrence, D.H., 16 Lawson, Lons, 54 Lawson, William, 51 Leacock, Stephen, 20 League for Social Reconstruction, 15-16 League of Nations, 87 Lewis, C. Day, 56 Lewis, David, 16 liberal arts, 19 Lieutenant-Governor's Commission of Housing Conditions in Toronto, 38 Livesay, J.F.B., 47,48, 51, 57,86 London School of Sociology and Social Economics, 30-1 Maclver, R.M. 19, 34-5, 38

MacKay, Ira, 19,72-3 Macnair, Duncan, 51-2, 56, 58 MacNeice, Archibald, 56 Marsh, Leonard, 26 Marx, Karl, 17,68 Marxism, 55-6,64 Marxism-Leninism, 54 Masses, 47, 55 McClung, Nellie, 21 McGill University, 4-5,15-17 McKillop, Brian, 21 McMaster University, 18 metaphysics, 33, 37-8,103-4, 111-12 modernism, 6,8,10,12-13,18,22-3, 28-9,68,103,113,115; literary modernism, 15,47, 53, 56,61,63 'Montreal' (Livesay), 61 Montreal Group, 15 Mooney, G.S., 16 Mooney, George, 41 Moore, Jocelyn, 55 morals, 37, 43, 49, 89-90,100-3,lo6/ 108-9,112-13,1*5 Morton, Jean, 53 National Recovery Administration, 54 Nazism, 57 Neighbourhood Workers' Association, 25 New Frontiers, 48, 51 Nicol, Peggy, 16 Ontario Research Foundation, 18 Orwell, George, 56 Ottawa Planning and Housing Conference, 41 'The Outrider' (Livesay) 63,65 Oxford University, 22, 30

154 Index Paris Commune, 52 Park, Robert, 77 Parker, Ethel Dodds, 92 Parkinson, Joe, 15 Parmenter, Ross, 55 Penner, Jacob, 14 Plato, 30-3,43-4 Political Economy, Department of, (University of Toronto). 4,19, 31, 34 Porter, Cole, 16,64 Pound, Ezra, 15 Pratt, E.J., 61 Pringle, J. C, 40 professionalization, 4, 8,12,25-8, 42-4, 53,69,108, no, 113-15 Progressive Arts Club, 47, 54-5 proletarian literature, 55 Public Works Administration, 54 'Queen City' (Livesay) 59, 62 Queen's University, 86 race, 52,78,89,94, 96, 99,101,110-11 reciprocity, 32, 34, 42, 44, 87,113 The Republic, 31 Rockefeller Foundation, 13,18-19, 74 Rooke, P.T., 87,89-90 Roosevelt, Franklin, 54 Rowell-Sirois Commission, 38 Royal Victoria College, 72 Russia, 17, 96 Ryerson, Stanley, 55 Salsberg, J. B., 14 Sandburg, Carl, 15 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 52 Schnell, R.L., 87,89-90 science, 6-9, 48-50 Scott, F.R., 15-16,61

Scott, Marion, 16 secularization, 82,107-8, ill, 114 sexuality, 57 Shore, Marlene, 74 Silcox, Rev., 42 Smith, A.J.M., 15 social good, 31-2, 34, 42,112 Social Gospel, 20-2 social ideal, 41,44-6, 51 social intellegence, 39,49 socialism, 14, 52, 54-6 social science, 3,102-12,114-15; and Christianity, 21-2,100; critique of, 32, 35-8, 44-5,85; and humanities, 19; promotion of, 18-9, 70,75,101; and secularization, 82-3; and social work knowledge, 6-8,25, 27-8, 30, 39/ 41,81,84, 92-4,98-9 Social Science, Department of, (University of Toronto). See Social Service, Department of (University of Toronto) social security, 95-6,108 Social Service Council of Canada, 21, 42,86 Social Service, Department of (McGill University). See Social Study and Training, Department of (McGill University) Social Service, Department of (University of Toronto), 4,10,23, 31, 46,70 Social Study and Training, Department of (McGill University), 4,23, 69-70, 72-74 social work: philosophy of, 30, 39, 42-4,52,115; practice, 7,9-10,102, 104,112,115 social workers, role of, 38-42, 48, 503, 66, 71, 80, 83-5, 91-3, 98,115-16

Index 155 Social Workers, School for (McGill University), 70,72-3. See also Social Study and Training, Department of (McGill University) sociology, 70,81-4 Sociology, Department of (McGill University), 71, 73-4 Sociology, Department of (University of Toronto), 18, 44 solidarism, 87-91, 95, 99 Sorbonne, 47, 54 Soviet Union, 54, 56 Spanish Civil War, 14, 56, 96 Spartacus Club, 17 Spender, Stephen, 56-7 Stalinism, 54-5 Stapleford, F.N., 25 state, role of Canadian, 13,27, 37, 53-4,88-9,95-6, 99,108,112 Struthers, James, 97, 98 Student Leagues of University and High Schools, 17 subjectivities, 3,105 subjectivity, 40, 42 Tawney, R.H., 31 technique, 8-9, 26, 39-40, 66, 83, 99-100,105-9, H4 technologies of governance, 45,65, 109-10,112,114-16 technology, 3,101-9,111-12,114-15; and capitalist power relations, 50, 63-6; definition, 7-8; and ethnic groups, 80-1; and organizations, 27; and the Social Gospel, 22; and social work, 9-10,83,98-9; spread of, 14,77,79,96 Thompson, Lee Briscoe, 48, 58 Toronto Welfare Council, 38 Toynbee, Arnold, 22

Toynbee Hall, 30 Trinity College, 47 Trotsky, Leon, 55 Underhill, Frank, 15 'Unemployed,' 61 unemployment, 13-14, 50, 52-4,64, 67,94, 96, 98,101,110 University Aix Marseilles, 47-8 University Communist Club, 17 University of British Columbia, 23 University of Chicago, 69-70,75, 83 University of London, 31 University of Toronto, 4-5,15,17, 47 University of Western Ontario, 23 University Settlement House, 24, 38 values, 3, 40, 42,44,114 Valverde, Mariana, 22 Van Der Spengel, Dr., 54 Vedanta, 30, 33-4, 38 vitality, 40-1,43, 51,100 Wallace, Joe, 51 Warne, Randi, 21 The Wasteland' (Eliot), 60 Watts, 'Jim/ 54 Welfare Field Office of British Columbia, 10, 46,66 Wills, Gale, 22,28 Winnipeg General Strike, 13 Woman's Christian Temperance Union, 21 women: and academia, 5,72; community of, 93; and contradiction, 10; and history, 9,102; and idealism, 42,92; leadership, 5; and science, 50; and social activism, 48, 58,67; and social work, 3-4,7,97,

156 Index 99,101-2; and social work practice, 28, 42,104 Women's Missionary Society, 21 Women's University Settlement, 25 Woolf, Virginia, 60 The Worker, 51

Workers' Experimental Theatre, 55 Workers' School, 54 Young Communist League, 17,54 Young Women's Christian Association, 21