by Elena Siddall
In 1963 I graduated from Mary Washington College of the University of Virginia, with a BA degree in Pre-Foreign Service and headed for New York City. The degree did not get me a job as translator at the United Nations, so I answered an ad for Social Investigator in the Department of Public Welfare. The only requirement was a college degree in any field, and the majority of applicants came from liberal arts.
The six-week training consisted of reading Charlotte Towle’s “Common Human Needs.” The book had been under fire in 1951 when a statement made by Towle, a psychiatric social worker, was made public: “Social security and public assistance programs are a basic essential for attainment of the socialized state envisaged in a democratic ideology, a way of life which so far has been realized only in slight measure.“ Reading John Bowlby’s Maternal Care and Mental Health also was required. Bowlby was the Director of Tavistock Clinic and a consultant to the World Health Organization. The training was rounded out by learning reams of Child Welfare and Public Assistance policies.
Female trainees were encouraged to go into the Bureau of Child Welfare (BCW), while males directed to Public Assistance (PA). All were issued a black notebook and assigned to any of the five boroughs. I was sent to work in the Bronx.
The Investigators were represented by the Social Services Employees Union, which one joined voluntarily. Among the first actions of the union in 1965 were to have the SI re-classified as “Caseworker” and to negotiate a salary increase from $4,100, to $4,200. The union, which I soon joined, was very active in non “bread and butter” issues, advocating for a “more dignified” treatment of welfare recipients and BCW cases (not all coming from the welfare rolls).
I learned that the city offered scholarships towards a Masters of Social Work degree based on performance after one year of employment and enrolled in Columbia University School of Social Work for night classes. I also was elected to be a representative from the Bronx BCW to the union’s Executive Board. These factors resulted in rather intense exposure to the increasingly vocal demands of social activists engaged in Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” resisting the Vietnam War, and supporting the Civil Rights movement.
I was drawn to the activities with some serious reservation, having myself come to the US in 1949 from five years in displaced-persons camps in Germany. My family had fled the Bolsheviks in 1919 from Petrograd to Latvia and fled the Soviets in 1944 from Latvia. My family was vehemently anti-Communist, and my work in NYC was disapproved of. My father, an engineer and director of a cement factory in Latvia of interest to both the Soviets and the Nazis, brought us to America with $135 in his pocket. He picked apples and worked as a day laborer until he found employment as a draftsman. We never accepted welfare. Economically we were poor. Everybody (three siblings and myself) “made it” through college, to Master’s programs, and to professional lives without “handouts.” And here I was, as my father accused me, “crying about the darling poor.”
At that time, the Columbia School of Social Work was housed in the Andrew Carnegie Mansion at 5th and 91st Streets (now part of the Smithsonian). It was bizarre to work in the decaying, impoverished Bronx by day and then get on the subway to head to a 5th Avenue mansion to hear, in class, how to dismantle “the system.”
About that time, a husband-wife team of professors (sociologists) arrived at Columbia, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. Cloward and Piven embraced (Saul) Alinsky Radicalism to advocate for the poor and down-trodden. No, they did not teach night-time classes, but they caused quite a stir when they published a profoundly explicit “strategy” in the progressive/left The Nation magazine in the May 2, 1966 issue. They wrote (in part):
It is our purpose to advance a strategy which affords the basis for a convergence of civil rights organizations, militant anti-poverty groups and the poor. If this strategy were implemented, a political crisis would result that could lead to legislation for a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty….
The strategy is based on the fact that a vast discrepancy exists between the benefits to which the people are entitled under public welfare programs and the sums which they actually receive… This discrepancy is not an accident… if challenged, would precipitate a profound financial and political crisis. The force for that challenge, and the strategy we propose, is a massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls.
“The Weight of the Poor” ends with:
If organizations can deliver millions of dollars in cash benefits to the ghetto masses, it seems reasonable to expect that the masses will deliver their loyalties to their benefactors. At least, they have always done so in the past.
The strategy was simple for immediate implementation. The union encouraged Public Assistance caseworkers to issue Special Grants to all recipients for what they were “eligible for.” There was no time for establishing “eligibility” for ”non-recurring” grants for clothing, household equipment and furniture, including washing machines, refrigerators, beds, bedding, tables, chairs, even if you had these. BCW/ Bronx was located in the Melrose Welfare Center, and while we, the caseworkers, were not involved with the issuance of these grants, many of our cases were recipients. The ensuing chaos was frightening as the center-–and all centers were over-run with people demanding their “special grants.”
Several strikes followed that summer, with caseworkers demanding the city to improve conditions, not only for the caseworkers, but their caseloads. ”Recipients” became “Clients.”
I was awarded a Paid Educational Leave scholarship (full tuition plus salary), and, rejected by Columbia (“lacking in dedication”), left for the University of Pennsylvania to earn my Master’s degree in Social Work, 1967-69.
At Penn, we studied Saul Alinsky, theorists of the Neo-Marxist Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Apthekar, and various progressive ideas on the elimination of poverty. The school also had an active Students for Democratic Society chapter. This was a Marxist group, calling for extreme social change on the American landscape, baby-boomers raised on what was the best in America in the post World War II years. The radical arm of this movement eventually morphed into the Weather Underground, originally called the Weathermen, a hard-core domestic terrorist group including Billy Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Kathy Boudine, Cathy Wikerson, and a small roster of other activists, now writing their memoirs post-incarceration for bombing, killings and raising hell.
I was an anomaly there, “too conservative.” I returned to the Bronx after my degree, but the work (I had been in Child Protective Services) had become too dangerous, and after I pushed a knife-wielding woman following me down the stairs, left soon after.
Cloward is deceased, but Piven carries on. C and P were the architects of the Motor–Voter initiative, and Piven allegedly is Obama’s mentor still. The Cloward-Piven Strategy is 48 years old.
How is it working for you?
Elena Siddall is active in the Mathews Republican Committee and the Mid-Peninsula Patriots.
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