Who Killed Civil Society?: The Rise of Big Government and Decline of Bourgeois Norms by Howard Husock

The Manhattan Institute’s Howard Husock begins this overview of social services in America by considering the “biggest mystery” of his childhood, namely, “how my father survived his.”  Husock’s dad was an orphan living in a scruffy Philadelphia neighborhood during the Great Depression.  The answer his dad provided was “The Agency,” a private, largely volunteer organization that stressed norms over material provisions -- a message often delivered to the elder Husock by a widow who rode in a chauffeured Cadillac across town to encourage principles like self-control, honesty, and good manners.

By contrast, today’s social service message is that “institutional barriers are to blame” for the plight of America’s “marginalized” individuals.  In the words of a recent textbook, “Social Workers recognize the extent to which a culture’s structures and values may oppress, marginalize, alienate, or create or enhance privilege and power.”  Consequently, social workers should “engage in practices that advance social and economic justice.”  Husock’s book documents this fateful transition from the structure and philosophy of “The Agency” to massive government programs that focus on material provision, social issues, and the amelioration of existing maladies (e.g. drug addiction and broken families) rather than the formation of character traits that prevent those maladies from arising.

 

Five prominent figures are employed to chart Husock’s road toward our cultural Hades -- a path paved, to be sure, with good intentions: Charles Loring Brace, Jane Addams, Mary Richmond, Grace Abbott, and Wilbur Cohen.  A sixth figure, Geoffrey Canada, provides a contemporary example of the type of organization Husock hopes will flourish to help reestablish “Middle-Class Values” among a burgeoning social services population.   

The norm-centered focus of the Juvenile Aid Society that saved Husock’s father was pioneered in the latter half of the 19^th century by Charles Brace’s Children’s Aid Society which began its privately funded mission of instilling the values of education and civility in thousands of newsboys, bootblacks, and other waifs who roamed the streets of New York City.  Beyond supplying lodging homes and living necessities, Brace sought to influence the character of children who possessed no vision of a better future.  Brace thus became a “missionary of bourgeois norms” that provided the means for achieving a good life.  A major aspect of Brace’s effort involved “orphan trains” that relocated 120,000 children to Midwest farm families -- not as servants but as family members who would learn the same morals and habits as their parents.  Brace, who died in 1890, noted that “our whole influence is moral” and shunned assistance “which doesn’t touch habits of life and … character.”

Much better known than Brace is Jane Addams, founder of Chicago’s Hull House.  Addams’ approach to social work began, as it did with Brace, with modeling and encouraging behavioral norms and habits for the poor immigrants with whom she lived.  Over the years, however, Addams focused more attention on government-funded assistance and political issues (a living wage, workplace safety, child labor laws, etc.).  Indeed, in 1935 Addams won the Nobel Peace Prize for her advocacy of that expansive goal.  Meanwhile, the task of instilling positive character traits began to be derided by the crusading Addams as “incorrigibly bourgeois.”

Mary Richmond, who herself (unlike Brace and Addams) came out of difficult circumstances, attempted to preserve the character-focused approach of Brace while also emphasizing the need for significant material assistance.  Her “friendly visit” vision of social work stressed professional “diagnostic” methods employed largely by trained volunteers working with private organizations.  This non-governmental approach that retained an emphasis on moral norms was abandoned completely by the Abbott sisters, Grace and Edith, both University of Chicago graduates, Hull House residents, and fervent advocates for government assistance programs.  The capstone of their efforts was the Social Security Act of 1935 that included an Aid to Dependent Children component.

The final nail in the coffin of a character-centered vision of social work was administered by Wilbur Cohen, “the consummate federal bureaucrat” who earned the sobriquet “Mr. Social Security.”  Cohen, who had no close connection with the population affected by his policies, saw poverty purely as a product of economic circumstances whose solution was to be found in a variety of “social insurance” programs.  Cohen’s lasting legacy was achieved via LBJ’s massive Great Society welfare system that focused overwhelmingly on providing material “entitlements” and dealt with existing, often intractable, pathologies.  But to Cohen’s dismay, “social services increased along with benefit levels,” and many of the problems those material benefits were intended to solve (e.g. illegitimacy) increased dramatically.

Husock’s new model for social services follows the structure and philosophy of Geoffrey Canada whose Harlem Children’s Zone project grew out of his own experience of the violence and cynicism inculcated in youngsters by hardened mentors who saw the system rigged against them and scoffed at the foolishness of seeking anything beyond immediate gratification.  Canada’s privately-funded project focuses on young kids not yet corrupted by the negative influences around them and has grown from one block to more than a hundred.  His urban oasis provides a stark example of a clean, graffiti-free neighborhood and demonstrates what can be achieved by embracing “middle class values” such as self-discipline and education.

While Husock’s overview of social work’s abandonment of moral norms is instructive, the hope he places in admirable efforts like Canada’s seems unrealistic.  As Husock himself admits, the world of social work represents only a fraction of the cultural input that shapes individual perspectives and habits.  And Canada’s work, even multiplied by dozens of similar projects, represents a small fraction of the services delivered by state and federal government agencies.  Put bluntly, the cultural input of all social service workers pales in comparison with that of mass media.  Husock mentions rap music in one sentence, noting its banishment from Canada’s model community.  Yet rap is a cultural item whose negative influence by itself dwarfs all the unquestionably positive work done by Canada and similar projects.  Now add to rap the drumbeat of cynicism promoted by Hollywood, academics, politicians, and the mainstream media.  While morally-focused social projects are certainly saviors for the thousands they touch, the idea that such projects will significantly move the broader cultural needle in the same direction is naïve.

 

Attorney General William Barr’s recent Notre Dame speech accurately summarized the massive secularist attack on religion and traditional values over the last half-century – an attack that includes but goes well beyond the world of social services.  The success of that attack is poignantly summarized by Planned Parenthood’s indignant response to New York City’s “moralistic” campaign to discourage teen pregnancy: “It’s not teen pregnancies that cause poverty, but poverty that causes teen pregnancies.”  This anti-moral economic determinism is now deeply engrained in American culture. 

Without a “fundamental transformation” of the mass media’s constant condemnation of personal moral judgments – without a drastic change in its lionizing of hedonistic pursuits that “push the envelope” beyond every prior boundary of decency – without a rejection of its reflexive division of society into  privileged and victim groups -- without a massive intellectual and moral shift on the part of educators, the entertainment industry, prominent intellectuals, and folks in electronic communications, the prospect for significant improvement in the culture at large, including its ever-expanding social services arena, seems bleak.

    

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle    

50 Things They Don’t Want You to Know by Jerome Hudson

Breitbart’s Jerome Hudson goes out on an limb by placing a hefty number in the title of his book, 50 Things They Don’t Want You to Know.  Perhaps that’s why this best-selling volume doesn’t appear on the prestigious New York Times list.  In any case, Hudson’s collection of MSM-disdained facts turns out to be both readable and enlightening.  Categories that account for most of the chapter headings concern illegal immigration, tech company machinations and employment practices, Obama Administration policies toward Russia, and a handful of entries about gun violence, the environment, Jihadism, and President Trump’s economic success, especially with minorities and women.

Hudson begins his magazine-length collection of articles, however, by focusing on abortion in black communities, noting in chapter one that “From 2012 to 2016 More Black Women in New York City Had Abortions Than Gave Birth.”  (Hudson himself is “black” and employs that race-descriptive term.)  This startling heading is verified statistically and expanded into a discussion of abortion in the black community, a group that accounts “for more than 36 percent of all abortions nationally.”  The article concludes with an extensive analysis of Planned Parenthood’s targeting of black communities and the racist views of its eugenics-enamored founder, Margaret Sanger. 

The lion’s share of articles in Hudson’s book concerns illegal immigration.  Hudson notes, for example, that in 2014 “immigration arrests grew to 50 percent of all federal arrests from just 28 percent a decade earlier.”  Another chapter is devoted to the huge economic cost of illegal immigration for low-skilled workers, especially black Americans.  Hudson’s most startling statistic, however, focuses on females that come into this country illegally: “Eighty Percent of Central American Women and Girls Are Raped While Crossing into The U.S. Illegally.”  That figure comes from a Univision-owned news source, “an anti-Trump and anti-Wall outfit.”  Another study by “Princeton Policy Advisors estimates that, in 2019, 103,000 women will be raped trying to reach the United States from Central America.”  Obviously, these are numbers the #MeToo Democratic Party and its media allies, two groups that welcome “undocumented immigrants” into the country, don’t want voters to know.

Some quite unexpected information about illegal immigration is disclosed in chapter 46, which discusses Obama border policies that were actually harsher than those implemented by President Trump.  Hudson notes that there was no outrage about psychological damage to kids or talk of “concentration camps” when the former Commander-in-Chief placed “unaccompanied children in steel cages” or separated “tens of thousands” of family members.  And one can only imagine how the New York Times would have characterized a Trump-initiated Alien Transfer Exit Program (ATEP) that shipped “male migrants” across the country, sometimes “thousands of miles from their original border sector” and then “escorted [them] back across the U.S.-Mexico border.”  In the process “ATEP routinely broke up families migrating together and made it a logistical nightmare for a couple to find each other again.”  This Obama-era program, however, elicited no media tears, if it was even noticed.  

Another chunk of information in Hudson’s collection of forbidden facts is devoted to the tech industry.  One area of interest concerns methods employed to slant Internet searches and news apps toward “trusted” sites like the New York Times and away from conservative outlets.  Another line of inquiry involves the staggering amount of information these companies gather about users that can be employed for nefarious purposes, both political and mercantile.  A revealing anecdote at the end of chapter 35 concerns a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg who told a friend, shortly after Facebook launched, that he had thousands of emails, pictures, addresses, and even Social Security numbers from folks at Harvard whom he described as “dumb f--ks” for blindly trusting him.  A third subject for scrutiny concerns the employment practices of multi-billion dollar tech companies that employ legions of foreign workers who are paid substantially less than their American counterparts thanks to F-1 (OPT) and H-1B visas that pad the corporations’ already enormous profit sheets -- funds that often go untaxed thanks to IRS regulations tailored by Congress to the specifications of their tech supporters.  

As noted above, several entries in this book deal with Obama Administration policies toward Russia, an approach summarized by the heading of chapter 27: “Hillary Clinton Supported a ‘Strong, Competent, Prosperous, Stable Russia’ Before Blaming It for Her Election Loss.”  Apparently one way to secure a strong, prosperous Russia was to sell it twenty percent of all U.S. uranium (chapter 28) and in the process make the Clintons themselves a lot wealthier.  For starters, Bill received a half-million dollar speaking fee “for an event in Moscow attended by high-ranking Russian officials.”  Add to this stipend “a combined $145 million to Hillary and Bill Clinton’s family foundation” paid by “nine foreign investors involved in the uranium deal” and one would have Adam Schiff’s dream scenario for impeachment and removal from office.  In addition to the uranium deal, “President Obama and Hillary Clinton Encouraged U.S. Investors to Fund Tech Research Used by Russia’s Military” (chapter 29).  This pet Obama project focused largely on the Skolkovo Foundation and was described by a U.S. Army program as “arguably an overt alternative to clandestine industrial espionage.”  It was a policy so reckless as to make John Brennan’s “treason” accusation against Trump reasonable -- were Trump (and not Obama) the one actually pursuing this kind of technological “reset” with Putin’s regime.

Add a few chapters on fake “right-wing terrorism” statistics, trade policy, Venezuela’s socialist disaster, failed government programs, and violent Democrat-run cities and you have the complete ensemble of topics in Hudson’s statistic- and information-packed offering, a work replete with footnotes to establish the sources of information employed to let readers know what leftists fervently wish to conceal.  Snowflakes should certainly be given “trigger-warnings” in advance of exposure to the contents of this book.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle