A. GENERAL SESSIONS' PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS-DOES SOCIAL WORK PROMOTE Allen T. Burns, Director, Study of Methods of Americanization, The question of how much social work, or the social worker, promotes social progress has been made vivid to me by two stories or parables that recently friends of mine have related. They illustrate two different possible relations of social work to the promotion of social progress-one relation the organic, the other, the mechanical. The first story illustrates the organic relation by the part taken by the expert chemist in the process of turning liquids into solids. You know that in order to turn a liquid into a solid there is required a certain amount of heating and boiling and bubbling, and there is no external force, do what it will, that can be of much effect except to let the boiling and bubbling go on. The most that any outside person or force can do, if he is surely expert and knows the qualities of various liquids in that boiling state, is to understand the proper moment at which a little crystal of the substance, the solid that is to be formed, may be dropped in. If, at exactly the right stage of boiling, he throws in the particle of substance, the process of turning into a solid is greatly accelerated. Around that little focus of crystallization the process goes on rapidly to its completion. "That much and no more,” said my friend, “is what social work can contribute to social progress." Now, the other person, a more pessimistic and cynical appraiser of social work, says the social worker is very much like a little girl playing by the seashore when the tide is coming in. She is throwing pebbles into the sea, and as the little ripples made by the splash creep up the sand, she runs to her mother, unmindful of the ground swell which makes the tide, and cries, "Mother, see, I am making the tide." What we are going to discuss tonight is whether the parable of the crystal or the pebble is the one that really represents the relation of social work to social progress. Is it an organic or a mechanistic relation that is most contributory to the forward march of human welfare? While some things are likely to be said that may seem more or less critical of ourselves, far be it from me to undervalue the contributions which social work has already made to human welfare. If we are interested in progress, we must all realize that we shall move on from methods that have been employed to newer ones, despite the fact that the most substantial, lasting, and surest progress builds on and recognizes that which has gone before. Otherwise we should be like the child who, standing on his father's shoulders and forgetting all else in his exultation, cries, "See, I am taller than daddy." Heaven forbid that that should be the spirit of any of us. All papers in this volume appear in the order in which they were presented, beginning with the general session held on the evening of June 22. 3 There have been indispensable values contributed by social work up to The greatest of these and the most indispensable, as our historians some da show, is the good will of the social workers, for that is the lubricant of social pro Without it, progress would be impossible, either in the work that has been do as I believe, in the greater work that is still to be accomplished. I am sure a very real tribute is being paid to the social worker and the pla his good will in the community, these days when so many inventories are being ta as to why men do not enter the ministry and the missionary field, as once they From the churches themselves comes the explanation that the underlying reaso that the field of service of good will has become more inclusive than the church its and that the very same motives which found expression years ago exclusively in ministry are finding expression and outlet today in social service. As fundamen then as religion, is this spirit of good will that has led the social worker in his profession. But then there is the knowledge, both direct and vicarious, of social condition The social worker has been the sensitive nerve center of society. We have come t know its ills, its processes, and its possibilities, by intimate first-hand contact; and one of our uses has been the sharing of this knowledge with the rest of the community. As knowledge becomes more and more important, as we understand the deeper processes of society, we will realize how indispensable is this contribution of social work. Also, there are the thousands of restored minds and bodies of individuals and of families that the social worker can claim as one of his contributions to society. Surely no greater recognition of this has ever been given than in the late war, when all kinds of social workers were summoned as necessary and indispensable elements in the nation's marshalling of its entire force-the family welfare worker, the recreation leader, the organizer and leader of boys' and girls' clubs, the hospital social service worker, and so through the long list. The nation has recognized this contribution, and far be it from any of us to belittle it. Granting, however, that all this is true, is there the possibility of our resting satisfied with our accomplishments or perhaps of failing to see the lines for still further contribution to social progress? Are we somewhat in the danger of him who was more or less our forerunner-the rescue mission worker. He was always exhibiting his wonderful cases of conversion, as well he might. We have criticized him sometimes because he did not recognize along with these miraculous achievements some of the defects and limitations of his own method. He never stopped to question why the futile, backsliding professions in his mission far outnumbered the converts, or what there was about his method that permitted this. He never stopped to ask-and we think we have begun to what the limitations were that might create human wreckage even faster than he was effecting human salvage. Are we, as social workers, blind somewhat to our own limitations, and in the same way? Shall we ask ourselves that tonight? For if we are working with a zeal that is without knowledge, we may come under the same condemnation which we have passed so freely on our predecessors. Now, whether we have such defects or not, there certainly are some limitations which honesty and candor compel us to confess. Not long ago a study was made of one of the most efficient and modern family-caring agencies in the country, one whose work was fairly inclusive of most of the poor in its city. With all our boast that the extinction of poverty is one of our purposes, it had to be admitted that the number of cases on that organization's records were increasing much more rapidly or at a greater rate than the population of that city. And what family-caring agency would not, if examining itself, find the same to be true? I heard Dr. Haven Emerson say not a great while ago that the records of physical examinations in the draft in the last great war showed that there were just as many men physically defective then as there were in our civil war more than fifty years before this in spite of all the health work in this period. We have our own explanations of course: that our methods of detection and diagnosis have improved so greatly that we know a great many more sick and poor than formerly. Admitting that this is true, it still leaves something to be desired. If our ability to discover new methods of diagnosis has outstripped our method of removing the ills of society, we still may have centered upon one side of the problem to the neglect of another. The other day a visiting housekeeper for a large association said, in a report to her superior, that while it was all very well and good to ask people to contribute to their work because of the valuable service it was rendering, honesty compelled her to admit that the families upon which she labored followed out her prescriptions as long as she kept a very close personal relation to them, but as soon as she was more or less removed they all seemed to lapse into their own ways. There was a kind of frankness which we need to apply to ourselves, and ask whether all this salvage which we have effected is more or less of the limping sort, still depending upon us for its stability. Again, in the newer field of social hygiene, we have gloried in the gradual removal of our segregated districts from city after city. Yet, a little while ago, George Kneeland, the foremost vice investigator of the country, said that it was by no means certain that the elimination of the segregated districts had actually lessened vice, that the traffic through automobiles, through rooming houses, through flats, through assignation hotels, and the many other varied forms that this evil had taken on, required us to make still further inquiry as to how much progress even this muchheralded method has accomplished. So, we have gone on, passing, by Herculean effort, various kinds of laws that required, oftentimes, redoubled effort for their enforcement. We passed a model child labor law in Ohio many years ago and in only a few years the Children's Bureau of the Federal Government came out to show us how far we honored it in the breach rather than in the enforcement. When we first entered the war, we prided ourselves on the obsolescence of the pension system. Judge Mack, a former president of this conference, drafted an almost model law for soldier compensation, which we believed would do away with the necessity for the more or less demoralizing effects that pensions have; and yet how far did we have a social fabric that was capable of incorporating this benefaction? The subsequent dissatisfaction, the incapacity to operate a system so as to meet all the needs that the men have felt, seem to be driving us very rapidly back to what is very much like a lump pension system, the bonus plan. In another direction, that of appropriations by legislative act, there has resulted from our multiplicity of demands upon the public treasury more or less of a revolt by the taxpayers, until, as one of them said: "You social workers are just like cracker jack, the more you eat, the more you want, and we can see there is no end to your demands and we may as well stop them one place as another." Now, while these are only illustrations which you could duplicate many times, they are the honest kind of self-examination we need to make if we are to answer the question: How |