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HUMAN VALUES AND
SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
HUMAN VALUES and
SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

MARION HATHWAY
MEMORIAL LECTURES

Jv

COUNCIL ON SOCIAL WORK EDUCATION

© Copyright, 1961
by the
Council on Social Work Education, Incorporated

Library of Congress catalog number: 61-18517

Manufactured in the United States of America

by Beaverbrooke Printing Co., Inc.

COUNCIL ON SOCIAL WORK EDUCATION

345 East 46th Street, New York 17, N. Y.
61-18-58
 Contents

Page

iMCoV, eM ASM a SS BLE Ri Oey Se AA RR ede AC Vii

RRMeine RIVE
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WRY. fd crise ornscieon eresaurte ciearomamsiioceae
aint cana ix
ARLIEN JOHNSON

Preparation for Social Responsibility ........ssssssssssssessessssssesenssesenee Maratea XVii

MARION HATHWAY

THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES

Human. Values in social Chamee (1957 i cick asecteescncenerssrcomnaes 1

THURGOOD MARSHALL

Needed: The Social and Moral Equivalent to the H-Bomb! (1958) 10

WALTER P. REUTHER

Modern Science and Human Welfare (1959) .nnecssscccccccscssssssssssssissssssssesses 31

GEORGE R. HARRISON

Public Responsibility for Human Welfare (1960) on. 42

JULIA J. HENDERSON

The Place of Professional Education in Higher Education (1961) 54

KATHARINE ELIZABETH MCBRIDE

Memorial Resolution—Bryn Mawr College wcsssssssssssssssscssnsssssssssssssee 63

DRistot Marion Hathway's Publications nares onceccoresceonscmvatoeerterns 67

Foreword

{he volume is a memorial to Marion Hathway. It has been made

possible by her many friends who have wished to pay tribute to Marion’s
great contribution to social work and social work education. It is most
appropriate that such a volume should be published by the Council on
Social Work Education. Marion not only served for many years as the
executive secretary of the American Association of Schools of Social
Work, one of the predecessor organizations of the Council, but she was
among those far-sighted educators who saw the Council as a vehicle
through which to mobilize more effectively the interest and resources
of the total field as a means of further strengthening social work
education.
Marion’s interests were broad and deep as this volume makes clear,
but she was above all else a dedicated educator who remembered always
that the only real purpose behind the continuous effort to improve social
work education was to make possible better social services to people
in need of them.
It has required much self-restraint not to amplify in this foreword the
notable contributions made by this devoted social worker to the many
causes in which she was interested and which are so ably reviewed
herein by Arlien Johnson. It would be useless to contend that this volume
does more than touch on her many interests. No one book could capture
fully the warmth of her personality, the range of her interest in human
welfare, the depth of her feeling for and belief in people, or her quiet
sense of humor. She was one of those social workers about whom we
can truly say that this is a better world because of her.
The Council is grateful to Marion’s many friends for their interest
and financial support which make this volume possible, to those who
have contributed to its content, and to Marion’s sister Julia who has
provided advice and counsel in the preparation of this volume and whose
love and respect for Marion have been an inspiration to us all.
ERNEST F. WITTE
Executive Director
Council on Social Work Education
New York, New York
August, 1961
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MARION HATHWAY
1895-1955
i
Tribute to Marion Hathway

4 growth of a profession can often be traced in the history of its

leaders, whether these be individuals or associations of its members. And
at certain stages of development, the individual leader plays a more
important part than at other periods; for the leader may combine
qualities of mind and heart that enable him to have widespread influence.
Marion Hathway was such a leader in the social work profession.
The years 1916 to 1955 which were the life span of Miss Hathway’s
working years—dating from her graduation from Radcliffe College to her
sudden and untimely death — marked a period during which social
work emerged from a loosely organized association of movements to a
recognized discipline and a consolidation of several professional asso-
ciations into a united, national organization, The National Association
of Social Workers. As part of this development, social work evolved an
educational program that prescribed the training to be followed to
provide a basis for professional competence. These formative years were
marked, as might be expected, by many struggles and conflicts over goals
and methods. Miss Hathway was one of those leaders who combined the
best of past experience with a vision of the future. She was fired by the
humanitarianism of the early reformers but she was also infused with
the scientific spirit of inquiry and analysis. Endowed as a person with
rare qualities of sensitive understanding, deep feeling, and intelligence,
she also had great personal charm and the gift of humor. All of these
qualities she put to good use in her life of dedication to furthering the
goals and values of her profession. Her contribution to education for
social work was especially noteworthy.
Marion Hathway was born in North Tonawanda, New York, July 31,
1895, the second of three children of William W. Hathway and the
former Alice R. Shelley. She was greatly influenced by New England
traditions while she was growing up. Memorable characteristics were
her quiet dignity, graciousness, her generous nature, and withal a sense
of adventure and fun which made her a delightful friend and companion.
In 1936 she was married to Theodore R. Parker, a fellow professor
at the University of Pittsburgh. In accordance with her feminist leanings,
she always used her maiden name in professional circles.

ix
 During the years she was a student at Radcliffe College, 1912 to 1916,
the first World War began and the many problems it induced awakened
a new social consciousness in this country. No doubt the climate of the
time had an influence on Miss Hathway’s natural propensities and
led her to major in Social Ethics and Economics. This combination of
the philosophical and the practical was characteristic of her activities
throughout her life. Her undergraduate interests were in social work,
in religious and reform organizations, and found expression in volunteer
service in settlements and in the woman suffrage movement. Her
aptitude for leadership was evident in such campus activities as business
manager of the College Weekly and editor of the College Yearbook.
A variety of work experiences from coast to coast helped to prepare
Miss Hathway for the responsibilities which she later assumed in
August 1935 as Secretary of the American Association of Schools of
Social Work (now incorporated in the Council on Social Work Educa-
tion), a position in which she advised with university officials throughout
the country on standards for social work education. The five years
following graduation from college were spent as a teacher of mathematics
in a private preparatory school, as a War Department statistician in
Washington, and as a field representative for the National Board of the
YWCA in the mountain states. A growing interest in vocational guidance
led her in 1921 to take a position as Assistant Director of the Bureau
of Child Welfare in the Denver, Colorado, Public Schools. The next
five years were filled with purposeful activity. In addition to her work
in the Bureau, she participated in social work professional organizations
and helped to develop a plan for the school of social work which was later
established at the University of Denver. She was also an influence in such
organizations as the American Association of University Women, heading
vocational conferences for high school girls and making studies of
vocational opportunities in local industries. She helped to organize the
Business and Professional Women’s Club of Denver and the Colorado
Vocational Guidance Association. Her interest in vocational guidance
culminated in a master’s thesis at the University of Chicago which was
published in 1928 in the monograph series of the School of Social Service
Administration under the title, The Young Cripple and His Job.
Miss Hathway’s career as an educator began in 1927 when she went
to the University of Washington to teach pre-professional courses in
social work in the sociology department. The four years Miss Hathway
spent at the University of Washington (1927-1931) gave ample oppor-
tunity for leadership on both campus and in the community. The

x
demand on the University, as the depression began, called for an expan-
sion of introductory courses and for participation in community planning.
Miss Hathway gained the respect of all with whom she worked —
students, colleagues on the campus, and social agency and community
people. As in Denver, her approach to problems was a scholarly one:
study and fact finding were the basis for action. The Seattle Community
Fund engaged her to make special studies, one on the cost and volume
of social work and another on homeless men which led to the establish-
ment of a Central Registry to bring a degree of order out of the chaos
that unemployment was increasing. In addition to a heavy teaching load
and to acting as secretary for the Washington State Conference of
Social Work, she found time to revise, compile, and edit three social
service directories, two for Seattle and one for the State of Washington.
With the assistance of a graduate student, she completed a study of
poor relief in Washington, later published under the title, Public Relief
in Washington, 1853-1933.
These early years in Denver and Seattle were typical of her activities
in later years: scholarly devotion to advancement of the profession and
active participation in the life of the community. Her interest in learning
and desire for knowledge led her inevitably to seek further graduate
study. After spending three summers as a student at the University of
Chicago she entered on a full-time basis in the School of Social Service
Administration; and in 1933 she was awarded the Ph.D. degree. Her
doctoral dissertation, The Migratory Worker and Family Life, was based
on a field study in the State of Washington and was, characteristically,
a pioneer inquiry in a neglected field. Work with Edith Abbott and
Sophonisba P. Breckinridge, who uniquely combined the devotion and
idealism of the social reform era with a pathfinding scientific approach
to social problems, reinforced Miss Hathway’s belief in the possibilities
of social change through the exercise of courageous leadership for wel-
fare programs by those who, at the same time, were ever building more
effective methods of service to people in distress. She became certain
that teaching and research provided opportunity for useful work in
harmony with her convictions.
In 1932, Miss Hathway joined the faculty of the University of
Pittsburgh to teach in the social work program where she remained,
except for a three-year leave of absence as Secretary of the American
Association of Schools of Social Work, until 1951. These were busy
and, on the whole, rewarding years. She saw the Division of Social Work
become a full-fledged School of Social Work; she was appointed Professor

xi
of Public Welfare in 1941. For several summers and while on sabbatical
leave from Pittsburgh, she held positions as visiting professor at
American University in Washington, University of Hawaii, and University
of Puerto Rico.
Miss Hathway accepted appointment as Director of the Department
of Social Economy at Bryn Mawr College in 1951. She strengthened
and extended the work of the Department and she gave special attention
to the doctoral program which, it was said, she “viewed as a true
integration of knowledge in the social sciences and social work.” The
Resolution adopted by the Faculty of Bryn Mawr College at the time
of her death contains this statement:
She at once made herself an integral part of the college community.
... In all these relationships her unremitting energy was apparent.
She demonstrated her ability in organization, stood for broad and
liberal views on issues that arose, maintained an attitude that was
independent but friendly and sympathetic, and revealed a spirit
at once loyal and courageous, never afraid to take an unpopular
stand in defense of her own convictions. Thus she won and held
the respect and affection of colleagues and associates.

The satisfactions of these later years were enhanced by close associ-

ation with her sister, Julia, who lived nearby; and by vacations which
she spent with her husband and Julia at their summer place in New
Hampshire.
As a teacher Miss Hathway was painstaking and thorough, endeavor-
ing to inspire her students to seek breadth as well as depth of knowledge.
She stimulated them to think for themselves, to understand with historical
perspective and to have faith in the public social services as part of
the evolution of a democratic society. Ruth Smalley, who was both a
student and a colleague of Miss Hathway’s, says of her, “She had a quiet
patience with her students as striking as her fiery zeal for what she
taught. She expected the best a student could give and was satisfied
with nothing less — but she was concerned to help him realize that
best in himself — in his own way.” The example she provided by
engaging as a member of the profession and as a citizen in a wide
range of activities aimed at the improvement of social and living condi-
tions influenced students in developing a philosophy of social action.
The community activities in which Miss Hathway participated while
in Pennsylvania are too numerous to recount. Locally she served on
professional advisory committees to such organizations as the Pittsburgh
Urban League, the Citizens Committee for Survey of the City Health

xii
Department, the Pittsburgh Department of Public Welfare and the
Federation of Social Agencies. In the State she served on such com-
mittees as the Joint Committee for Agencies and Schools of Pennsylvania,
the Public Charities Association, and on several Governor’s Committees,
the last, the Committee on Mental Health. She held office in such
national organizations as the American Association of Schools of Social
Work — she was President in 1942 — the American Association of
Social Workers (now the National Association of Social Workers),
the National Conference on Social Welfare. In 1942 she was Chairman
of the Advisory Committee on Training and Personnel to the United
States Children’s Bureau and the Social Security Board.
Miss Hathway’s liberal views and deep concern for human well-being
led her sometimes to participate in organizations not popular in all
quarters; for example, the Progressive Party, the Pittsburgh Council for
American-Soviet Friendship, the Pittsburgh League for Social Justice,
and others. Criticism directed against her, that misinterpreted her
motives for such activities, hurt her deeply. She was a strong supporter
of a democratic labor movement and believed that collective bargaining
and social legislation could help to achieve improved standards of living.
She was among those who were always ready to “stand up and be
counted” when professional issues were at stake or social betterment
causes needed support. On the campus she was a strong proponent of
that precious heritage of the university, academic freedom.
Throughout her career, Miss Hathway took an active part in the
organizations that sought to bring higher standards to education for
social work. She had a direct and lasting influence upon social work
education through her service as Secretary of the American Association
of Schools of Social Work, 1938 to 1941. She took leave from the
University of Pittsburgh to become the first full-time secretary of the
Association, and in the words of the Resolution passed by the Council
on Social Work Education in January 1956, “She contributed signifi-
cantly to the development of educational standards, gave generously
and patiently of her experience and wisdom, particularly to new and
struggling schools, and through these pioneer efforts laid the foundation
for a system of professional consultation to educational institutions as
it is known by the Council today.” She had the capacity to enter into
each situation presented and, as with students, to bring out the strengths
while dealing firmly with the weaknesses. Her sound knowledge of
educational principles, her conviction about the place of professional
education within the university, and her perceptive understanding of
people and situations, enabled her to gain the respect and the support
of university officials for the standards that were then emerging for
social work education.
Miss Hathway’s interest in research and writing has already been
mentioned. The rapid growth of the public social services following
the depression of the 1930’s profoundly affected the practice of social
work and made evident the need for modifications in social work
education. While she was Secretary of the AASSW, a study committee
of the Association, with the assistance of an advisory committee from
federal and state agencies, secured a grant of funds from the Rockefeller
Foundation for the purpose of making an analysis and recommendations
concerning the personnel needs of the public social services and their
implications for social work education. Miss Hathway undertook the
difficult task of compiling the final report, published under the title,
Education for the Public Social Services, a task that in the words of
the Chairman of the Committee, Robert Lansdale, required “patience,
courage, and skill” in reconciling many points of view and differences
of opinion.
About this time Miss Hathway was offered the opportunity to serve
as Editor of a Social Service Series under the aegis of Houghton Mifflin
Company. She guided the selection of subject and author for four
volumes which have made a substantial contribution to social work
literature: American Social Security System by Eveline Burns (1949),
Social Group Work Practice by Gertrude Wilson and Gladys Ryland
(1949), Community Organization Practice by Campbell Murphy (1954)
and Casework Services for Children by Henrietta Gordon (1956). She
was at work on an introductory text on the field of social work at the
time of her death.
The many people who had known Marion Hathway during her life
— students, colleagues, friends, and acquaintances — wanted in some
way to bear tribute to the great contribution she had made to social
work, to professional education, and to the democratic philosophy
which she exemplified. It was with this purpose in mind that the
Memorial Lectures were conceived and are now published. They
admirably reflect her interests: civil rights, labor leadership, the uses
of modern science, new areas of social welfare services, and education.
Those invited to give the Lectures — Thurgood Marshall, Walter
Reuther, George R. Harrison, Julia Henderson, and Katharine McBride
— are all leaders who have challenged complacency in their respective
fields; they have moved forward toward new frontiers; they all admonish

xiv
social workers to consider their place in these forward movements.
Their spirit is one that Marion Hathway shared.
It is our hope that this volume of Memorial Lectures in honor of
one of the distinguished leaders of the social work profession will be
an inspiration to the younger generation of practitioners, and that they
will wish to emulate the breadth of vision, the moral stamina, and the
professional competence which were hers. Benjamin Youngdahl puts
such a hope in these words: “Marion Hathway: scholar, teacher,
crusader, advocate for underdog, peace lover, internationalist, friend.
May her convictions for social justice and righteousness — and her
courage to act on these convictions — be continuing standards of social
work — and of democracy!”

ARLIEN JOHNSON

Granada Hills, California

August, 1961
Tus lecture, given in 1948 at the Twenty-ninth
Annual Meeting of the American Association of Schools
of Social Work, is but one example of the social work
statesmanship that typified Marion Hathway’s profes-
sional lifetime. Always pressing toward new horizons of
social work goals in terms of critical contemporary
social issues, she had the gift of foreseeing critical areas
of social responsibility
— always in terms of human
values! — so that not only was she in the vanguard but
it truly can be said she was “ahead of her time.” This
paper deals with issues that appear, a decade later, as
current crucial concerns in these memorial lectures.
Because Marion Hathway’s thoughts and writings, as
reflected in her own words, are so pertinent and timely,
they are included as an introduction to this memorial
volume.
Preparation for Social Responsibility
MARION HATHWAY

is the closing paragraph of his stirring address, “Why Not Face It,”
our president appealed to us to consider the importance of social
philosophy as basic to the practice of social work. A similar emphasis
has pervaded the discussions at many sessions of this conference. The
critical nature of the period in which we live makes of “a basic social
philosophy” a sine qua non in professional education. There is probably
not one of us who does not use the expression “basic social philosophy”
over and over again. But even as we do so, have we anything like a
precise meaning in mind? Are we thinking together about it? How do
we identify the person who has, as we say, “‘no basic philosophy’? How
do we equip students with such a philosophy? My discussion today is
an attempt in a preliminary way to identify the sources, to suggest
certain hypotheses, and to comment on teaching methods in the Prepa-
ration for Social Responsibility.
Human needs, which stimulated the early efforts in the direction of
social reform and in provision of social services, were needs created by
the changing structure of community life. Social work was brought into
being because of concern over the social adjustments which the indi-
vidual was asked to make. Practice and education for the field over
the years have been greatly affected by differences between those who
have emphasized individual and those who have emphasized environ-
mental causation in social maladjustment. How these differences have
affected professional education is indicated clearly in a recent statement
by Sue Spencer, the Executive Secretary of the American Association
of Schools of Social Work, as follows:
One group finds the heart of social work in those processes or prac-
tices used by workers in direct worker-to-client or leader-to-group
relationships. . . . The other group finds the heart of social work in
the development of services to meet human needs and problems.!
Here are the two familiar facets of our field which have, at least in the
past, produced opposing points of view and which are today reflected
in our educational programs. Inasmuch as preparation for social re-
sponsibility has little opportunity for success as it moves back and forth
1 Spencer, Sue: “Issues in Professional Education,” Survey Midmonthly, Vol. 83,
No. 6 (June 1947), pp. 167-169.

XVii
 between two such opposite poles, it is therefore fortunate that we can
preface our discussion today by noting progress in bringing these oppo-
sites nearer to each other, so that we are able to see them as part of a
whole.
The fusion of the concepts of individual freedom and collective secu-
rity is one of the encouraging developments of our time. Mutual discov-
ery of psychiatry and social sciences of each other have done much to
temper the cleavage of the past. How basic is this fusion in the present
day practice of psychiatry, for example, is indicated by the words of
Franz Alexander who wrote:
No social group can escape the mentally unsettling consequences
of the prevailing discrepancy between emotional orientation and
social structure. The effect of this discrepancy upon the struggling
masses is insecurity, loss of self-esteem and frustration. . . . The
remedy lies obviously in an emotional re-orientation, restoring the
disturbed relation between psychological attitudes and social struc-
ture. The achievement of this lies not primarily in the field of
psychiatry or of mental hygiene. It is the function of the social
institutions to which the shaping of the personality and of social
attitudes are traditionally entrusted — first of all the family, the
church and the school.?
“Necessitous men are not free men” expresses the same thought in the
- words of a great statesman. Franklin D. Roosevelt developed this con-
cept in the Economic Bill of Rights, commenting as he did so, ““We have
come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom can-
not exist without economic security and independence.”
If we accept it, this fusion of the concept of individual freedom and
collective security begins to clarify for us a kind of philosophic base
which gives our field a unity, an under-structure upon which our prac-
tice can be developed. Yet it challenges us to determine how we are to
hold our understanding of and service to the individual as a profes-
sional discipline, and at the same time extend that discipline to an
understanding of and service to the environment. It demands that we
examine the cultural and social-institutional factors that frustrate and
twist men’s lives and that we develop as much expertness in this area
as we now apply to interpersonal relationships which thwart person-
ality development.
The first step in all of this has been taken, I believe, if we can accept
as the goals of social work practice in the framework of American
2 Alexander, Franz: “Mental Hygiene in the Atomic Age,” Mental Hygiene, XXX,
Oct. 1946, pp. 529-544.
3 Annual Message to Congress, January 11, 1944.

XViii
democracy the union of the concepts of individual freedom and col-
lective security as found in the document known as the Economic Bill
of Rights. Here is a new basis of security. Here there are included the
right to a useful and remunerative job; the right to earn enough to
provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; the right of every
farmer to raise and sell his products; the right of every business man,
large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair com-
petition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad; the right
of every family to a decent home; the right to medical care and the
opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; the right to adequate
protection from economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unem-
ployment; and the right to a good education.*
It is such a set of ethical values that seems to me in the last analysis
to test the validity of our professional efforts as practitioners and edu-
cators. Yet, what is the connection between the acceptance of this state-
ment of the philosophy of the social work practice and the certainty
that this philosophy may be clearly and forthrightly expressed in pro-
fessional practices in a given agency? How can the connection be so
effective as to cement with this philosophy once and for all the under-
girding structure of social agency operations and social work practice?
We know that professional activity divorced from a sense of ethical
values for which we take responsibility has a potential for anti-social
performance. Thus was characterized the work of medical practitioners
in Nazi Germany, whose application of scientific method detached from
ethical values led the profession to engage in a kind of activity that
has shaken the civilized world. In present day American social work,
it is not the potential detachment that bothers us. It is the how of
moving ahead to a more positive expression of ethical values in our
profession that is our concern today.
In a recent article, Donald Howard, President, American Association
of Social Workers, has called our attention to a larger area of profes-
sional responsibility in social work which has emerged from World
War II.5 The challenge of this expanding responsibility in the societal
structure of our time has been indicated very forcibly by Benjamin
Youngdahl in his presidential address at Chicago in 1947 entitled “Stand
Up and Be Counted.’ This widening area of professional practice and

4 Tbid.
5 Howard, Donald: “New Horizons for Social Work,” The Compass, Vol. 28, No.
7 (Nov. 1947), pp. 9-14.
6 Youngdahl, Benjamin: “Social Workers: Stand Up and Be Counted,” The Com-
pass, Vol. 28, No. 3 (Mar. 1947), pp. 21-24.

xix
the increasing emphasis upon the relationship between the nature of
social welfare organization and political and social structure behoove
us to examine our own performance in professional education to deter-
mine the extent to which our students are preparing to function in this
new frontier.
What is the specific charge to us? First and foremost, we are chal-
lenged to scrutinize and add to the existing process of professional
education a new area of responsible professional activity. This area is
work with societal process. If we are agreed upon social goals that lead
toward freedom and security for all men, then we must actively apply
ourselves toward their realization. We would not build a new design
upon a tottering chassis; no more should we expect the social work
philosophy of the early 1900’s to support our efforts today. We need
a new design conserving the best of the old. How can we do this? How
can we prepare for social responsibility?
It is not easy to express clearly what I have in mind. The term “social
philosophy” is misleading. Social work has not been without a social
philosophy or a sense of social responsibility. Something of the kind
has been basic to our functioning throughout the years. It has, how-
ever, been a kindly, tolerant and patient aura which has hovered over
“our enabling efforts” as we have emerged from the philanthropic domi-
nance of the past. Now, issues are more clearly outlined; alternatives
more sharply defined. This tolerant understanding of both sides and
acceptance of feelings on both sides is outmoded as the understructure
for our “enabling of 1948.” The day, for example, of “I approve of
labor unions but —I don’t approve of strikes;” “I believe in civil lib-
erties but-— a personnel committee of the board can provide for all
personnel practices in our agency” — these attitudes are like “laven-
der and old lace” today.
We must clarify our ethical values as a professional group. The older
professions have usually defined their individual and group responsi-
bilities in a code to guide their members’ conduct. The present period
calls for more than a guide to individual conduct. Our relationship to
society calls for agreement upon our fundamental responsibilities which
in turn will affect our conduct as individual practitioners. Therefore, as
we draw up our production schedule for 1948, to continue the analogy
of an earlier paragraph, we shall want to look at skills and tools that we
can command for our new design. My suggestion is that a beginning
be made by considering five hypotheses of social responsibility:
1. That social action is a part of all professional practice. Inherent,

xX
I believe, in the social goals and purposes of each and every social
agency which is sanctioned by the community is responsible social action.
Whether in the area of social casework, social group work, social inter-
group work, social planning or research, the absence of or indifference
to a meaningful social goal to which every staff and board member of
the agency is pledged should disqualify the agency as an acceptable
social instrument of the community. This is not to say that the same
method of social action is utilized by the various functional areas of the
field, as one or two illustrations will indicate.
In social casework the current trend is that help can be properly
given only in relation to the service for which the client applies and for
which the agency is established. The elements in social casework coun-
selling are that it shall be on an individual basis, that the problem be
of concern to the client and that he desire to move in dealing with it.
Here professional social action has a place in the enabling process itself
if the client brings a problem, for example, of racial discrimination
and indicates a desire and ability to take responsible action in this
area and the caseworker discusses the channels of action available to
the client.
In group work there is “an educational process in which the group
worker helps individuals establish satisfying group relationships that
assist them to grow emotionally and intellectually and enables them
to function more adequately in community and other socially significant
groups.”’ This term, “socially significant,” provides ample opportunity
for the identification and use of social goals and for responsible move-
ment towards them. Illustrations of social action in the group work
process are many and varied. The group worker may even identify
“democratic goals” with group work method and make of group leader-
ship a social action program in itself. However, he may limit activity
to understanding and helping the individuals within the group. Between
these two extremes is “enabling the group to function more adequately
in the community” in which professional social action must be defined.
Within the field of community organization some progress is being
made as the inter-group character of the process and the professional
nature of activity are identified. The range of possible objectives, how-
ever, extends all the way from a promotional campaign to action around
agreed upon steps with the full representation of interest groups in the
inter-group process. Enabling the inter-group towards “socially desirable
7 Wilson, Gertrude: “Counselling in Schools and Colleges,” Journal of the National
Association of Deans of Women, Vol. X, No. 3 (March 1947).

Xxi
goals” is in between and again the character of professional social action
can be defined.
Social research is selected in final illustration. One of the topics of
current comment is the new role of the scientist in present day society.
The atomic scientists, aware as no others of the social implications of
their discoveries, have taken leadership in social responsibility for the
control and use of their findings. Social research in social work has
something to learn from these efforts. Acceptance of social responsi-
bility for the implications of his findings will link the research worker
with a sense of values which give him perspective on the negative as
well as positive implications of his efforts. His obligations thereby become
clearer to him.
I have taken the liberty of selecting these fields of social work for the
purpose of elaborating what I mean by the concept of social responsibility
for which we are preparing. Administration has been omitted only
because of time limitations, but illustrations are numerous and easily
available from this area of practice.
2. That responsible social action rests upon historical understanding
and conviction about future trends in the social welfare services. If we
accept the function of social action in modifying the societal process,
then we must know the materials with which we are dealing, past and
present. The significance of this element in social work practice in a
period of acute economic change has been highlighted in four periods
of our history. The first was the turn of the century which ushered in
the full impact of the industrial revolution upon this country, bringing
in its train greater growth in industry, immigration, urbanization and
social insecurity to workers in our society. A second of these important
periods is the one immediately following the first world war which brought
new insight into human behavior from psychiatry and from the social
sciences. The third period is that of the “thirties” during which the impact
of the depression, carrying with it fifteen million unemployed, confronted
the social workers in this country with need for action. The fourth period
is that of World War II and the years which have followed. Social
workers have grown as never before to see that the goals and objectives
of their own profession can never be approximated unless there is
security in the world — and a security for the individual founded upon
security of common goals in society.
3. That public responsibility in the field of social welfare establishes
firmly the place of professional service in public services. Social welfare
during the past year has been profoundly affected in the public area by
ee
the investigations of the public welfare agencies in New York and
Baltimore. The challenge to the fundamental principles for which social
work stands has been powerful and of great significance. How seriously
this trend may affect our efforts as educators is suggested by a summary
of the address by Chairman Stern of the State Board of Welfare before
the League of Women Voters in New York, as follows:
One thing in the inquiry that had struck him, Mr. Stern said, was
the philosophy with which social service workers interpret policies
approved by the state and city, a philosophy, he added, that
encourages people to remain on relief. He said this philosophy
had been expanding for ten years, that it stemmed in part from
policies of the Federal Social Security Board and was now being
taught in various social work schools.®
In contrast to that of New York, the investigation in Baltimore seems
to be of greater significance in that it has attacked not the things we are
failing to do but has questioned the things which we are trying to do.
In the Baltimore investigation, a research agency outside the field of
social work undertook to examine philosophies of procedure and prac-
tices including an analysis of the professional literature of the Bureau
of Public Assistance. Two of our able and respected faculty members,
Charlotte Towle and Grace Marcus, have been under fire because they
are authors of two pamphlets widely used in in-service training programs
in public assistance. “Common Human Needs’? and “The Nature of
Service in Public Assistance Administration’!® have been cited as
contributing to the use of the Baltimore agency as “proving ground for
the social work theories of the Federal Administration.”
These and other investigations in public assistance are threatening the
whole framework of public services. The attacks upon social workers
and schools of social work have their part in undermining confidence
in the place of professional service and in the standards of civil services.
It is the undermining of public confidence in social security that is really
at stake. President Robert Hutchins is quoted as saying that he would
not advise any young scientist at the moment to enter public service.
Will this be our tendency as preparation for the public service becomes
more difficult? Or can we examine these implications carefully and act
upon them constructively and with discipline?
8 New York Times, January 20, 1948. ;
9 Towle, Charlotte: Common Human Needs, An Interpretation for Staff in Public
Assistance Agencies, Federal Security Agency, Social Security Board, Washington,
D.C., 1945.
10 Marcus, Grace F.: The Nature of Service in Public Assistance Administration,
Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1946.
 4. That social agencies supported by voluntary contributions from
the community are responsible to the community. Private agencies are
supported by an increasingly large segment of the community. Their
boards should be responsible to the same larger community within which
are white collar and industrial workers. The efforts to democratize the
financing of private agencies have made their impact. Have efforts to
democratize administration been equally effective? I think not, or boards
of directors would not continue to represent the same groups; staff and
board relationships would not be encumbered by clashes over the desire
of staff workers to organize and bargain collectively.
5. That the principles of civil liberties shall govern the practices of
social agencies. The social worker bases his professional practice in part
upon certain philosophic concepts which are to all interests and purposes
“civil liberties.” If he practices within a restriction of these liberties,
it is both with the acceptance of limitation imposed and with the
conviction that change can be affected. Casework, group work and
community organization to be effective are dependent upon the freedom
of expression and action by individuals and groups affected by attempts
to further sound relationship between them. Fact-finding and interpre-
tation of conditions lose their value if research is not the search for truth
and surveys of needs are useless if reports are shelved because they are
painful to hear and are contrary to the views of certain community
interests.
* * *

These hypotheses have been enumerated without elaboration. Similarly

their relationship to the educational process must pass with only brief
comment at this time, for we must return to the essential question—
“How shall we prepare for social responsibility?”
The original subject for this final session was “Teaching Social Action”
and this is one way of approaching our task. Although its place is clear
and although experimentation is valuable to all of us, the problem seems
to be over-simplified by such an approach. I am fearful that methods
may become standardized in the minds of the students and that they will
tend to apply conclusions of one episode to another without regard
to basic differences that exist. Similarly, emphasis upon preparation for
“administration” or for “statesmanship” or “leadership” or a differen-
tiation between the work of “the specialist and the generalist” seems to
partialize a problem which seems to me to warrant attack as a whole.
As faculty members, our responsibilities do not require that each one
shall be active in social action movements. Action we will leave to those

XXiv
who are competent and ready. But from conviction we will excuse no one.
Students should be able to assume that every member of the faculty
of a school of social work has conviction on these five points or their
equivalents and the kind of conviction that leaves no student in doubt.
This is of fundamental importance in shaping student attitudes and it
should not be necessary for students to conjure up devices to find out
“what do faculty members think about this or that.”
Further, our responsibility is to help students to understand the nature
of the social-economic setting in which present-day social work is prac-
ticed. Few students come to our schools with any working knowledge
of social economics. They need an understanding of the social structure
just as they need an understanding of the individual who lives under
the structure. Just as they need to understand their own feelings in
relation to the individual, so do they need to understand their feelings in
relation to the social-economic structure. Materials for this purpose are
now available and can be integrated with many courses.
Further, our responsibility is to encourage the capacity to criticize
and form thoughtful judgments. Again, within our general teaching
programs, more emphasis should be placed upon the responsibility of
the student for analysis, for independent judgment, for presentation
and defense of his conclusion. This method calls concretely for a high
standard of teaching and for seminar groups and faculty time available
to the student who wishes to clarify points. It cannot be mass teaching.
Further, our responsibility is to help student organizations of various
types appearing in our schools. These are natural outgrowths of students’
development in the use of the group method. They offer an additional
learning experience for the student and need encouragement from that
point of view. They help to keep the student well informed. They should
not become a substitute for faculty leadership in examining and formu-
lating action programs.
The task is not an easy one, if we will pick it up. I am reminded of the
words of Rex Tugwell in describing his approach to the problems of
Puerto Rico:
It is worth contrasting the sense of hope and confidence which
all of us share today with the feeling we had at the outset. The vast
difficulties of the problem were oppressive and we early concluded
that... we could . . . make no conclusions. But as we steeped
ourselves in the facts and caught a feel of the nature of the problem,
we became more hopeful.!!
11 Tugwell, Rexford G.: The Stricken Land: The Story of Puerto Rico (New
York: Doubleday & Co., 1946).

XXV
Summary
(1) That social ethical values have changed during the period in
which social work has been developing as a profession; (2) that from
the ethical values of today we can deduce a set of principles that guide
our actions as practitioners and as teachers; (3) that these principles
or tools shall be capable of standing the test of the times; (4) that our
students will recognize them as their guiding directing force; (5) that
the graduates of our schools shall not falter in their use.
MARION HATHWAY
MEMORIAL LECTURES
Human Values In Social Change
THURGOOD MARSHALL*

IRs is no better time than the present to rededicate ourselves to

the principles to which Dr. Marion Hathway dedicated her life. It has
been said:
Dr. Hathway was that rare combination of a crusader and a scholar.
In her, the pioneer social reformers lived again. She cared passion-
ately about children, the disadvantaged and all in need of a cham-
pion and a spokesman. She had the wisdom and statesmanship as
well as the heart and zeal to work unceasingly for their welfare...
Her steadfast adherence to democratic principles and her cham-
pionship of civil rights will continue to inspire support and direct
the profession of social work in the years of tremendous change and
uncertainty ahead.!
In recent years we have watched with interest the world-wide move-
ment toward alleviation of the old theories of colonialization and the
removal of racial barriers in most areas of the world. The forward
movement of this trend has for years been apparent in India, Asia and
Africa. We have witnessed the restlessness of individuals of color denied
rights and privileges in their own land solely because of oppression by
peoples of other ethnic groups throughout the world, and there has been
a steady movement toward the removal of race, caste, color and religion
as barriers to citizenship.
In more recent years the problem has been brought closer to home.
On May 17, 1954, and again on May 31, 1955, most Americans and
other people of goodwill throughout the world were heartened that our
government had clearly and concisely recognized once and for all
that under the Constitution of the United States segregation in public
education was unconstitutional.? Since that time, in other decisions
involving recreational facilities and transportation’ the United States
Supreme Court has made it clear to the world that no state and no com-
munity has a right to separate its citizens on the basis of race and color.
Now, years after these decisions, we are all moved by the extreme
*Special Counsel, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
1 Excerpt from a Memorial to Marion Hathway by Ruth E. Smalley, delivered at
a meeting of the Philadelphia Area Chapter, National Association of Social
Workers, December 1955.
2 Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483; 349 U.S. 294.
3 Gayle v. Browder, 352 U.S. 903.
THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES 2

reaction to them in many areas of the country. Many were shocked

and depressed last year to find that one lone Negro woman, Autherine
Lucy, was prevented from attending the University of Alabama solely
by reason of the action of lawless mobs. However, many more were
shocked to discover that in the year 1956 we could find state university
and state law enforcement officials abjectly surrendering to mob action.
We have also witnessed the throwing of bombs and the shooting up
of buses and private homes, as well as churches, in places such as
Montgomery, Alabama, Birmingham, Alabama, and Tallahassee, Flor-
ida. These are types of extreme reaction based upon mob hysteria which
grab the headlines because of the violence inherent in them. These
actions not only tend to have our country appear as impotent to cope
with such situations, but also seem to demonstrate insincerity in our
protestations that we seek complete equality for all citizens as a pattern
for the entire world.
Recently, in discussing this problem with a large group of repre-
sentative college students from all areas of the world, except Russia
and its satellites, I was struck with the realization that these students,
tops in their individual countries, were unable to understand the
difference in our country between the law and its enforcement and
actual implementation on the local level. Indeed, it was at times difficult
to explain adequately how it was possible for a state government to
either be unable to or refuse to cope with lawless mobs. Once this
was fairly well explained it was even more difficult for them to com-
prehend the inability of the national government to move in. All of this
merely pinpoints the problems that all of you meet with and the need
for helping students of these problems to that understanding of the
problem necessary to provide satisfactory answers to the public they
will deal with. Of course in social work, as in many other fields, there
is always the difficulty of bringing into correct perspective the customs
and mores of individuals, the rights of individuals and minorities, and
the so-called delicate balance between state and federal functions.
Unfortunately, these problems do not lessen but tend to increase as
we struggle with the growing pains of a democracy dedicated to laws
rather than to men.
Because of my personal experience I would like to deal first with
the law. The decisions of the Supreme Court in 1954 and 1955 cannot
and should not be considered in a vacuum. The law of the land is built
up by decisions of the courts construing our basic legal document, the
Constitution of the United States. The Constitution is our supreme law.
 Human Values in Social Change )

In many of its most important provisions it speaks in general terms,

as is fitting in a document intended, as Chief Justice John Marshall
declared, “to endure for ages to come.” It is likewise true that from
early in the 19th Century there has been no question of the authority
and duty of the United States Supreme Court to consider and decide
the constitutionality of state statutes challenged as being in violation
of the Constitution of the United States.
Chief Justice John Marshall in 1819 recognized the principle as
follows: “This great principle is, that the constitution and the laws
made in pursuance thereof are supreme; that they control the constitu-
tions and laws of the respective states and cannot be controlled by them.
. . It is of the very essence of supremacy, to remove all obstacles to
its action within its own sphere, and so to modify every power vested
in subordinate governments, as to exempt its own operations from
their own influence.” 4
On February 15, 1913, Mr. Justice Holmes wrote: “I do not think
the United States would come to an end if we lost our power to declare
an Act of Congress void. I do think the Union would be imperilled
if we could not make that declaration as to the laws of the several
States. For one in my place sees how often a local policy prevails with
those who are not trained to national views... .” 5
There should, of course, be no question that the Fourteenth Amend-
ment to the Constitution took away from the states the right to deal
with its citizens on the basis of their race and color. The Civil War,
the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and the Federal
Civil Rights Statutes were brought about, at least in part, by the decision
of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott® case, to the effect that no Negro,
slave or free, had any rights which any other man was bound to respect.
It could be argued, very well and indeed it has been argued, satisfactorily
that the decision in that case was correct as the Constitution stood at
that time. If this argument be correct then it is also true that the
Fourteenth Amendment changed the situation to the point that all
American citizens had rights which were to be protected against
discriminatory state action. This no doubt would have become the law
much earlier had it not been for the political sell-out involving the
North as well as the South which relegated the rights of Negro Americans
to the tender mercies of the South.
44 Wheat, 316, 426-427.
5 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Collected Legal Papers (New York: Harcourt, Brace
and Howe, 1920), pp.295-296.
6 Scott v. Sandford, 19 How. 393.
THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES 4

Thus, the separate but equal doctrine began to grow up in the 1880's,
and in 1896 the United States Supreme Court, in the case of Plessy v.
Ferguson,’ put its stamp of approval upon the right of a state to single
out one group of its citizens solely because of race and color and
ostracize them from the rest of the community. This became the law
and was followed in state after state. With extensions here and extensions
there our entire country became a patchwork quilt of laws, varying
from state to state, in regard to the rights of American citizens who
happened to be non-white.
Many of the people studying the present era of desegregation labor
are under the delusion that state-imposed racial segregation has been
in existence “forever.” The truth is that the segregation laws we know
today are of comparatively recent origin. Most of the laws now on
the statute books were put there at the beginning of this century and
came as the result of a determination to move the Negro back to a
position as close to slavery as possible. Beginning with the impetus of
the Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine, the southern states and some of their
northern allies grasped the opportunity to create two types of citizens
with separate rights for each. This was for the sole purpose of creating
an inferior class of citizenship for people of color. Indeed the mushroom
growth of segregation and discriminatory laws during the first two
decades of this century piled up a huge bulk of legislation, much of
which is still on the books — all of which is unconstitutional.
Efforts were made by state law, local ordinance and local custom
to make certain that Negro Americans, solely because of their color,
should be embarrassed at every turn, be denied as many rights as possible
beginning with the denial of the right to register and vote, unfair jury
trials, segregated housing, schools, recreation and all other forms of
life. The important thing to remember about all of this is that the
separate but equal doctrine and the laws passed pursuant thereto are
of recent origin, most of them less than fifty years old.
On the other hand, starting with registration and voting cases and
cases invalidating municipal ordinances for residential segregation during
the period of 1910-1920, the Supreme Court began to exclude the
separate but equal doctrine from certain areas such as discriminatory
practices in juries, residential segregation and registration. This was
followed by decisions outlawing exclusion of Negroes from professional
schools, barring segregation in interstate travel, prohibiting state or
7 Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537.
 Human Values in Social Change 5)

federal enforcement of restrictive covenants preventing Negroes from

owning homes, etc. In the past decade, the Supreme Court, in a series
of decisions, has step by step removed the separate but equal doctrine
from phase after phase of public education up to the decision of 1954
which declared that all segregation in public education was unlawful.
Thus, these latest decisions are not “sudden” or “disruptive changes”
of American life but, rather, are parts of a steady trend in our govern-
ment toward the basic principles for which it was founded. To be more
specific, they are the steady movement toward fulfillment of the
Emancipation Proclamation and the Fourteenth Amendment to our
Constitution.
On the other side of the picture during the past two and one-half
years, we have witnessed a carefully planned campaign of misleading
news releases, newspaper stories and magazine articles for the purpose
of discrediting these decisions, building up disrespect for the Fourteenth
Amendment, and with the hope of breeding within the minds of law-
abiding Americans disrespect for the law of the land. As was expected,
southern state governors, attorneys general, United States Senators and
Congressmen from the South and others, have joined in this field-day
of irresponsible criticism of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Supreme
Court. The people of the South are urged to maintain segregation at
all costs. People of the North are urged to understand the “problems”
of the South. While it should have been expected that selfish politicians,
bigots and the like would enter into this area of criticism, it should
not be expected that decent American citizens would sit idly by and
watch other good Americans be misled by these irresponsible campaigns.
This unprecedented public relations job has had its effect throughout
the nation. Sympathy has been built up in the North as well as the South.
Anyone seeking compliance with the Supreme Court decision is branded
an extremist. Excuses are freely accepted to explain away lawlessness.
The truth is that too many people have been sold a “bill of goods.”
However, the tide is beginning to turn.
For example, just a few months ago a group of a hundred outstanding
members of the Bar of the Supreme Court from thirty-one states and
territories of the United States issued a statement concerning the recent
attacks upon the Supreme Court of the United States. In this statement
it was pointed out:
Whether as individuals we agree or disagree with the school deci-
sions, we recognize that they were the culmination of a steady line
of growth in the application of the concept of equal protection of
THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES 6

the law, and that each stage was preceded by sincere and determined
opposition.®
. . . The Constitution is our supreme law. In many of its most
important provisions it speaks in general terms, as is fitting in a
document intended, as John Marshall declared, ‘to endure for ages
to come.’ In cases of disagreement we have established the judiciary
to interpret the Constitution for us. The Supreme Court is the
embodiment of judicial power, and under its evolving interpretation
of the great constitutional clauses — commerce among the States,
due process of law, and equal protection of the laws, to name
examples — we have achieved national unity, a nation-wide market
for goods, and government under the guarantees of the Bill of
Rights. To accuse the Court of usurping authority when it reviews
legislative acts, or of exercising ‘naked power’ is to jeopardize the
very institution of judicial review. To appeal for ‘resistance’ to
decisions of the Court ‘by any lawful means’ is to utter a self-
contradiction, whose ambiguity can only be calculated to promote
disrespect for our fundamental law. The privilege of criticising a
decision of the Supreme Court carries with it a corresponding
obligation — a duty to recognize the decision as the supreme law
of the land as long as it remains in force.?
One of the most respected and outspoken leaders of unrestrained
condemnation of the Supreme Court has been Mr. James F. Byrnes of
South Carolina. U.S. News and World Report and other publications
cite him as an authority on constitutional law because of the fact that
he is a former justice of the Supreme Court. Mr. Byrnes’ major attack
on the Supreme Court is because of the overruling of the precedent of
Plessy v. Ferguson. In reading his criticism of the Supreme Court’s action
in the school cases, we should not disregard the fact that Mr. Byrnes
is remembered for his well-decided opinion, while sitting on the Supreme
Court, in the case of Edwards against California, involving state statutes
which prohibited bringing indigents into the State. In the decision by
Mr. Justice Byrnes, a long line of Supreme Court cases which had
seemed to support the California statute were disposed of in the following
language: “We do not consider ourselves bound by the language referred
to. City of New York v. Miln was decided in 1837. Whatever may have
been the notion then prevailing we do not think that it will now be
seriously contended that because a person is without employment and
without funds he constitutes a ‘moral pestilence’.” 1°

8 George Wharton Pepper, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, American Bar Association

Journal, Vol. 42, No. 12 (December, 1956), p. 1128.
9 Ibid.
10 Edwards v. California, 314 U.S. 160, 177.
 Human Values in Social Change f

Another student of constitutional law in a recent law review article

sums up the point as follows:
Those who find fault with the overturning of Plessy should take
account of the fundamental proposition that ‘it is the individual
who is entitled to the equal protection of the laws.’ The Constitu-
tion’s promises run to individuals — not to whites as one group
and to Negroes as another. Some Southern whites argue that
Southern Negro children, taken as a group, are inferior in health,
home environment, and average intellectual development. Yet firm
constitutional principle has this to say: no child should be relegated
to an underprivileged group in order that other children may retain
a privileged status. In striking down Plessy the Court was upholding
a principle far better authenticated by history.!!
Recent decisions by federal and state courts have made it clear that
the law of the land must be respected and individuals and state officials
may not interfere with legal integration of public schools. For example
a recent decision upholding an injunction against people who interfered
with action of the Hoxie, Arkansas, school board in its determination
to desegregate its public schools said:
The plaintiffs being bound by constitutionally imposed duty and
their oaths of office to support the Fourteenth Amendment and to
accord equal protection of the laws to all persons in their operation
of the Hoxie schools must be deemed to have a right, which is a
federal right, to be free from direct interference in the performance
of that duty.
Plaintiffs are under a duty to obey the Constitution. Const. Art. VI,
cl. 2. They are bound by oath or affirmation to support it and are
mindful of their obligation. It follows as a necessary corollary that
they have a federal right to be free from direct and deliberate
interference with the performance of the constitutionally imposed
duty. The right arises by necessary implication from the imposition
of the duty as clearly as though it had been specifically stated in the
Constitution. In many cases the implied rights which have been
upheld by the courts have been of far less importance than the right
against being interfered with in obeying the Constitution which is
here involved.12
On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court declared that segregation in
public education violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Two and a half
years later there remains a gap between this pronouncement of the law
and southwide compliance. Reasons for this demand the attention of
11 Charles Fairman, “Attack on the Segregation Cases,” Harvard Law Review, Vol.
70, No. 1 (November, 1956), p. 91.
12 Brewer v. Hoxie School District, 238 F. 2d, 91, 98-99.
THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES 8

social workers. In the first place, the Supreme Court, while retaining in
the federal judiciary the ultimate authority to enforce our Constitution,
left to the local communities the task of working out the plans for
compliance.
The record will show that in local areas wherever and whenever
communities were free from state action or mob action compelling
continuation of segregation, desegregation has proceeded “with all
deliberate speed” to the satisfaction of all concerned. This record of
compliance in varying degrees in nine of the seventeen southern states
and the District of Columbia is a demonstration of what can be done.
In these areas the role of the social worker is a relatively easy one —
to work with people free to act in compliance with the law of the land.
The real problem is in areas where either the state government or
uncontrolled mobs put themselves above the law of the land. In these
areas our normal democratic processes are stymied. Here the normal
American courage and will to abide by the law is effectively blocked
and good Americans permit themselves to tolerate lawless action within
their own communities. This situation has been brought about by a
combination of circumstances. First, there is the misunderstanding of
the purpose and effect of the “separate but equal doctrine.” Second,
there has been an almost complete immobilization of trained community
leadership otherwise dedicated to seeking obedience to morality and
the law. And, finally, there has been an intensive mobilization of thought
and action aimed at disrespect of the law of the land, the Constitution
and the Supreme Court.
It is time to reverse this trend. If a reversal is to come it will not
happen by a continuation of silence, inaction and lack of courage.
If it is to come, it must be spearheaded by organized community groups
under the guidance of people trained in this field.
Here are some of the problems you will be faced with. Deep in the
minds of so many people is the feeling of inherent inferiority of Negroes
as a group. In many respects the separate but equal doctrine has been
more devastating than slavery itself. Slavery did not start in this country
on the basis of racial inferiority. Indeed, it was not until early in the
last century that inherent racial inferiority was adopted as a last ditch
rationalization for the continuation of slavery. The Civil War Amend-
ments to the Constitution abolished slavery, guaranteed citizenship,
equality and the right to vote. The true purpose of these Amendments
was shortly nullified by a combination of circumstances. The persistence
of the South and the surrender of the North brought about “separate
 Human Values in Social Change 9

but equal” which was conceived of, put into effect for and became a
legalized formula whereby, as one historian puts it: “The two groups
were to remain apart and every contact — social, political, and economic
— was to recognize and affirm the continuing inferiority of blacks to
whites.” 15 Sixty years of this formula have left scars on the minds of
all Americans of all races in all areas of the country. This ingrained
belief can only be dispelled by the widest dissemination of the wealth
of scientific information destroying forever any basis whatsoever for
theories of inherent racial inferiority of people.
Then, too, we have extensive publicity given to statements that the
Supreme Court exceeded its authority in the school desegregation cases.
These statements are all aimed at convincing Americans that these
decisions need not be respected or followed. Such statements by people
in high and low places, by Congressmen and Senators as well as Attorneys
General, by alleged authorities on Constitutional law, coupled with the
underlying theories of racial inferiority, have had their effect. The
arguments against the decisions themselves are fallacious and can be
dispelled. Our Constitution is supreme — all state laws to the contrary
must yield. There is no middle ground so far as constitutional law is
concerned. Not only the Supreme Court but state and local federal courts
in the South are not only enforcing this law of the land but also are
protecting local school boards integrating their schools.
There is no longer any legal justification for any community not
starting upon a program of desegregation. There is adequate legal
protection from the federal courts for any school board wishing to
desegregate its schools. The one stumbling block is the lack of a will
to desegregate in many areas — or maybe it is the fear of reaction from
White Citizens Councils or the KKK or local politicians. Whatever
the reason, it is a non-legal one.
Individuals and communities under the guidance of social workers
trained in community organization must take over from the lawless and
the timid. There is “nothing to fear but fear itself.” There was no peace
during slavery, there has been no peace under the “separate but equal
doctrine.” We cannot escape our democratic principles, our Constitution,
our law or our own conscience. There will be no peace in the field of
race relations until our country enjoys the calm that comes from “doing
right.”

18 Oscar Handlin, Race and Nationality in American Life (Boston: Atlantic, Little
Brown and Co., 1957), p. 46.
THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES

Needed: The Social and Moral Equivalent

to the H-Bomb!
WALTER P. REUTHER*

I APPRECIATE very much the opportunity of participating in your

Conference, and most especially appreciate the privilege of being the
Marion Hathway Memorial Lecturer.
Marion Hathway won the esteem, the affection and the admiration
of people far and beyond the field of social work because she was
recognized for her sense of dedication, for her idealism, for her vision
and her courage, and, perhaps most of all, for her sensitive understanding
of basic human problems. So, I am deeply honored to be able to be
associated in this remote way with her great memory. I believe that in
time history will place Marion Hathway in the category of giants in
the field of social welfare where she will join Jane Addams and others
who gave much to the building of a better tomorrow.
Now in a real sense I feel at home here among social workers, because
on many occasions I have attempted at the bargaining table to get
people to realize that collective bargaining has meaning and purpose,
within the framework of a free society, only as we can relate it to the
broad social and economic and moral needs of the whole community.
I have had my efforts in this respect rewarded on some occasions by
having management tell me that I sounded like a preacher, that I
sounded like a Do-Gooder, and when they wanted to be really sharp,
they told me I sounded like a social worker! I have even been accused
of being an egghead. That puts me in the class which most of you occupy!
I am happy to be here for another very important reason. I believe
that as the American labor movement matures, as it establishes its
right to be, so that its existence is not constantly threatened, as it and
we are growing up, we are learning to understand more clearly that we
cannot solve our problems in America in an economic or social vacuum.
Organized labor can hope to find answers to the broad problems which
confront it only as it learns to work with men and women of good will
in the whole community in finding answers to the problems of all of
the people.
We are trying to demonstrate in a very practical and tangible way

* Vice President, AFL-CIO; President, United Automobile Workers of America.

 H-Bomb!
— Social and Moral Equivalent 11

that we understand the basic concept that all of the values we share
as free people are essentially indivisible in character; that we can not
make these values secure for ourselves except as we work with other
people to make them universal for all people.
That is why I am very happy to be able to discuss some very complex
and challenging problems that we face together in a troubled world.
For we meet in a world that is deep in crisis, at a time when perhaps
we have never been faced with two such sharp contradictions as we
face in this century. Literally we stand on the rim of hell. We must
always keep in mind that we now have achieved the weapons of total
self-destruction. And yet the same scientific and technical know-how
that gives us the H-Bomb and guided missiles, provides mankind with
the tools of undreamed-of economic abundance with which we can
build a brave new world, if we will but have the good sense to apply
these tools to finding answers to mankind’s basic peaceful needs.
I have been saying that the crisis in the world is not economic. It is
not political. It is not military. The crisis in the world essentially is a
more fundamental kind of crisis. It is a moral crisis which reflects man’s
growing inhumanity to himself — man’s growing immorality toward man.
Our dilemma in the world is that there is a growing cultural and
moral hiatus between the progress we are making in the physical sciences
and a tragic lagging further behind in the human and social sciences.
Somehow we need to be able to equate progress in the physical sciences
with the needs of man in the social sciences.
Too often we think of the struggle in the world between the forces
of freedom and the forces of tyranny as a struggle for supremacy.
That is a mistake! It is no longer a struggle for supremacy. The H-Bomb
has reduced the human family to a simple common denominator: the
struggle for survival. This common denominator cuts across all groups,
all classes and all economic differences. Unless peace can be maintained,
the richest millionaire in Park Avenue will perish just as will the poorest
share cropper in the most underprivileged family in the South. That is
why I believe that survival in this period of world history has become
essentially a challenge to finding the social and moral equivalent of the
great power in the physical sciences that the H-Bomb symbolizes.
History has made our country the custodian of world freedom. We
did not choose this role. I presume if we had a choice we would enjoy
the comfort and the security of the smug isolationism that we had many
years ago. But the world is changed. It has become a small place in
time and in distance, and we now, not through choice but through
THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES 12

necessity, must assume increasing responsibilities as the strongest of

the free nations of the world. These responsibilities are inseparably
tied to the contribution that we must make in trying to find a way to
preserve peace, since that is the price of survival.
I believe that as we attempt to face these new and increasing respon-
sibilities, we can meet them only as we fully comprehend the dimensions
of the challenge, the dimensions of the threat of war and the dimensions
of the promise of peace. I happen also to believe that we can be equal
to this challenge, but that we cannot be equal to it unless America
makes a conscious effort to begin to get our basic values into sharper
focus so that as a free people we will understand more clearly to what
we are dedicated. Given that understanding of the values we believe in,
we can begin to rearrange the list of our national priorities so that we
can truly put first things first.
I think we must understand that while we need to improve and
strengthen our military power, that is not the whole answer. We need
to be strong on the military front in order to meet the military realities
of a troubled world. But we need also to understand clearly that military
power is but the negative aspect of a dynamic foreign policy. Through
military power we buy only the time and the opportunity to take the
offensive on the broad economic and social fronts in the only arena
in which freedom can win. It is that arena in which peace can be won
and freedom can prevail only as we win peace.
So I have been trying to get people to realize that the struggle in the
world between the forces of tyranny and the forces of freedom is a
struggle for the hearts and the minds and the loyalties of hundreds of
millions of uncommitted people who make up the great majority of the
human family. You cannot win the hearts and the minds and the loyalties
of uncommitted people with naked military power and military superiority
alone. In the final analysis, they will judge America, they will judge
the worth and the greatness of our civilization, not by our military
power, not by our economic resources, not by our technical progress
or our material wealth. They will judge us by the only true measurement
of the greatness of any civilization — the sense of moral responsibility
and social consciousness by which a people translate material wealth
into basic human values, technical progress into human happiness, into
human dignity. That is why I believe that military power is the negative
aspect of our struggle, and that the positive aspect of our struggle is
the only arena in which we can win.
I believe that our problem in the world is essentially moral in character,
 H-Bomb! — Social and Moral Equivalent 13

and J think our problems at home are essentially moral in character.

Take the crisis in the field of education. Is that an economic crisis?
Do we lack the economic resources essential to the overcoming of our
educational deficit? The answer emphatically is “No!” We have the
resources. This is not an economic crisis in education. It is a moral crisis.
We have failed to demonstrate the good sense and the moral courage
to commit that measure of our economic resources adequate to overcome
the deficit. We have everything to overcome these deficits except the
will which must flow from a sense of moral determination.
The trouble, I believe, is that we have been more concerned with
the condition of our national plumbing than we have with the adequacy
of our educational system. So long as we are more concerned with
plumbing than we are with schools, the future of our country is in
jeopardy, and with it the future of freedom in the world.
When Sputniks I and II went into the air, I made the observation
that this could be a kind of bloodless Pearl Harbor. It might shock us
out of our complacency. While we ought to have contempt for the
Soviet system, because it has contempt for every basic human value
that we believe in, we ought not have contempt for their capabilities.
I am fearful that Sputnik has only jarred us into a wakening realization
of our deficits on the educational front, but only in the physical sciences,
in the fields of engineering and technology.
I would like to lend my voice in the effort to send up a few danger
signals on the horizon in America as we talk about education. We must
not make the tragic mistake of believing that we can meet the challenge
in the world by setting up a kind of mass production system for the
creation of engineers and scientists and technicians in the field of the
physical sciences. We can meet the challenge only as we step up our
educational efforts to train more competent and dedicated people in
both the physical sciences and the social sciences through a bold
program of education, because otherwise we will be in trouble.
I think we need to understand that the men who make up the
membership of the Politburo, who reside in the Kremlin in Moscow,
can afford to have an educational system that overwhelmingly concen-
trates the resources of their system upon training engineers and scientists
because they don’t need social scientists in the Soviet Union. The men
in the Kremlin take care of all that. In our country, the physical sciences,
the art of working with machines and materials, are not the end. They
are a means to an end, and the end product is the enrichment of human
life, the facilitating of growth of the human personality.
THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES 14

Therefore we have this practical job of meeting the challenge posed

by the Soviet educational system’s great emphasis on the training of
competent engineers and scientists. We must meet that challenge, but,
parallel to it, we must train competent and dedicated people in the
human and social sciences in order to keep in moral balance those
values we are dedicated to as free people.
If we overemphasize the purely physical sciences to the neglect of
the human and social sciences, we are going to create serious imbalance
in America and we are going to seriously weaken our ability as a free
nation to meet this challenge. Our basic problem is to find a way to
expand our overall educational effort through a balanced program that
will enable us to raise the level of our scientific, our technical and our
production know-how; and at the same time, through a balanced
program, develop a comparable know-why in the human and the
social and moral sciences.
The Russians don’t have that problem, but we do, and our educational
system must be geared to these basic realities.
I remember when the present Secretary of Defense, Mr. McElroy,
was the Chairman of the White House Conference on Education. On
the day the Conference opened in Washington he was asked: “Mr.
McElroy, why do you think there is so much controversy about this
whole question of Federal aid to education?” Mr. McElroy replied:
“Well, when you take our two most valuable things — our money and
our children— and you mix them up, it creates a very explosive kind
of combination.”
Don’t you see? When we equate our pocketbooks with our children,
we are in trouble. This has been the source of our difficulty. The pocket-
book has blurred the vision of America.
One of the things I think the American labor movement has a real
right to be proud of is the fact that we have always been in the vanguard
in the struggle to broaden educational opportunities. We have always
held the belief that every child, regardless of race or creed or color,
is made in the image of God. We think our educational system ought
to provide every child, regardless of which side of the railroad track
he may have been born on, the kind of educational opportunity in
which he can grow intellectually, culturally, and spiritually to the limit
of his God-given capacity to grow. We have opposed the limitations of
inadequate schoolrooms and underpaid teachers. We have been in the
front of that fight, and we are proud of it. We believe we need to work
 H-Bomb! — Social and Moral Equivalent 15

harder with other groups in our society, to get more people to under-
stand that we are not only robbing millions of American children of
their maximum opportunity to grow, but that education in this world
of crisis has become a matter of survival.
I read briefly what the President recommended the other day. It is
a half-hearted, half-way approach to this problem. His recommendations
do not measure up to the dimensions of the challenge. We need to
raise our sights. We need to have as much courage on the field of
education as we demonstrate on the field of battle when freedom is
challenged there.
There are people who say that Federal aid to education is bad
because it means Federal control. We know that isn’t true. And strangely
enough, some of the same people who are the most vocal in opposition
to Federal aid to education, who know that our local and state tax
structures are inadequate to overcome this tremendous deficit in the
field of education, turn right around with great enthusiasm and support
Federal aid to the highway construction program. If we can have
Federal aid to build superhighways across America, then why can’t we
have Federal aid to overcome this tragic deficit which is robbing our
children of their rightful educational opportunities? We can, any time
the American people decide that they are going to have it. Any time
we commit ourselves morally to do this job.
Two years ago I spoke to a group of educators in New York State.
I was talking about the deficits in education and I proposed that for a
five-year period we earmark one and a half to two percent of our gross
national product to overcome our educational deficit. The next day
I was dodging verbal brickbats from every direction. They said this was
fantastic — it would bankrupt America. And the men of little faith who
would sell America short, used the same old shopworn slogans about
why it couldn’t be done.
I said: “What is one and a half to two percent of our gross national
product?” Well, it is somewhere between six and seven billions of
dollars. How much is six or seven billion dollars?
Well, in the last world war, you and I, as citizens and taxpayers,
took on a financial obligation in paying for the war, and in one week
we spent more than what is represented by one and a half to two percent
of our gross national product.
I ask you and I ask myself this question: Is there something wrong
with the moral fiber of a free people who have the courage and the
will to spend billions and billions and billions in one week to train
THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES 16

our finest young people how to die in war; but haven’t got the courage
to spend enough in one year to teach them how to live in peace?
We need — and the President’s recommendations will not meet the
challenge — to build schools to overcome the shortage of classrooms.
How many teachers, who would like to work with a child, to encourage
and help to facilitate the growth of that little spark of human genius
God put there, to nurture and cultivate that spark — how many teachers
with 45 students can do that? How many, instead of teaching, are just
maintaining discipline?
We need more schools and we need more teachers. And we will
never get more teachers until we begin to pay them an income compar-
able to their responsibilities and their competence. I represent a lot of
workers at the bargaining table, and I don’t think they have their
measure of economic and social justice. But when I look at the salaries
of school teachers and I look at the fact that last year a sweeper, the
lowest paid worker in the General Motors plant, made more than
fifty percent of our elementary school teachers, I say that that is not
only economically wrong — it is morally wrong! Now the sweeper is
not being overpaid! The school teacher is being underpaid!
We need to expand our scholarship program so that we will not lose
tens of thousands of our best students in high school who ought to
continue their education. I think we should have a scholarship program
worked out on the basis I recommended two years ago when I served
on a panel set up by Congress to deal with the peaceful application of
the atom. I recommended a system of Federal scholarships based on
competence. If the student maintained his high academic standing, he
would serve in our school system for one year beyond and in lieu of
his military service; or if he was needed abroad in our economic aid
program to fight Communism on a positive basis, he could serve abroad
for a time equal to and in lieu of his military service. Why should
we educate people and then put them in boot camp, to learn how to
salute? Why don’t we use these people to overcome our school deficits
until we can bring new people into the teaching profession by paying
them decent salaries?
There are many things we could do, but the trouble is the dimensions
of the problem are tremendously high and our sights are low. Always
the question is asked: Can we afford it? The real question is: Can we
afford survival? Obviously we can. The great tragedy of America is
that we are losing not because the Russians are superior. We are losing
because we are not trying. Nothing could be more tragic than when
 H-Bomb! — Social and Moral Equivalent |

people are blessed with all of the economic resources, with a highly
developed technology, with a rich democratic heritage from which to
draw inspiration and dedication as a nation; when they have everything
it takes, but a lack of will and moral courage.
Right now the American economy is getting into trouble, at the very
time it ought to be strong and healthy; when we ought to have full
employment and full production making the economic wealth we need
to meet the military challenge, to overcome our economic and educational
deficits, to raise our prestige, and to step up our economic aid program
to the world. And instead of the American economy being in high gear,
it is limping along. Unemployment is on the increase. They tell us that
we will have four and a half million unemployed by February; 325,000
are unemployed in the State of Michigan — 200,000 in the City of
Detroit. The automobile industry is operating at less than sixty percent
of capacity. The steel industry? I testified before the Senate Committee
on Tuesday and Wednesday, and when I submitted economic data
that the steel industry is operating at 56.6 percent of its capacity,
Senator Kefauver said: “That was last week!” And he read from the
Wall Street Journal that the steel industry is operating at fifty-five
percent of capacity. I wish that the Russians were only operating their
steel industry at fifty-five percent of capacity!
The appliance industry, where we make refrigerators and washing
machines and all of the other things that millions of American homes
need, is operating at about fifty-six percent of capacity.
On Wednesday the chief economist for the McGraw-Hill Book
Company, a very conservative publishing business, said that more than
twenty-five percent of the total manufacturing capacity of America was
completely idle! Now I say this unused capacity, these idle workers,
represent the margin of survival. They represent the economic margin
that can make us strong militarily, that can overcome our educational
and scientific deficits, that can raise our living standards, and do more
on the economic fronts of the world. In the last four years we lost
96 billions of dollars in our gross national product because we failed
to fully utilize our productive capacity!
I wish every American could have had the opportunity that I have
had in the last several years! I have been to North Africa. I have been
to Asia and India. I attended a meeting in North Africa last summer
in the city of Tunis. I spoke in the public square. It was a meeting
intended to help build democratic trade union forces in North Africa so
that we can resist the programs of penetration and subversion of the
THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES 18

Communists. It was August and quite warm. When the meeting was
over a young friend, the Secretary of the budding free trade union
movement in Tunisia, said to me: “How would you like a cold drink?”
I said: “That’s just what I need.” He went right around the corner
from the main square in Tunis and there was a Coca Cola vending
machine. Put in your nickel and you got your ice cold bottle of Coca
Cola! And on the billboards I saw American motor cars being advertised,
and cosmetics. I came back and addressed the Detroit Adcraft Club,
an executive group of advertising people. I said: “We’d better do
something about this problem. We had better learn to sell America’s
ideals and ideas in the world as well as we sell our cars, our Cokes
and our cosmetics, because this is the area in which the challenge has
to be met.”
Then I went to India and I saw poverty in India. You can read in
books on sociology and economics about poverty and hunger and human
desperation. But poverty in its naked and ugliest form is not something
that you can understand intellectually. It is something you can feel
only with your heart. It must be an emotional experience.
I saw little children, three-, four- and five-year-old girls and boys in
a potato patch in India. Their mother had a six-month old baby
strapped on her back. They were all hacking away in the sun at the
hard, parched earth with little hand hoes. It was 112 degrees in the
shade. I noticed that they were picking up little potatoes no bigger
than a pea. I said to the fellow who was with me: “Don’t the potatoes
get any bigger than peas here?” He said:

Yes. This is the fourth time they have dug that field. The first time,
the people who own the land got ninety percent of the potatoes
and these people who work the land got ten percent. The next
time the people who own the land got a little bit less and the people
who dug the potatoes got a little bit more. The third time the ratio
was a little bit more, and the last time they get to keep all the
potatoes they find.
Those four- and five-year-old children were picking up each little
potato and putting it carefully in a little basket, because that potato
stood between them and survival. I remembered the mountains of
potatoes in America that we plow under or poison so they can’t be sold,
and I thought to myself: “If we could use those food surpluses sanely
and rationally and courageously, taking the wrinkles out of empty bellies
in the world, it would give America a moral power stronger than all
of the H-Bombs we will ever build in the arsenals of American democ-
 H-Bomb! — Social and Moral Equivalent 19

racy.” Look at the economic facts in India: Five years of heroic effort.
They have raised the per capita income from fifty dollars to fifty-six
dollars a year. Still there are seventy million landless peasants who
last year had an income of less than twenty dollars for the whole year.
I went up in Northern India where they are building one of the great
dams in Asia. It is only a few feet lower than Boulder Dam. It will
irrigate ten million acres of land. It will capture the waters, the flood
waters of the monsoons, and store it up and feed the parched land
in the months and months when no rain falls. It will increase the
production of food. When I got there I saw equipment made by members
of the UAW, Caterpillar bulldozers, big earth moving machines that
we make in the Caterpillar plant in Peoria, Illinois. They had two or
three of these machines and behind them, men and women with burros,
with a little basket on each side of the burro, put in a few shovelfuls
of earth, moving behind these huge earth-moving machines; and behind
the burros came women carrying baskets of soil on their heads.
I said: “If you had more machines, couldn’t you step up the com-
pletion of this dam? Couldn’t you irrigate the land and raise more
food and raise living standards?” They replied: “If we had more
machines, we could get this done much quicker. We could build more
dams. We could solve our food problem.”
The great threat in Asia is not the H-Bomb. The great threat in
Asia is poverty — ugly, naked poverty, and the Communists are able
to forge poverty into power.
Two weeks ago in Life magazine, there was a feature story on Peoria,
Illinois. It showed acres and acres and acres of tractors and bulldozers.
Nineteen thousand workers were working in that factory. Today only
twelve thousand are working, and they are only working four days a
week. The acres of tractors and bulldozers in Peoria are duplicated
at the Allis-Chalmers plant in Wisconsin and the John Deere plant in
Iowa and in dozens of other plants. Two months of the production
that is represented by these idle machines and the idle workers would
swing Asia onto freedom’s side in the struggle for survival — and yet,
here is this tremendous capacity going to waste. Here are these millions
of workers without jobs. This is tragedy. This is what the men of little
faith and little vision have never understood. That the margin of our
survival lies in the full mobilization of our productive potential, and
then the gearing of that potential, based upon a list of national priorities,
to the things that come first in a program of mobilizing America to
meet its increasing world responsibilities.
THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES 20

We are in trouble in America! You don’t have to get a Ph.D. degree

in economics from an Ivy League School to know what is wrong. It is
very simple. We are in trouble because of a serious and growing
imbalance between greatly expanded productive power and lagging
purchasing power. The only way that we can have full employment,
full production economy in which we realize the great abundance made
possible by our developing technology, is if we achieve a dynamic and
expanding balance between greater productive power, balanced by
greater purchasing power — still greater productive power balanced
by still greater purchasing power — each time achieving this dynamic
expanding balance on a higher and higher economic plateau in which
the people of America are able to share increasing economic abundance.
We are in trouble because in the last eleven years American industry
put into new factories and automated machines 385 billions of dollars.
General Motors, Ford and Chrysler alone, in the last ten years, put
7.2 billion dollars into new and in many respects fully automated plants.
The automobile industry has been saying: “Well, automation is
nothing new. It is just an extension of the old technology.” But don’t
let anyone make you believe that that is true. Automation, and the
technology that it expresses, represents the second phase of the industrial
revolution. When James Watt developed his first crude steam engine
in England which gave birth to the first phase of the industrial revolution,
he did one basic thing: he substituted mechanical power for human
muscle and we built our technology upon that basic concept. Automation
brings to this technology a new and revolutionary element. In addition
to substituting mechanical power for human muscle, automation substi-
tutes mechanical judgment for human judgment. The machine is taking
over the thinking process in our production technology.
One of the big problems used to be translating technical books,
because technical language is almost a language in itself. We have
machines now which will translate a Russian textbook into English,
French, German and Spanish at one time. If it is a Spanish textbook,
it will translate it into the other four languages at one time.
We have a machine that can take a recording of Caruso, not one
that has been scratched up because your hi-fi set hasn’t been working
properly, but the master plate on which the tone qualities are still clear
and sharp. It can make a recording of those tone qualities and store
them in the memory of the machine. Thirty years after Caruso’s death
a new song can be written, translated onto a magnetic tape and fed
through this machine. The magnetic tape creates the right kind of an
 H-Bomb! — Social and Moral Equivalent 21

impulse in electronic tubes and it pulls out all of the exquisite tone
qualities of the various notes and Caruso sings a song written thirty
years after he died!
I went to work in the Ford Motor Company in April 1927. They
were making the last Model T which was a very simple piece of
mechanism. When I went to work at Ford’s, just 31 years ago, it took
thousands and thousands and thousands of individual workers, working
on individual machines, many, many, many hundreds of hours to
machine a simple Model T engine block. Now the lines are automated.
In the Cleveland Ford engine plant built in 1951, they take a V-8
engine, a complicated piece of mechanism, and feed it through the
engine line without a human hand touching it, and in fourteen and
six-tenths minutes it is fully machined.
Is that good, or is that bad? The right answer cannot be given by
an engineer working with a slide rule in the physical sciences. The
answer to that question will be found in the human and social sciences.
In whether those new machines will work for the community, or whether
they will be used for narrow, selfish purposes.
When I went through that plant, I was asked how I liked it. I saw
a few workers here and there, watching big panels. They said to me:
“Mr. Reuther, I suppose you are worried about how you are going to
collect union dues from all of these machines?” And I replied: “That
is not what I am bothered about. What I am bothered about is how
you are going to sell Ford automobiles to all these machines! That’s
what I am worried about!”
That’s why we are in trouble. We have eight hundred thousand new
automobiles in inventory right now and Chrysler is shutting down.
General Motors is laying off. Why? Because of this imbalance between
expanded productive power and lagging purchasing power. The human
need is there. People don’t have the purchasing power necessary to
translate need into demand.
Last night in the East somewhere, Mr. Benjamin Fairless, the former
President of United States Steel Corporation, got into the act on the
UAW profit proposal — and he said it was very bad. I notice also that
Mr. Blough, who is now the President of the United States Steel
Corporation is in Detroit tonight getting into the act in the same way.
I want to quote from this morning’s Detroit Free Press something
Mr. Fairless said:
A squeeze like that on profits . . . would stop investment cold,
lower productivity and increase unemployment.
THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES 22

Now Mr. Fairless is a firm believer in the old trickle-down economic

theory. This is the theory that if you pile the banquet table of the few
on top, so high with all the good things, in the process some of the
crumbs will get brushed off and trickle down to the people down below.
This is not just a problem in economic justice. It is also a matter of
economic necessity because our free economy will not work if any
important segment is short-changed. We are in trouble because giant
corporations who exercise monopoly control and domination in vital
sectors of the American economy are able to get a disproportionately
large share of the fruits of our developing technology, and have short-
changed the workers, the farmers and the consumers. They have not
only inflicted economic injustice upon the workers, the farmers and
the consumers, but they have created the imbalance that puts into
jeopardy the health of our whole economy.
Now if we had a shortage of capacity, if the demand were greater
than the supply, if the purchasing power outran the productive power,
then Mr. Fairless would be correct in his thinking that we ought to
emphasize productive power and recreate the balance. But when
productive power is up high, when twenty-five percent of our total
capacity is idle, when the auto industry is operating at less than sixty
percent of capacity, the steel industry at fifty-five percent, and so on
down the line, does Mr. Fairless think the answer is to increase produc-
tive power even more? Because that is what he would suggest by giving
the money to the people who normally would invest it.
If, however, you share these fantastic profits with workers and
consumers through lower prices, then you put into the hands of low
and middle income groups high-velocity purchasing-power dollars.
They will go into the market place to buy the things they need. It will
stimulate demand. Demand will stimulate sales. Sales will stimulate
employment, and we can get the economy back into high gear, back
into full employment and full production.
In 1929 we got in trouble. It wasn’t mysterious. They talked about
overproduction. We never have had overproduction. We have always
had acute underconsumption, because you don’t have overproduction
until every basic human need is filled, and at that point you can choose:
Do you want more gadgets, or do you want more leisure? But we
haven’t reached that point yet. And we are in trouble because of the
imbalance between expanding productive power and lagging purchasing
power.
It is precisely to this basic problem in the economy that the UAW
 H-Bomb! — Social and Moral Equivalent 23

directs its collective bargaining efforts in 1958. We have made a simple

proposal. Oh, it’s been called radical, foreign, extravagant, and many
other descriptive words but there are twenty thousand companies in
America that have profit sharing. Even people in the President’s cabinet,
Mr. McElroy and Mr. Folsom, come from companies that boast about
their profit sharing. We have proposed this approach because it represents
a sane and sensible and socially responsible approach by which workers
can realize their economic equity on a basis that does not inflict higher
prices upon the American consumer.
We said: “At the end of the year, after you set aside ten percent
for profits on your capitalization, we would like the worker to share in
the excess profits just as the executives do.” We didn’t dream up this
idea. We are just borrowing what they do for themselves. We think what
is good for the goose is obviously good for the gander in this situation.
But we also said: “Now, we don’t want to just be in there grabbing
and grabbing and grabbing as a pressure group. We are agreed that,
after you set aside the ten percent on your investments, the excess
profits should be shared as follows:
“Fifty percent to the stockholders and the corporation executives.
“Twenty-five percent to the consumers in lower prices.
“Twenty-five percent to the wage earners in improved economic bene-
fits. That’s the most effective way to begin to correct the imbalance
between productive capacity and purchasing power.”
The American labor movement is firmly committed to operate within
the framework of our free economic system. We have rejected emphati-
cally and with finality the Marxist concept of the class struggle. We
believe that the class struggle and the Marxist theories are historically
antiquated, if they ever had any validity, because they are based upon
a concept that presupposes that the struggle in the world between
economic groups is a struggle to divide up economic scarcity; that there
is not enough to go around and one group struggles to get its share by
taking from another group. We believe that we are now at a place in
human history where the tools of economic abundance afford mankind
— free labor, free management, and free people, working within the
framework of a free society — the glorious opportunity not to struggle
to divide up scarcity, but the opportunity to cooperate in creating and
sharing economic abundance by creating a bigger and bigger economic
pie in which everyone can share. This is our philosophy.
As a matter of fact, this is the first time in human history that the
tools of economic abundance are so efficient, and so productive that
THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES 24

mankind can control his physical environment and solve man’s basic
economic and material needs. Having satisfied man’s basic economic
and material needs, we can begin to devote more time and more
energy and greater resources to facilitating man’s growth as a social
being, as a cultural being, as a spiritual being, which in truth represent
the higher aspirations of human civilization.
This is the great challenge!
Now I represent one and a half million workers at the bargaining
table. This is a large responsibility. I intend to carry out that respon-
sibility to my membership. Mr. Curtice represents the stockholders.
He has a responsibility to the stockholders, and he is obligated to carry
out his responsibility. But what I have been trying to get management
to understand at the bargaining table is that while we in labor have a
separate responsibility and management has a separate responsibility,
together free labor and free management have a joint responsibility —
a joint responsibility to all the people, to the whole nation. That joint
responsibility of necessity transcends in importance our separate
responsibilities since you can’t have free labor without free management,
or free management without free labor, and neither can be free except
as we learn to cooperate in preserving a free society in a free world.
In a totalitarian state you can get industrial peace in the absence of
justice. I lived under Hitler. I lived under Stalin. I know that. In a free
society, however, industrial peace is only possible as a by-product of
economic and social justice. There is no other way to get it, because
when free men and women are denied their measure of economic justice,
they will fight to get it.
What we have been trying to get management to understand is that
collective bargaining must be raised above the level of a struggle between
competing economic pressure groups. Collective bargaining cannot
represent the kind of constructive economic force or socially responsible
force that it should be, if it is based upon economic power rather than
economic facts. I believe that collective bargaining can be the kind
of constructive force it must be, only as the persuasion of power gives
way to the power of persuasion!
We get into trouble at the bargaining table because the economic
facts are brushed aside and we have the application of what we in the
UAW call the double economic and moral standards. I have looked
over the problems in our Union, and about one percent of our problems
fall outside of these double standards, and 99 percent fall in the circle
circumscribed by these double standards.
 H-Bomb! — Social and Moral Equivalent 25

What do I mean by double standards? Well, let me illustrate. Some

years ago we had no pensions in this industry. When a worker was
too old to work but too young to die and he couldn’t keep up with
the speed of the line, they dumped him on the industrial scrap heap.
We went to the great corporations and we said that when a worker
reaches the autumn of his life, after he has made his contribution by
a lifetime of useful work, he ought to have the right as a citizen, as
a worker, as a human being, to look forward to living out the remaining
years of his life on this good earth with a sense of economic security
and human dignity.
We said too that social security payments, which back in those days
averaged around $35.00 a month were not adequate. We wanted to
supplement them at the bargaining table. They said: “Go down to
Washington. Get the social security laws improved.”
So we went to Washington, and when we got down there found the
halls of Congress crawling with the paid lobbyists those same fellows
had hired to go down there and block it. We came back to Detroit.
We said: “You blocked it down there. We are going to get it back here.”
They said: “That’s very bad!”
We only wanted a hundred dollars, including social security. They
said that this would destroy the whole financial structure of our free
enterprise system because it would immobilize millions and millions
of dollars in pension trust funds. I can show you page after page of this
kind of propaganda. Five years later, today, they are saying that pensions
are a great support for the free enterprise system because now workers
are putting capital into circulation to help build factories.
They had said also: “It will destroy the sense of independence and
self respect of each worker if the company puts the money aside. That
will be very bad. Tell the workers to save for a rainy day! Then they
can have security with self respect!” Now, I don’t begrudge the corpor-
ation executive one penny of the money he gets. I wouldn’t trade the
satisfaction I get in my job for all the money he might have tucked away.
But I had a corporation executive say to me: “Tell them to save for a
rainy day,” at a time when the average wage in General Motors was
a dollar and fifty cents an hour. It was back around 1946-47. That
same corporation executive who told me to tell the workers to save
for a rainy day because if the company gave them a pension plan it
would destroy their sense of independence and self-respect was receiving,
in salary and bonus combined, an average of $332.00 per hour, based
THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES 26

upon a forty-hour week fifty weeks in a year. We broke his salary

down so we could understand it!
The Board of Directors of the General Motors Corporation had
looked at this fellow and probably sympathized with his wife in the
terrific struggle she was having trying to make ends meet on a measly
$332.00 per hour. They knew he couldn’t save for a rainy day and
they had already provided a $25,000.00 pension for this $332.00 an
hour executive. That is what we call the economic and moral double
standard.
We are having that same double standard applied to our latest
proposal, with a vengeance!
You must remember that Mr. Curtice gets a bonus not as a stock-
holder. He gets a bonus as an employee, out of profits. We are only
suggesting that a worker get a bonus as an employee out of profits.
They try to fuzz up the issue by talking about ownership. Mr. Curtice
gets his bonus not as an owner, but as an employee — a very highly
paid employee, but an employee nevertheless.
Let’s look at what has happened in the last ten years and see who
is unreasonable, and extravagant, and see who is on solid economic
ground — on the kind of moral ground that you can defend. Mr. Curtice
characterized our proposal as extravagant. I wrote him a letter and
asked him by what process of mental and moral gymnastics he arrived
at his conclusion and asked him to explain it in the light of these facts:
Mr. Curtice in the last ten years, 1947 through 1956 — the period
for which the latest figures are available, because we don’t have 1957
yet— got a salary of $1,630,000.00. He got a bonus out of excess profits,
after the ten percent was set aside — that’s their formula — of
$3,930,000.00. His total income in the ten year period was
$5,560,000.00, or a yearly average of $556,000.00.
Now what happened to a GM worker? In the ten years we are talking
about, the average GM worker made $39,272.00. If the profit plan
that we have proposed had been in effect he would have gotten $6,406.00,
or a total of $45,678.00 for the ten years. That amounts to $4,567.00
a year.
Mr. Curtice, by his method of mental and moral gymnastics, says
that $4,567.00 is extravagant, unsound, foreign, dangerous, and infla-
tionary. But the $556,000.00 that he got each year was morally right,
economically sound, and a hundred percent pro-American!
I testified before the Senate Committee studying high prices the
other day. Was it wages or higher profits? And I showed the Senate
 A-Bomb! — Social and Moral Equivalent 27

Committee that in January 1947 a stockholder who had purchased

$52,000.00 worth of GM stock — 1,003 shares at the market rate at
that time — would have gotten in the first year the same income from
his $52,000.00 investment that a GM worker made in wages. In that
year $52,000.00 earned the same money as a GM worker if he worked
every week in the year. But the GM workers didn’t work every week.
What happened in the next eleven years? In the eleven years a GM
worker made roughly $40,000.00 in wages. The stockholder who bought
$52,000.00 worth of stock received $96,000.00 in dividends, his stock
was split on three different occasions, and he had an increase in capital
gain of $189,000.00. Starting even with the worker, he got in eleven years,
based upon his $52,000.00, $284,000.00 to the worker’s $48,000.00.
This is why we are in trouble, because the tremendous increase in
productivity, based upon automation and the new tools of abundance, has
not been shared with workers, consumers and stockholders on a fair basis.
It is this imbalance which threatens the American economy.
From 1947 to 1958, profits in GM went up 268 percent. Wages went
up 72 percent. In Ford, profits went up 329 percent. Wages went up
70 percent. Let’s take GM. Profits in 1947 were 554 million dollars
before taxes. In 1955 they were $2,543,000,000.00. Wages in 1947 were
$1.44 per hour. In 1955 wages were $2.18. If wages had gone up the
same as profits, the wages in General Motors in 1955, instead of being
$2.18 an hour, would have been $6.60 per hour.
These are the economic facts no one can challenge. They can do a
lot of sleight of hand stuff mixing up figures and starting out comparing
rabbits with horses and getting all kinds of conclusions. But these are
the facts that they don’t want to talk about at the bargaining table and
that we are going to insist be talked about.
They say you can’t measure productivity. The corporations in the
auto industry have resisted for the past fifteen years efforts of the
Bureau of Labor Statistics to compile productivity figures for the auto
industry. They guard these things as they guard their lives. In 1947
we produced 4,798,000 cars and trucks. We had 648,800 workers.
In 1957 we produced 7,220,000 cars and trucks with 652,000 workers.
In other words, production went up fifty-one and a half percent.
Employment only went up one-half of one percent.
You can’t run away from these facts. They are there. Nobody can
challenge them.
We get into these collective bargaining discussions and what happens?
Someone comes up with a new idea. Someone suggests that we begin
THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES 28

to act socially responsible at the bargaining table, that we raise

collective bargaining above the struggle of competing economic pressure
groups. Someone suggests that the consumer has an equity that ought
to be protected at the bargaining table. Immediately the old scare
words are taken out of the moth balls. Just look at the editorial in
the Free Press. Reuther is the road to socialism! This is the first step
toward destruction of the free enterprise system! And they start the
campaign and the cold war of propaganda.
We seem incapable of discussing new ideas based upon their merits.
Instead of discussing them on their merits, we try to find a nice, catchy
scare-word, put a tag on them so you can brush them aside without
being required to examine them on their merits. We believe our demand
is economically sound. We think it is morally right because it is socially
responsible, because it does not represent a pressure group approach
to collective bargaining.
But the great captains of industry in America, who make long and
pious speeches about the free market place where they exchange
commodities, have never clearly understood that the free market place
where ideas are exchanged is much more important than the free
market place where commodities are exchanged. Unless we preserve
the free market place of ideas, we cannot preserve a free society. And we
cannot preserve a free economy except as it is preserved within the
framework of a free society.
The greatness of America comes not out of our material effort, but
out of the intellectual effort to which we dedicate our material effort;
and the thing that we don’t seem to get people to understand is that
the Communists, the totalitarians, get unity in conformity. In a free
society we must achieve unity in diversity. Within the framework of the
basic values that we all share, we must work out the differences without
jeopardizing those basic values to which we are committed. When we
reject ideas just because we aren’t able or willing to cope with them
intellectually on their merits, we are trying to get unity by conformity,
rather than unity in diversity.
I am disturbed at times in America when I see that when the issues
are sharp, the drive for conformity is much greater. There is no value
in saying: “Well, we will let you argue about the things that don’t count,
but we can’t have controversy about the things that are important.”
It is the important areas of controversy that count. The little fringe
matters somehow will take care of themselves if we deal with the
basic problems.
 H-Bomb! — Social and Moral Equivalent 29

We may have eased this pressure for conformity in the broad area
of civil rights and civil liberties; but in the economic field, in the social
field, the pressure for conformity is still there, steadily pushing people,
getting them into convenient, comfortable confines of what the other
fellow has accepted as the standard of social conduct.
The threat of what we call that evil and ugly and immoral political
phenomenon — McCarthyism — was not that it slandered and smeared
a few prominent people in the headlines. That was sad.
The great threat was the kind of unseen, invisible process of moral
corrosion that got millions and millions of people unwilling to dare
to even go to a meeting or to a social gathering or to think what they
would like to think, out loud. We will have paid dearly for that!
We don’t know how much of a lead the Communists have in the missile
field because we browbeat some of our greatest technical minds, some
of our most brilliant scientists; because we had this rigid, narrow
confinement where the giants of immorality were perverting the great
moral giants and intellectual giants in some fields.
I think we need to recapture in America the crusading dedication
that Marion Hathway and Jane Addams applied to their work, and
apply those standards to every aspect of American life. We need to
be willing to face controversy, because the test of one’s convictions
is not: How do you stand by the values that you believe in when it is
convenient and comfortable? The test of one’s convictions is: How do
you stand by your faith in the face of controversy, in the face of
adversity? How much courage do you provide to enable the inner man
to find outward expression when the outer man is under attack? This is
the test of your faith!
What good are values in the abstract? What good are moral standards
or standards of social responsibility in a vacuum?
Nothing unrelated to people has value, and values unrelated to people
are without value.
I have unlimited faith in America. I have unlimited faith in the
capacity of free men to surmount seemingly impossible obstacles,
provided we can get free men to begin to fight for the things they believe
in as hard in peace as they have demonstrated their will to fight in war.
The tragedy of the human family, as the pages of history throughout all
of the ages record, is that great nations and great peoples have somehow
always demonstrated the will and the courage and the sacrifice to die
for the negative end of war because they shared common fears and
common hatreds.
THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES 30

I believe that the great challenge of free men in this hour of deepest
crisis in the world is to find a way to tap the great spiritual reservoir
that dwells deep within the human breast. To find a way to mobilize
people, to get men and nations marching together, working together,
building together, sacrificing together, because they share common
hopes, because they dream common dreams, because they share a
common faith — working together in peace! This is the great challenge!
I believe in our ability to meet this challenge. I believe that though
the road will be hard and difficult, somehow men and women of good
will in the world will work and march together. Together we can fashion
that better tomorrow, in the image of peace, in the image of human
freedom, in the image of social justice, and in the image of human
brotherhood!
Modern Science and Human Welfare

GEORGE R. HARRISON*

Jie many and great contributions of Marion Hathway to social work

and education, coupled with my assignment to discuss the contributions
of science to human welfare, automatically determine the subject of my
address. Any social worker realizes only too vividly how often the
production of warped lives is related to improper environment. Science
is becoming recognized as one of man’s most powerful weapons in his
fight against poverty, illness and death, but I shall hope to show how
it also helps provide an atmosphere for the more perfect flowering
of the human personality and spirit. Many will challenge this statment,
and point as an example to the terrible new weapons provided by science.
But these weapons are also tools; they are a natural part of human
evolution, and I believe are quite overshadowed in importance by the
better understanding of the processes of nature which science brings.
Consider first such specific things as food, clothing, housing, and the
production of desirable surroundings, for without these no proper base
can be formed on which the flowering of the individual can take place.
Every human being deserves, and I believe can be given, an opportunity
to fulfill his maximum physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual capabil-
ities. Marion Hathway led troops directly on one firing line to help
bring this about; she was equally concerned with the broad strategy
of all major efforts to reduce human suffering.
Take a typical family problem — perhaps an extreme case, but one
of which any social worker could find many examples. The father died
of an infectious disease in early middle life. The mother works as a
chambermaid in a boy’s school. A daughter, in her early twenties, has
been in a mental hospital for several years, and is now being rehabilitated.
She still needs expensive therapy, approximately half of which is provided
at taxpayers’ expense. She is not yet well enough to work full time,
and goes from one part-time job to another, adding small amounts to
her mother’s meager earnings. The son is a juvenile delinquent — having
had no proper home life, he is on the town and moves from one difficulty
with the police to another. What can society do to extend help to these
* Dean of Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES 32

people, all victims of circumstances over which they had almost no

control?
Today the first line of attack must be through social welfare agencies,
and social workers have already helped this family greatly. But their
attack on the various problems now can be palliative at best. Somewhere,
sometime, many somethings needed doing which were not done, partly
because those involved did not realize that they needed doing, and
partly because no one knew how to do them.
I want to discuss the long-term basic attack on this situation and
others like it. Science has done much, and should be able to do a
thousand times as much more, to keep such cases from ever occurring.
I am not saying that only science is needed to do the job. But science
can bring new forms of knowledge which provide a great leverage for
improved social enlightenment. Let us consider the effect of science on
longevity for the father’s sake, on poverty for the mother’s sake, on
illness for the daughter’s sake, and on education for the sake of the son,
and finally on the welfare of society as a whole, just for goodness’ sake.

Science and Longevity

In 1658, just three hundred years ago, the number of human beings
alive was in the neighborhood of 500 million. Today about 2700 million
exist on earth at one time. Thus in three centuries, or nine generations,
five times as many people came to be alive at one time as before.
Look around at the four out of five who might not be here. They are not
statistics; they are living people — fathers and mothers and poets and
teachers and farmers—they are you! They are now available to live lives
which may be full, rounded, active, filled with interest, useful and
enjoyable, or harried with hunger, pain, worry and depression — all
hindrances to the development of the personality.
The advances in medicine which have increased the average span of
life are well known. When Charles II of England died less than three
centuries ago, the royal physicians did forty-three different things to
help him, from raising blisters on one extremity to applying a plaster
of pigeon dung to the other. But they were working in the dark. The
physicians had names for the King’s diseases, but they didn’t know
enough about how his body was constructed to help him. They had
no microscopes or antibiotics or X-ray machines.
Today physicians are learning to attack illness at the level on which
 Modern Science and Human Welfare 53

it originates. I know of no more satisfying experience than to watch a

child with a temperature of 105° restored to his normal appearance
and behavior within three hours after being given a few cents worth
of exactly the right kinds of molecules. All of the atoms needed for
making these molecules existed in King Charles’ day; in fact, there was
probably an adequate supply of the molecules themselves within a
hundred yards of the dying King’s bed.
Few will gainsay the desirability of medical research and the kind
of enlightenment it brings, but one who grants this must allow the
biologist his microscope, his X-ray, and his penicillin. One must permit
him to bring in radioactivity and the stuff of which the atom bomb is
made; in fact, the whole kit and boodle of physics and chemistry and
mathematics. As the first point — all science is a unit; you cannot have
one part and foreswear the rest. If men’s eyes are going to be opened,
they must look at what they will see.
We find all of science, not just medicine, helping to increase the
span of human life. At the turn of the century the average U.S. life
expectancy was 47.3 years. Today it is over 70. The combination of
improved health, more nutritious food, and easier working hours (made
possible largely by introduction of the machines of science and tech-
nology) has resulted in an increase in longevity of nearly 50% in 50
years. To be sure the accelerating rates of growth are mainly at the
two extremes of youth and old age, but one is a good time for learning,
and the other for the use of wisdom.
For several decades now life expectancy in the United States has been
increasing by an amazing figure, five extra years in every ten. A new-
born baby can be expected to have at least twice as many days of life
as it would have had if born at the end of the American Revolution,
or four times what it would have had in the earliest days of human
history. Science has thus already given mankind many added years to
climb to new heights of awareness and creative opportunity. Later I
shall discuss the question that is often asked: “What’s the good of this
if science is going to kill them all off with H-bombs?”
Given longevity we must be concerned with health, for we do not
want to raise generations of elderly invalids. The human body, com-
posed of molecules arranged in very specific patterns, is an extremely
complex grouping of chemical and electrical servomechanisms. Its proper
functioning depends on a set of extremely intricate and delicate, but
remarkably stable, balances in the chemical environment of the various
parts.
THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES 34

Drugs, like human bodies, consist of molecules. New molecules often

solve old problems of disease. Of the drugs found efficacious today
fewer than one-third existed in 1940. Every year we develop in the
U. S. about 30,000 new types of molecules, and of these about 500
are useful new drugs, How often today does a young surgeon have a
chance to see a mastoid operation? If seldom, it is because of the new
isolation of an old type of molecule. Again, 30 cents worth of penicillin
per person has been found to be enough practically to eliminate the
terrible tropical disease of yaws.
A hundred million people in India still suffer from malaria at any
given moment, and a million Indians a year die from it. Two of the
newer molecules, DDT to kill off mosquitoes, and primaquine or its
equivalent to kill the single-celled animals which invade the blood
stream in malaria, could practically eliminate it. Here we see the effect,
not of the lack of scientific advance, but of the lack of the social appli-
cation of this because of economic and political retardation.
Nervous and mental diseases today cost more than 10 billion dollars
a year in loss of social wealth in the U. S., negligible in comparison
with the human suffering involved. There are 650,000 mental patients
in public hospitals, requiring more beds than for all other illnesses put
together. One person out of every twenty now can expect to be hos-
pitalized for mental illness at some time in his life. Many of these
people need only new molecules. In addition, many personality and
character difficulties surely originate from undiagnosed cases of mental
and nervous illness. Great new developments, especially in the field of
the tranquilizers, are now showing much promise in aiding both the
seriously mentally ill and those with simple neurotic upsets.
What comfort one gets from the thought that some of the many
people who have borne the social stigma of mental illness, as did two
of the brothers of Ralph Waldo Emerson, can now be restored to fairly
normal living by the provision of half a teaspoonful of special molecules
a day.

Science and Hunger

Our bodies seem to us permanent over a lifetime, yet atoms and

molecules are continuously being removed and replaced with new
 Modern Science and Human Welfare 35

ones. Experiments with radioactive tracers have shown that each year
98% of the atoms in our bodies are renewed. One human body may
contain 100,000 different varieties of protein molecules, trillions of each
variety. These must be repaired and replaced.
The world faces a serious food problem. It is here now, but unless
science is applied ever more diligently, it will get much worse. Never
in history has everyone on earth had enough to eat. In fact, to feed
adequately the 2700 million human beings now alive, the world’s farms
and fisheries should yield a quarter again as much food as they now
yield. During the past generation the number of persons on earth has
been increasing three times as fast as the amount of food produced.
Every day for breakfast 100,000 new mouths arrive clamoring for
nourishment. Within the next generation the world’s food supply will
have to be doubled if all who are likely to come to life are to be fed
properly.
We face a food problem here in America as in the world at large.
We each use between four and five pounds of food a day. To keep up
with our increasing number of hungry mouths (4 million births a year
instead of 2.7 million seventeen years ago), we will need within fifteen
years more than 100 million new acres of arable land. Not more than
40 million are in sight, even if we do our best at irrigation, drainage,
and clearing. Who is going to provide this food? Is this a good time
for science to take a vacation?
Already our crop yields per acre have been increased by more than
one-third through science and technology. Improved methods of curing
and preservation, including radiation with atomic rays, are also help-
ing in reducing spoilage of the large amounts of food previously wasted.
Most alarming is the protein shortage, foreshadowed by the $5.00
steak. Conversion of fodder into proteins in meat animals results in a
loss of at least 85% of the contained energy, but provides for our bodies
some badly needed sub-molecular building blocks. In terms of energy
storage, protein farming is less than 1/7th as efficient as carbohydrate
farming. Science has already helped much here through selective breed-
ing, improved fertilizers, and better mechanical handling, and can do
much more.
Fats are in surplus, and probably will be so for a long time to come.
At the moment we are fairly well off for carbohydrates, too, for each
American citizen now uses on the average only half as much starch as
did his forebears in 1900. This is because of the energetic assistance
of electric motors and engines operated on gasoline instead of sugar.
THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES 36

But there is likely to be a carbohydrate shortage within 75 years, unless

science can come up with a better way than farming of making carbo-
hydrates, which I am confident can be done.
All of the energy processed by our bodies has originally been bot-
tled in molecules by plants, which took it from sunlight, and once
science has solved the remaining mysteries of photosynthesis, energy
may be storable directly in bottles as well as it is now stored by plants.
If a method of catching more of the bountiful supply of energy that
reaches us from the sun, and storing it effectively in complex molecules
for food without using additional land can be found, hunger can be
abolished from the earth. This will not end all of mankind’s troubles,
but it will at least raise them to a higher level of experience, which is
part of evolution.

Science and Poverty

Here we are, then, living longer, feeling healthier, and with food
for all. How does science affect our ability to earn a living?
Science creates jobs. This sounds strange to anyone who thinks of
science mainly as producing great new machines which can do the
work of a dozen men, and which causes them to become unemployed.
It is true that new devices occasionally cause technological unem-
ployment, but in a rising economy of the sort science produces this is
always transient. The weavers of Britain found themselves displaced
by the power loom, but soon there were more weavers than ever, for
much more cloth was needed. The number of human telephone oper-
ators in the U. S. is increasing rapidly, even while automatic switch-
boards are displacing the old-fashioned “central.” In 1910 the 100,000
people employed in livery stables in the U. S. gradually found them-
selves replaced by automobile workers, whose numbers have now grown
to more than 8 million. Machines that are valuable to humanity always
create more jobs than they destroy, for the increased productivity of
the workers who operate them enables society to fill more of its needs
and desires, thus greatly increasing demand.
In the U. S. today each person need work less than 40 hours a week
on the average to earn a living. A century ago our predecessors had
to work 70 hours a week for a living less than one-tenth as desirable.
“Ah, for those simply happy days of yesteryear.” Desirable in what
 Modern Science and Human Welfare au

way? Desirable in terms of what human beings in general appear to

desire, that is longer lives, better health, greater security and comfort,
increased opportunity for achievement, and more effective communica-
tion with their fellows at all levels. In these simple terms living in the
America of 1959 is better than that of 1859 by many fold. To counter
the occasional philosopher who will say that the simpler life was more
desirable, more enjoyable, and better for one, we need only point out
that new knowledge has merely introduced the added element of choice.
No one is forced to work only 40 hours a week, with modern devices
to help him, if he chooses instead to work 70 for the living standard of
1859. But he must choose one or the other, for he cannot select the
Status quo ante, but with antibiotics!
In 1900 the number of jobs in the U. S. was 29 million. Now the
number oscillates around 75 million, and is rising. During this same
half century the population of the U. S. has only doubled, so there are
more jobs available per person now than then. Society has been enabled
to change the boundaries of employment so that children no longer
need work long hours at dispiriting tasks, and women are far freer
to earn their livelihood, if they so desire.
The added new jobs are in great part made available by new indus-
tries, most of which have resulted from scientific advances. Much new
social wealth comes from development of new forms of matter — new
molecules. A new type of molecule which turns out to be useful can
affect immeasurably not only our health and safety, but our social
wealth level. New molecules which have recently given rise to new
multimillion-dollar industries within a few years include nylon, 2-4D,
DDT, lead tetraethyl, several plastics such as polyethylene, and a num-
ber of synthetic rubbers. Our wealth level has gone up more than
100-fold. Even greater increases in the wealth level have resulted from
new developments in the release and control of energy.
Assuming maintenance of the proper environment our national
wealth level can be expected to double again within the next 25 years,
basically because twice as many horsepower should become available
per person by then to increase productivity that much. This may not
be good of itself, but it gives new opportunities for goodness.
Have we now reached a plateau which represents not wealth but
rather the absence of poverty? By no means! There is every indica-
tion that the industrial revolutions of steam and electricity are to be
capped by a still more important revolution, resulting from the peace-
ful uses of energy from atoms. Beyond fission energy, now being
THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES 38

brought into control in plowshares beaten from bombs, we may eventu-

ally learn to control the energy of fusion, and gentle the energies of
the H-bomb for the beneficent uses of mankind.

Science and Education

Science has brought great gains in education. Reduction in poverty

has given people more leisure for education, for entertainment, or for
vegetation, mixed in accordance with their desires. At the same time
the increase in longevity has justified spending more years in prepa-
ration for life. As Samuel A. Stouffer has pointed out, of today’s
Americans aged 65 and over, only 20% completed high school and
less than 8% went to college. Among citizens between 25 and 34,
however, 60% completed high school and 20% went to college.
President deKievit of the University of Rochester has said that,
despite the fact that the top 10% of our students in quality will be
responsible for most of the progress made by the coming generation,
it is the ordinary rank and file students who furnish the foundation on
which American industry and the American economy are built. So we
have arguments for both quality and numbers in education. The Ameri-
can educational system has accepted the responsibility for both. In
bringing the opportunities of more than elementary schooling to the
80 or 90%, instead of the mere 10 or 20% reached in Europe, we
have raised the integrated amount of education, but have developed
an unwillingness in the name of democracy to differentiate properly
in our public school systems among students of different capacities and
interests. We cannot afford to half educate that 10% of the age group
which will produce the mental mutations on which 90% of all human
progress depends.
Good as American education may be, much has gone wrong with it.
The progressive movement, useful in its day, has in my opinion gone
too far, so that students in our public schools lose much of the mental
discipline they formerly received. Our educational system may well
have been carried away by its discovery a few decades ago of the
importance of motivation, and gone too far in assuming that all learning
should be fun. Only parts of learning can be fun. Other parts must
involve the discipline needed to improve the mental machine so that
later learning can be more fun.
 Modern Science and Human Welfare 39

That great big energetic rocket that the Russians were kind enough
to launch so skillfully under the name of Sputnik I has probably had
a more immediate effect on American education than any other single
event of the century. It has reversed a trend. For years America has
been undergoing a degeneration of the value citizens put on the learning
process. Our reaction to Sputnik also demonstrated that there is still
flexibility as a group that is so necessary in any entity if it is to be capable
of continued vitality and growth. In one short year the rocket reaction
changed the curriculum in one-fourth of America’s high schools. This
percentage must be increased and gains consolidated.
But our attention tends to waver, and fortunately the Russian rocket
Lunek I now circulating around the sun has stimulated again our sense
of the immediacy of the need for improved education, not only in
science but in all other subjects. An encouraging change in attitude
toward the public school is observable. But the Russians still go us
one better in certain directions. For example, no Soviet child need worry
about being unable to get, for financial reasons, as much education
as he can effectively use.
Our education needs much more than improved pedagogy. To the
increasing of knowledge we must add the increasing of awareness, the
increasing of understanding, and the development of creative imagination.
Science has great disciplinary value for improving all three.
Our children need to get a more dynamic picture of nature. We
have much to learn from evolution. Looking about us we can see new
species of plants and animals coming into being that never existed before.
Great new patterns of order in the Universe are continually unfolding
new social and political and economic entities. We live in a dynamic
and growing universe.
Men change from millenium to millenium more than we suppose,
lulled by such statements as “You can’t change human nature,” and
“There is nothing new under the sun.” These dicta must be interpreted
in terms of the proper time-scale and background. Twice during the
past million years the human brain has suddenly doubled in size.

Science and Social Welfare

Looking back on the course of evolution, examining the slow develop-

ment in nature by trial and error of ever more complex forms, forms
THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES 40

of higher capacity, one is overwhelmingly convinced that scientific

enlightenment cannot but aid in man’s choice of ways of progress.
Humanity cannot afford to forego the benefits measured in terms of
material, mental, moral and spiritual improvement that result when
science is permitted to assist in strengthening both the base and the
sides of that great pyramid of culture on which rests man’s development
of higher forms. When we choose the status quo so long as we are not
too uncomfortable, regardless of how uncomfortable we are likely to
become later, we suffer from immaturity or ignorance. Science, in
improving our creative imagination through education and experience,
helps us to make the comparison of events widely separated in time,
so that we can compare the totality of our probable future comfort
at all important levels with our present comfort, and thus make wise
decisions. While increasing complexity must not be worshipped as
progress in itself, it must be valued for the new capabilities it has
brought in the past, and the new possibilities it presents now for the
future of human attainment.
Life has always been getting more complex for the million years
that man has been on earth. In fact, life was getting more complex
for two billion years before man appeared on earth. Life involves ever
more complex patterns, atomic, molecular, social. Science is one of
the disciplines that helps us decide how best to meet this complexity.
A point frequently overlooked is that science, like art, is one of the
forms of culture in which men of different nationalities can today meet
most effectively. In religion, for example, over the long centuries
development of widely differing cultures has resulted in proliferation
of hundreds of different sects, most of which have much in common,
but all of which have a strong divisive tendency. Similarly political
systems tend to divide and multiply. Science is new enough, and still
flexible and free enough from tradition, that international cooperation
in science can take place quite readily. Science has achieved greater
unity because it underwent its major development while the world was
being rapidly shrunk. Russian and American scientists are much closer
in mutual understanding than are Russian and American politicians,
for example, and this has already had good effects at Geneva and
elsewhere.
But what of atomic and hydrogen bombs? Is science going to destroy
mankind? Or, before it does this physically, is it going to destroy us
spiritually?
I am not too concerned about the H-bomb, although I agree we
 Modern Science and Human Welfare 41

are being given an opportunity to acquire wisdom rather more rapidly

than may be comfortable. H-bombs present big problems. People, to
meet big problems, have to grow big. But the situation is typical, except
in size, of many that the human race has faced before, from which
it has emerged triumphant and through which it has attained its greatest
accessions of wisdom. Man is still the master of his fate, using science
for his own ends whether these be good or evil, but, on the average,
learning, increasing in awareness and in his power of controlling himself
and the physical universe. That is why I am happy to have been invited
to participate in this occasion, held in memory of that tiny woman who
helped attack some of the world’s biggest problems in such a big way.
THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES

Public Responsibility for Human Welfare

JULIA J. HENDERSON*

L Is with a sense of honor and pride that I undertake, in the fourth

Marion Hathway Memorial Lecture, to press forward toward one of
the goals which illuminated Marion Hathway’s life — the expansion
and better fulfillment of Public Responsibility for Human Welfare.
Having devoted the past fourteen years to the United Nations, it will
be no surprise if I define our “public” in global terms and “human
welfare” in the broadest sense as the “well-being” of the individual,
a term encompassing his mental and physical health, his education,
his economic welfare, and his place in society. Marion Hathway devoted
her great energy and ability mainly to the solution of the domestic social
and economic problems which were the key problems for her generation.
Today when America has accepted its position of leadership in the
world community, Marion Hathway would have been as deeply con-
cerned for the disadvantaged of Asia and of Africa as for those within
her national boundaries; she would gladly have contributed her great
talents as educator and scholar to the training of the young men and
women who must now enlist in the crusade to promote, in the words
of the United Nations Charter, “social progress and better standards
of life in larger freedom” through the world.
She would agree, I am also confident, that human welfare in this
global sense demands that the social work profession must be concerned
not only with the special problems of the disadvantaged but with the
whole range of problems of poverty, ignorance, and disease which
prevent vast majorities in some nations and whole races of people in
others from attaining the dignity and satisfaction which we proclaim
to be the right of every human being. This does not mean that the
social worker is expected to replace the engineer and the agronomist,
the teacher, and the doctor, but that he is to apply his knowledge and
skills to assisting both the individual and the community in finding
solutions for these basic problems.

* Director, Bureau of Social Affairs, United Nations.

 Public Responsibility for Human Welfare 43

Growth of Public Responsibility for Human Welfare

One of the most commonly acknowledged changes in Twentieth

Century society is the continuing growth of public responsibility for
human welfare. In courses on public welfare in the schools of social
work, considerable attention is still given to the growth of public
responsibility for the destitute, the poor, and the dependent members
of society over the past 350 years, particularly in England and in Europe
as well as in the United States. Only a little research from this historical
point of view would lead one to generalize that the growth of govern-
mental responsibility for such questions in this century has been speeded
up at a rate almost equal to our mechanical advances.
It is perhaps less well known that the growth of public responsibilities
for human welfare in those great regions of Asia, Africa, Middle-East
and Latin America which are characterized as the “under-developed
countries” has accelerated at an even greater rate than in the industrial-
ized countries. Most of the new nations of Asia and Africa are today
proud to be labeled by a term which still carries overtones of opprobrium
in our own country — “welfare state.” I shall long remember a trip
into a remote hilly region up the Irrawaddy River in Burma when a
group of villagers presented me with a “shan” bag carefully embroidered
with a Burmese inscription which was translated into English as “The
Honourable Welfare State.”
This objective — and one must recognize that it is still more of a
policy than a reality in most countries — has been enshrined in the
constitutions of nearly all new countries since the war and in amendments
to many old ones. In the period 1945-55, no less than 45 countries
adopted new constitutions or important amendments to their old ones
introducing basic responsibilities of the State in matters of social welfare.
These provisions covered a wide range of policies such as the State’s
duty to develop public health institutions, mother and child welfare
services, free and compulsory primary education, protection of labor,
and social security. The countries involved included every shade of
political ideology and every level of development. As pointed out at the
time this analysis was made, it cannot be assumed that social provisions
in a constitution are co-terminus with social action. Many countries
without specific provisions in their constitutions have carried out
extensive welfare programs through legislative and executive action.

1 International Survey of Programmes of Social Development (New York: United

Nations, 1955), Chap. I.
THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES 44

Nevertheless, these numerous constitutional provisions reflect the con-

temporary trend to make the welfare of the population a government
responsibility and the citizens’ enjoyment of minimum standards of living
a fundamental right.
Over the past several months we have been analyzing another
indicator of the growth of public responsibility for human welfare in
this broad sense, i.e., the growth of public expenditures in the social
field. This presents a more reliable measure of the degree of implemen-
tation of governmental welfare programs although the facts are often
obscure because of the multiplicity of governmental units dealing with
welfare programs, particularly in federal systems, and the discounts
which must be taken for inflation. If one tries to judge the actual benefits
to the population as against the cost of administration, still another
complicating dimension is added. Speaking in the simplest and most
general terms, however, there is no dispute about the basic point that
public expenditures for health, education, and welfare services for various
groups have been constantly growing in our century and particularly
in the post-war years both in absolute and in per capita terms. While
the levels of expenditure for these purposes in the industrially developed
countries are higher than in the economically under-developed countries,
it is worth noting that the level of expenditures in the latter countries
is higher than it was in the industrial countries at a similar period in
their economic development.
We have recently made an analysis of the public expenditure patterns
of a number of Southeast Asian countries and have found that ex-
penditures for health, education, housing, and welfare account for
one-third to one-half of their national budgets. Historical studies of
the expenditure data for these countries, with all the qualifications which
one must make, show that total public expenditures as a share of gross
national product and the share of social expenditure in total public
expenditure tend to increase as the economy develops.2 When one counts
the high cost of industrialization and even of agricultural improvement
today as well as security expenditures in the uncertain world in which
we have lived since 1945, these figures are a remarkable barometer of
public pressures for governmental social services.
The third measure of the growth of public responsibility for human
welfare lies in the rapid growth of governmental machinery for carrying

2 Economic Development and Planning in Asia and the Far East: Social Aspects.
United Nations, Economic Bulletin for Asia and the Far East, Vol. X, No. 3
(December 1959).
 Public Responsibility for Human Welfare 45

out welfare programs. As Americans, we considered it a highly significant

step forward when our Federal Government established the Department
of Health, Education, and Welfare with a Secretary of Cabinet rank.
In many countries in every part of the world, where Ministries of Health,
of Education, and of Labor already existed, new Departments for
Housing and for Social Services have come into being since the war.
Wide dispersal of public welfare functions has led to a demand for
coordination and, in some cases, even for integration of governmental
services; as a result, there is today a distinct trend toward the establish-
ment of Ministries of Social Affairs and/or central social welfare boards
composed of a number of ministries and important voluntary organiza-
tions in the welfare field.
Problems of the organization of public welfare services have become
of such importance that the Social Commission of the United Nations
has called for a special group of experts on the organization and
administration of social services to meet early in 1961. Preparations
for this group have already begun through an Asian regional conference
sponsored by the United Nations in New Delhi last month and a series
of case studies on social welfare planning.

Causes of the Development

If the trends toward more and more governmental direction and even
operation of social welfare services are unmistakable throughout the
world, what are the underlying causes of this development? It may be
important in shaping international and national social policies to under-
stand the forces behind this movement. As in the case of most other
social phenomena of our time, we must recognize that the causes are a
complex mixture of other political, economic, technological, and socio-
logical factors with the “mix” including different proportions in different
countries. Beginning with my branch of the social sciences, I believe
that the prevailing conceptions of the State both tend today toward
growing public responsibility for social welfare.
The Hegelian conception of the all-powerful State — which by process
of evolution in our century has spawned a variety of totalitarian doctrines
— inevitably means that there is no room for private organization and
that the all-embracing State takes care of its citizens from the cradle
THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES 46

to the grave. Even Marxist doctrine which took its dialectical method
from Hegel but rejected the State as an instrument of class society
exhibits itself today in the most powerfully concentrated states showing
no signs of “withering away.” The welfare functions of these States are
very extensive indeed.
In October 1959, I had the opportunity to see one of the Central
Asian Republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and to visit
hospitals and clinics, nurseries and schools, housing projects, rest and
recreation facilities. While one can be critical of the sacrifice the present
generation makes in terms of housing and clothing to rapid economic
development, no objective observer could fail to be impressed by the
advances made in health and education under this system. The public
pressures from local party and governmental units for more housing
were also making themselves felt by the Central planners.
In the West where the political theories of Hobbes, Locke and
Rousseau concerning the social contract of the people with their State
have evolved into a tenacious faith in democracy and the conception that
the State and its agent — Government — are the servants of the people,
the continuous growth of public social services are a matter of record.
The amount of public housing and public subsidies for medical care
may vary from year to year according to basic tenets of the party in
power and the competing claims on the national budget, but the long-
term trends are clear. The attention given under these two basic systems
to the nonmaterial elements of a welfare program — to the strengthening
of the family, to freedom and to civil liberty, to the participation of
citizens in making social policy and in carrying it out — still shows
marked variation which leads us, as Americans, to believe in the
superiority of our political ideas. I cannot fail to say, however, that even
in some of these respects, post-Stalin U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. are not
so sharply differentiated as they were a decade ago. The Russian family
is again accepted as a natural and basic unit of society and extensive
efforts are made through the social security system as well as through
the social mores preached by the party and the press to strengthen the
unity of the family. Citizens are encouraged to attend numerous meetings
about the Seven-Year Plan and its fulfillment. I was somewhat astonished
to have statistics quoted at our Conference in Bangkok on Social Aspects
of Economic Development indicating not only how many citizens of
the U.S.S.R. had attended these meetings on the Plan but how many
had spoken at each meeting. Widespread attempts to involve the people
themselves in building or improving their own housing even in urban
 Public Responsibility for Human Welfare 47

areas and much greater emphasis on private and cooperative home

ownership throughout the Soviet Union is another sign of the times.
Finally the exhortations of the press to involve the citizens of the U.S.S.R.
in stemming juvenile delinquency and in strengthening “public organ-
izations” for social betterment may be significant in a world in which
our political leaders, as well as our people, seem to accept the inevitable
coexistence of the two systems.
Parallel to the growth of public responsibility for social welfare has
been the growth of responsibility for economic development (or growth
of “interference” with economic life as some of our politicians and
businessmen would still call it). While we may see throughout the
world today every degree of economic planning and direction, regulation,
and ownership of the means of production, we cannot fail to note that
every new nation emerging in Asia and in Africa in the post-war period
has proclaimed its allegiance to a “planned economy” and even many
of the older countries of South America and the Middle East have
set up Planning Boards to determine their investment requirements in
relation to a particular rate and kind of economic development and
to control the development budget. It is through these mechanisms,
usually headed by the Prime Minister, that a government arrives at a
decision about the industry and agriculture which is to be left to the
“private sector” and that to be owned and managed in the “public
sector.” Even countries like the United Kingdom and France, which have
in the past rejected central economic planning in their metropolitan
territories, have introduced and continually strengthened such planning
in the overseas territories for which they are or have been responsible in
the post-war world. United States policy, while basing itself firmly on
the virtues of private enterprise both at home and abroad, is usually
found to support planning of comprehensive economic development
programs in the under-developed countries which ask the United States
for economic aid.
It is natural that administrators and economists engaged in develop-
ment planning very early face many practical social obstacles to the
implementation of their plans — an illiterate and untrained work force,
low productivity in an unhealthy population, heavy turnover of workers
without their families and without adequate housing, basic attitudes
which put very little value on material rewards, and so forth. They
have also faced the social consequences of economic projects which
were planned without adequate regard for the population which was
to build the plant or the dam and supposedly to benefit from the
THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES 48

production of goods or energy. These consequences have been elaborated

in numerous national reports as well as in United Nations studies.
It is not surprising, therefore, that nearly every planning board in Asia,
many in Africa, and several of the Central and South American countries
now plan on a comprehensive basis for both economic and social devel-
opment. The investments in health, education, housing, and welfare are
not yet on the same footing as industrial and agricultural investments
for both theoretical and practical reasons —e.g., the difficulties of
measuring returns in economic terms — but increasing attention is being
given by governments to the problem of “balanced economic and social
developments.”
Closely allied to the economic causes of increasing governmental
attention to social services are the technological changes which have
made it more productive for large agglomerations of workers to be
brought together for manufacturing or processing industries. Thus we
have seen the industrial revolution spread both its blessings and its
blight to every region in some degree, and with this development has
come more acute social problems which could not be ignored by govern-
ments. One of the reasons such problems could not be ignored, of course,
has been the voice of organized labor. As in Marion Hathway’s case,
social workers in many of the less-developed countries are finding in
the labor unions important allies in the fight for a more equitable
distribution of income and rising standards of living. Technological
change has also meant a rapid spread of communications not only within
countries but between countries. In my opinion, the radio has probably
been the most important single factor in what has been called “the
revolution of rising expectations” around the world. In this revolution
lies the basis for popular demand for education and health services in
particular. The importance of radio communication in social change and
in international relations was never clearer to me than during my
mission to Africa in the fall of 1957. As I visited community development
projects in a West African country, I saw groups of Africans clustered
round their radio sets in the village centers listening to news reports
on Governor Faubus’s action in the Little Rock High School. They were
getting more news on this subject, by the way, than on the action of
their own Minister of Interior in banning a British journalist who
criticized their government on freedom of the press. In East Africa at
the end of the same mission I saw eager crowds sky-gazing for a sight
3 Processes and Problems of Industrialization in Under-Developed Countriesries (N (New
York: United Nations, 1955). P
 Public Responsibility for Human Welfare 49

of Sputnik No. 1 which had just been sent into orbit. As the Minister
of Finance of the Federation of Nigeria, Chief Okotie-Eboh, put it at
the first meeting of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa
a year later: “The radio this morning has announced that the Russians
have shot a satellite off to the moon — while some folks are tired of
this old earth and are shooting off into space, Africans can’t be left
riding their bicycles.” He then listed his government’s priorities for
development — education, development of natural resources to increase
production of energy, health, and communications. The distinction
between governmental responsibilities for economic and social develop-
ment did not exist for this Minister of Finance.
Not all the causes for the expansion of public welfare services are
of a positive character, of course. The changes in our society have
tended to weaken many of our ancient stabilizing institutions — both
the family and religious groups. There is no need to expand on the
sociological changes which already have taken place in the Western
World and which occupy a large part of the social studies of the
under-developed countries in our day. We need only note that the
breakdown of the family’s economic functions in many areas, the
detribalization taking place throughout Africa, the changes in the social
functions of religious groups have all left a vacuum for the State to fill.

Effects of Expansion of Public Responsibility for Welfare

One could perhaps debate the question whether the weakening of

family and religious institutions in Twentieth Century societies is the
cause or the effect of expanding governmental responsibilities for human
welfare. While having classified these phenomena as “causes,” the
opposite side of the coin may be seen in the fact that public services
never expand fast enough to take care of the millions of children
deprived of normal home life, unemployed or underemployed, handi-
capped and aged who were, until recent decades, a responsibility of
their kinship group or their religious community. This problem is
particularly apparent in the countries where urbanization is taking place
at a much faster pace than industrialization,* and where social security
measures touch only a fraction of the need. This means, therefore, that
4 Report on the World Social Situations (New York: United Nations, 1957), Part U.
THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES 50

the short-run effects (and it may be for decades) of this transition from
family and community to governmental services may be less security
for disadvantaged groups.
At the same time, there is ample objective evidence that the expansion
of public social services around the world in the post-war period has
meant a miracle in life-saving on both ends of the scale — the reduction
in infant mortality and the increase in longevity in the under-developed
countries are in direct ratio to the extension of public health services.
The expansion of free and compulsory primary education has pushed
up literacy rates in many countries by 10-15% in the last decade
and 25% more children are in school now than in 1950. Nutrition
has improved in most parts of the world since the World War II and
real incomes have risen in the majority of countries for which such
data are available. No such optimistic picture exists for housing where
public efforts are still very insignificant in terms of absolute increases
in the population and the rate of urbanization as well. By and large,
however, one may say that social security has been provided for more
people in the industrialized countries than ever before in human history
and that expansion of public services holds out great promise in the
less-developed countries for a steadily rising standard of living.
This network of services and economic security measures have
naturally given emphasis to the prevention of need and suffering. Such
services are always at the top of any social work priority list as they
were for our Group of Experts on improving family levels of living.5
At the same time we know realistically that no social legislation and
no economic measures will ever relieve us completely of persons —
and even groups and communities — in need of remedial and rehabili-
tation services. These problems arise in part because the public programs
are “too little and too late” — urban planning after the shanty town
has grown up, accident prevention after a high rate of crippling accidents
in new factories, social security in the face of run-away inflation, youth
work after the delinquency problem is out-of-hand. Fortunately, most
governments today recognize the need for welfare programs which can
be tailored to fit their special circumstances, although in almost every
country these programs suffer both in terms of trained personnel and
finance. This is only one of the reasons why the effect of public welfare
programs should mean extension, at the same time, of voluntary and
local efforts.
5 Report ona Coordinated Policy Regarding Family Levels of Living (New York:
United Nations, 1957).
 Public Responsibility for Human Welfare 51

A Program for the Future

What does this continuing growth in public responsibility for human

welfare require of us? I cannot outline a detailed program of action in
each area of social policy but three points to be presented may have
a bearing on social work education. These are concerned with professional
responsibility for:
1. Promoting higher standards of education, health, housing,
and welfare services at home and extending assistance to less-
developed regions of the world in the promotion of higher standards
of living;
2. improving governmental administration at all levels for
implementation of social programs; and
3. strengthening local action through citizen groups and local
government to ensure dynamic and flexible social programs respon-
sive to the needs of all groups in the population.
Each one of these proposals involves many specific concerns of social
work education and, in some cases, perhaps a critical reappraisal of
the content of social work education. I am aware of the increasing
emphasis on social policy and social action as well as public welfare
administration in schools of social work.® As in the case of all trends,
the line is not unswerving and application of new policies is uneven.
I am convinced, however, from United Nations efforts to elicit the best
which North American social work has to offer to less-developed coun-
tries that the basic direction is sound.
The social worker today must and usually does feel his responsibility
for helping his community and his nation in pressing forward the fron-
tiers of social policy. This does not mean a blind allegiance to all
causes or crusades for changes in our own social legislation or cam-
paigns for or against certain aspects of foreign aid. A part of the pro-
fessional contribution obviously lies in the basic social research which
must become the foundation for changes in social policy. Our rapidly
changing demographic, economic and social structure demands con-
stant efforts to keep up with the facts and to help our communities as
well as our nation in responding to new needs. Like many others, I live
in a community which has more or less quadrupled in size since the
1950 census, which is not only bursting its school and transportation
8 Arden House Conference on Social Policy and Social Work Education, New York
School of Social Work, 1958 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958).
THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES 52

facilities, but which is facing the housing, recreational, and welfare

needs of a population which has become much more varied in color,
in religious backgrounds, in educational attainments, and in income
levels. The needs are different and our citizen groups are earnestly
seeking professional guidance concerning the solutions to our problems.
This situation is repeating itself around the world as our studies
on urbanization show. At the same time it is still important to keep
this demographic fact in perspective for the great majority of less-
developed countries where the population is still predominantly rural.
This serves only to illustrate that the social policies which we may
advocate in the United States in 1960 may have to change with the
times and that the problems of other countries may also demand dif-
ferent approaches and emphases. We should be sure of our facts and
not let our enthusiasm for the social work profession place it higher
in the priority list than teachers or nurses for an Asian country which
is struggling to provide basic education and health services for a rural
population. This does not mean that I think social work has no place in
U. S. bilateral foreign aid programs or in the United Nations program.
On the contrary, I believe that social services have an essential contri-
bution to make both to social and economic development in the less-
developed countries, but also we must train our students in the im-
portance and methods of social research rather than as protagonists
seeing only the problems of most concern to his own profession.
This being said, let me now advocate a strong crusading spirit in all
professional social workers when the facts have pointed the way to
needed changes in social policy. Whether the problem is one of extend-
ing and improving social security benefits, increasing the availability
of housing for low-income groups of all races, urban redevelopment,
medical care for older people, or educating the community (and the
Congress) on the reasons for being “our brother’s keeper” on a global
basis, the social worker must be found with the pioneers, not with the
technicians.
The goal of improving governmental administration of social pro-
grams probably appeals less to most social workers than the goal of
getting the policy changed or the direct contact with the clients and
beneficiaries of governmental program. Yet it is an essential link in
translating these policies into programs which matter to ordinary people
and we cannot afford to leave the question exclusively to professional
administrators, businessmen and taxpayers associations. No one should
be more concerned about the adequacy
— both in numbers and in
 Public Responsibility for Human Welfare ae

quality — of the civil servants in the health, education, and welfare

departments of governmental units of all levels. Like many other citi-
zens of my own town, I was concerned about standards of the Federal
and State civil services but it took a typhoid epidemic in 1956 in the
midst of one of the richest counties in the U.S.A. to wake us up to the
fact that our local health and building departments were staffed in a
way that made our policies and regulations a farce.
This is closely related to the final point which is my belief that, as
professional social workers and adherents of the democratic faith, you
have an obligation to strengthen local action through citizen groups
and through local governmental units. One of the real dangers in this
generation is the big and far-away government, the big organization,
policies and issues which are or seem to be too complicated for the
ordinary citizen and the resulting passivity, failure to exercise demo-
cratic prerogatives, acceptance of things as they are. Throughout the
world, the United Nations is promoting community development pro-
grams as a key to partnership of local initiative and public services for
human welfare. No single profession holds a more central place than
social work in this effort to help people to help themselves with the
cooperation of their common agent, the public service. 7

7 Training for Social Work, Third International Survey (New York: United
Nations, 1958).
THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES

The Place of Professional Education

in Higher Education
KATHARINE ELIZABETH MCBRIDE *

I. Is an honor to present the fifth Marion Hathway Memorial Lecture.

Marion Hathway was a splendid colleague, whose qualities remain as
clear to us today as when we were on one job or another working with
her. Most of us spend the major part of our time searching for solu-
tions; Marion Hathway was, I think, less interested in the process of
finding answers to questions than in setting the questions in the first
place. She was notable in having both a fine mind and a stout heart.
She could ask the disturbing questions, and in so doing sharpen issues
which others had left cloudy — and probably made themselves more
comfortable as a consequence. Marion Hathway, any day and every
day, would give up comfort for the honest facing of a difficult situation.
She knew that human welfare and the public interest required a recog-
nition of difficulties which fainter hearts would ignore. Being the per-
son she was, she made a lasting contribution to her profession, and
through this series of lectures we salute her.
Much has been written on the subject of professional education.
The Council on Social Work Education Annual Program Meeting in
1958 included papers by two of the experts, one of whom has since
written a comprehensive book on professional education. Furthermore,
the next step according to those wise about the subject, notably Ralph
Tyler, is a national conference.
Speaking about professional education and its place in higher edu-
cation, it may be useful first to review the contradictions that we seem
content to live with. One set of contradictions is old and familiar and
comes from the distinction we make between professional education
and advanced education in arts and sciences. We do not call the gradu-
ate school of arts and sciences a professional school, but that does not
mean that it is not a professional school. Here is the way Charles W.
Eliot, who had much to do with the development of professional edu-
cation in the United States, put the matter:
By the side of the schools ordinarily called professional there stands
in the true university an advanced school of liberal arts and sciences.
* President, Bryn Mawr College.
 Professional Education in Higher Education 55

. . . This is the professional school for teachers, men of letters,

journalists, naturalists, physicists, chemists, and mathematicians.
The journalists may have moved to a professional school of their
own, but otherwise Mr. Eliot’s statement holds. The graduate school
of arts and sciences is, except in name, a professional school for the
twenty or thirty fields it includes, but the fields themselves are not
in the ordinary sense professions.
The teachers who head Mr. Eliot’s list constitute the most superb
of our contradictions. After studying in the graduate school of liberal
arts and sciences, they may teach but they do not become professional
teachers. After studying in schools of education, they become pro-
fessional teachers, but teach at the university level much less frequently
than at the elementary or secondary level.
A contradiction, considerably newer than any that would have
concerned Mr. Eliot, arises now when we think of undergraduate edu-
cation in relation to professional education. It is simple to say that
a liberal education in arts and sciences is distinct from professional
education, but with the advance of knowledge far greater specializa-
tion than was earlier the case has come into undergraduate programs.
Anyone who stops by the laboratories to see undergraduates majoring
in chemistry would find it difficult to differentiate their study from
that of the professional. The same could be said of students in a num-
ber of other fields in liberal arts and sciences.
To make an arbitrary dividing line according to academic degrees
it would, of course, be possible to say that for liberal arts and sciences
the first degree is not professional, but one would at the same time
have to note that for other fields the first degree is the professional
degree. Parenthetically, one might note also that while the professional
schools, engineering, for instance, are making great efforts to intro-
duce “liberal arts courses,” the liberal arts curriculum is under constant
pressure to become more professional. I have sometimes thought that
the clearest distinction would have nothing at all to do with academic
degrees but would rest on the solid base of the student’s own intent.
Despite the present appearance to the contrary, this tangled web
is intended in the end to help us clarify the place of professional edu-
cation. Another set of contradictions arises from the fact that a great
many people want to be in professions. As a consequence, various
groups working at something that requires some specialized training,
1 Charles W. Eliot, The Man and His Beliefs, ed. by William Allan Neilson, 1926,
Vol. I, p. 75 (New York and London: Harper and Brothers).
THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES 56

but is nevertheless without any great body of knowledge or theory, may

still become profess especially if the group has an association
— ions
to back it up. Mr. Blauch in 1955 reported thirty-four professions. *
There may well be more today.
Complex overlaps with education in the arts and sciences and a
great diversity among professions are then conditions which are to be
taken into account in any consideration of professional education. They
do not rule out the consideration of professional education in the
large, but they do plant warning flags. To some of these signs of trouble
ahead I shall return.
First, I should like to review certain facts which have implications
for professional education. These are facts which shape our lives. We
know them and we know that we are under some urgency to understand
them, but we shall be exploring their implications for a long time.
Two facts are of such general importance that it would be hard to
name a profession they did not affect. One is the rapid expansion of
knowledge, an expansion of such a magnitude that Robert Oppen-
heimer, quoting Urey, has said that ninety per cent of the scientists
are alive. The second fact is that however we characterize the world
— divided, or in a state of tension or in a cold war — it is neverthe-
less one world, and it has never been so until the very recent present.
Rather for the service professions than for the others, although
architecture should perhaps be added, are three further facts of evi-
dent importance. Best recognized is the unusual distribution in the
total population, with high peaks for the very young, and the (a phrase
with irony of ironies built in) golden years beyond sixty-five, and
between these a considerable trough for those on active jobs. More
frequently recognized as a threat than a promise, but still possible to
evaluate only for the short term, is the fact of increasing automation.
The third fact to be introduced may not seem a fact in the sense
of these other two. It is a new concept which has appeared first in one
connection and then another until it is now widely enough accepted
to be seen as a determining factor in some of the professions. This is
the new concept of equality of opportunity which includes opportunity
to make up for earlier handicaps. The stages by which we reached this
new concept are well known with, for example, special education for
the blind and the deaf dating well back but special education for the
wer
2 Lloyd E. Blauch, Education for the Professions (Washington, D.C.: U. S. Gov-
ernment Printing Office, 1955).
 Professional Education in Higher Education 57

culturally disadvantaged as a very recent achievement, and, indeed,

hardly more as yet than a series of pilot projects.
It is tempting to add to these facts important for professional edu-
cation. I am reminded of the old travelers, who wanted to leave un-
touched no aspect of the countries they visited and consequently made
their books and also their titles include “the ancient and present state
and government .. . temples, palaces, castles and other buildings . . .
metals, minerals, trees, plants, animals, birds and fishes . . . descent,
religions, customs, and manufactures of the natives . . . together with
a description of the Kingdom of Siam!” I, too, find that almost every-
thing could be related to professional education.
Keeping to the minimum number of facts, however, I will analyze
briefly their significance for professional education, and finally to follow
this analysis by some of the most evident conclusions.
Starting with the rapid advance of knowledge, several implications
are instantly found, and they are clear. We expect continued and even
greater specialization. If our expectations are correct, we shall have
either longer periods of training and greater costs or new ways to
improve training so that time is not extended block by block as knowl-
edge to be covered is extended. It will not help to look for shortcuts
in the sense of more superficial learning, but it will help to seek for any
sort of valid improvement in learning. In this connection we have
Ralph Tyler’s warning to bear in mind:
All efforts at education imply some notions of how learning takes
place and how it can be facilitated. Some of these “theories of
learning” used by teachers in professional schools are more appro-
priate to the training of animals or to the simple habit formation
of children than they are to the demands of the complex learning
involved in educating the student for the effective practice of a
profession. 3
Social work has been, I think, more concerned with both curricu-
lum and methods of instruction than have many of the other profes-
sions. In view of the Curriculum Study of thirteen volumes perhaps this
last remark should be named the understatement of this Meeting. The
point to be stressed, however, is that social work is an area where
advances in knowledge are rapid. It will have to maintain these con-
cerns, to build on any present study and on a continuing basis where
new conditions warrant —if I may change a familiar title — Revise
and Dissent.
3 Charlotte Towle, The Learner in Education for the Professions (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1954). See Foreword by Ralph W. Tyler, vi.
THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES 58

Increasing specialization should more often be discussed in terms

of the great joy it brings a man as he comes closer to the problems he
wants to set and solve. Following the more usual course, I am point-
ing out the larger task that increasing specialization involves in itself,
and then turning to the problem the specialist has in keeping in touch
with other specialists who are necessary to him, to say nothing for
the moment of keeping in touch with the intellectual life of his time.
A recent contact with extreme specialization (extreme to me only)
came up in a conversation with a young mathematician. He had been
at a center where there was a large group of mathematicians and I
said, “I suppose you’ve had an interesting time discussing your work
with others there.” He looked very surprised and said instantly, “Oh,
I couldn’t discuss my work. I haven’t published it yet, and there wouldn’t
be anyone who would understand.”
Osler believed that the specialists in each generation were matched
by “the wide-visioned men.”
To two great groups of minds, the world has been indebted for
its progress — the hypermetropic, the wide-visioned men of the type
of Aristotle, Darwin, and Spencer; and the myopic — the men of
concentrated penetrating vision of the type of Pythagoras, Vesalius,
Harvey, and Pasteur. Who shall say which is the more important?
Those who think that at the present day specialism has run riot,
are purblind critics who cannot see that we are safe so long as each
generation in each department produces a few men with hyper-
metropia enough to synthesize the work of their colleagues . . .4
We know we need in addition to the specialist “the wide-visioned
man,” but does he continue to appear in our generation, in the neces-
sary fields and in the hoped for numbers? If the weight of answer here
is in the negative, how do we associate the potentially wide-visioned
man with others to let him develop a broader vision?
To what extent can the specialist, though not potentially broad in
vision in Osler’s sense, still keep in touch with the intellectual life of
his time? Related is a question just posed by John W. Gardner in a
very interesting way in his new book called: Excellence: Can We Be
Equal and Excellent Too? He discusses the diversity of leadership in
“our pluralistic way of life” and the fact that, with leadership so
widely dispersed, those exercising the power “have no very keen sense
of exercising it.”
Or they may well recognize their leadership role with respect to
4 Harvey Cushing, The Life of Sir William Osler, 1926, Vol. II, p. 232 (Oxford:
Oxford Clarendon Press).
 Professional Education in Higher Education 59

their special segment of the community but be unaware of their

responsibility to the larger community. If you suggest to the influen-
tial American that he occupies a position of leadership, his most
predictable response is, “Who, me?” 5
The specialist who would often argue that it is his task to pursue
his own line of work, and that alone, is nevertheless by his work help-
ing to create the life the rest of us live. He has this kind of responsi-
bility on the one hand and on the other the responsibility for leadership
which Mr. Gardner finds insufficiently recognized and urgently needed.
Faced by the magnitude of these responsibilities we may find it
anticlimactic to note the major problem for both the research man
and the practitioner of keeping up with the advances in his particular
field. The problem is too well known to belabor. If we were to make
a fresh start, planning professional education for the present day,
however, I wonder whether we would again concentrate all our require-
ments at the point of admission to the profession and create none
through a professional career.
If the rapid advance of knowledge has implications for each member
of each profession, one could maintain that the second fact to be con-
sidered— our first experience in living in one world, however seri-
ously divided it is — affects each member as a citizen but only a few
in a professional sense. The limitation is logical but it is nevertheless
important to consider professional education in relation to professional
responsibilities overseas for these are mounting up very rapidly.
The magnitude of the problem we all recognize to be great. It was
very well expressed the other day by James Reston in his column in
the New York Times:
The major facts are not in dispute. Even on Capitol Hill where it
is possible to get an argument about almost anything, most men
agree that the revolution in communications, the revolution in
weapons of mass destruction, and the political and social revolu-
tions in the underdeveloped regions of the world are creating
unprecedented problems for all the Western nations and especially
the United States.
Only in the northwest corner of the world — North America and
northern Europe — is there anything like general economic security.
On the rest of the globe, there are some 2,000,000,000 people
living in poverty, and this at a time when poverty creates greater
discontent than ever because men everywhere know that poverty
is no longer a fact of nature but is correctable.®
5 John W. Gardner, Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too? 1961, p.
125 (New York: Harper and Brothers).
6 New York Times, February 1, 1961.
THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES 60

In the Annual Report of the Carnegie Corporation for 1959, to refer

to John Gardner again, the extensive involvement of American uni-
versities in world affairs is expeditiously and strikingly presented. It
is a record of progress which everyone concerned with higher educa-
tion would do well to have in mind.
Mr. Gardner notes that the universities are planning for the long
term, as they must. The question many in the universities would raise
is whether planning is on a large enough scale.
Another question is whether we are devoting enough attention to a
profession which should be one of the leading professions at the present
stage in time. If I asked you to name five leading professions, you
would not name it. Perhaps if I asked for ten it would be included.
Did you place foreign service in the first five or ten?
It is the goal of many young students but my impression is that as
they get older and closer to the choice of a career the numbers de-
crease. If so, it is important to know why. When that conference on
professional education is held, there should be a special section on
foreign service as a profession.
Let us turn to the facts that affect the service professions more
than they affect others (with the possible exception of architecture).
The peculiar distribution in the population, with such high peaks
for the young and the old, if centuries were our scale, may be a very
temporary matter. Certainly we shall soon lose that trough for those
of an age to be working, and indeed there are some who ask whether
within another fifteen or twenty years we may not have more war
babies grown up and ready for professional positions than we have
positions. I have already noted that our responsibilities overseas will
increase. In terms of the service professions there should be noted
further a fact and a prediction. The fact is that the high proportion
of aging and aged will remain and the prediction is that short of catas-
trophe greater service rather than less will be expected by all segments
of the population.
It seems reasonable to suppose that for the foreseeable future we
shall continue to be short-handed in all the service professions. Each
profession may then in time seek — as nursing and teaching and social
work have done — better methods of recruiting. On this policy there
is unlikely to be much debate, although in some professions there is
no action either. On the further policy of trying to find ways of extend-
ing the hand of the professional there is always hot debate, perhaps
because extending the hand might seem a threat to replace the body,
 Professional Education in Higher Education 61

but also because “extending the hand” means new ways of working
for the professional and new ways are always troublesome at first.
Nevertheless in both nursing and teaching a variety of ways have been
found to extend the hand of the professional, and it is my understand-
ing that the Curriculum Study gives attention to “social work associates.”
The change we are now experiencing in the demand for professional
services may seem unrelated to the advance of automation, which I
want to consider at least in passing. We frequently ask the question,
what proportion of the population has the intellectual ability to go to
college. We do not usually put the question, what proportion of the
population has the ability to cope with a highly mechanized world, but
it is an important question. Teachers in any big city system could give
part of the answer. Social workers in various types of agencies could
give part of the answer. Both would say that there are sizable groups
in the population for whom both a way of life and a job must be
simple, and if these cannot be simple naturally, that is, in the nature
of the civilization, they must be made simple artificially, and that is
the work of professionals.
Some of those whom teachers, social workers and employers in an
earlier day would have despaired of can be brought to much higher
levels of ability and achievement than we used to think. Demonstration
projects, for example, in Public School 43 in New York City, are among
the most encouraging signs of the times. New levels of ability and
achievement are reached as special opportunity reduces cultural dis-
advantages and raises aspirations. It is nearly two centuries since Jeffer-
son’s plan for a school system — and so perhaps you would say that
we are slow at coming to a new concept of equality of opportunity.
However slow, the new concept is now sturdily established among
the more forward-looking people in the professions, but also in forward-
looking communities which seek to help their youth especially to make
up for earlier handicaps.
One of the conclusions to draw is the certainty of change. How do
we plan to take into account that certainty? In two ways, chiefly, is
my belief. One is to throw as many bridges as we can between different
fields of knowledge, including professional fields. These bridges will
be of different kinds: interchange of appointments from one faculty
to another, temporary and changing teams, joint seminars, joint proj-
ects and so on. Since these bridges can more easily be “thrown” when
the distance is not too great — in either physical terms or social terms
—the professional school related to a rapidly advancing body of
THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES 62

knowledge will increasingly often be found in a university, increasingly

rarely start up on its own.
Overlaps between fields are not nearly so troublesome as gaps be-
tween fields. The series of bridges which we now have or could create
might increase the overlap. That would be a small price to pay if they
would increasingly reduce the gaps.
The second way in which to take into account the certainty of change
is to set as one of the objectives of all education, professional and
otherwise, an interest in continuing education. How far we go beyond
setting such fine objectives is a matter which should — and seriously
speaking — have some debate. Would the members of any profession
ever vote themselves a requirement of continuing education? Perhaps
there are more moderate ways of achieving part of the purpose if the
profession not only through its journals but through special institutes
and in-service courses or clinics makes current knowledge attainable
and desirable, but we have a long way to go.
Beyond the certainty of change I set as a second conclusion, cer-
tainly for the service professions, there is a continuing state of being
understaffed, a continuing scarcity of qualified personnel. It is impor-
tant to approach this problem not only in the non-controversial way of
good recruiting, but in the controversial way of developing both human
assistants and various new technical aids.
Concerned as we may be by a variety of serious problems, the heart
of the matter is that the professions have higher hopes for service than
ever before. Much of their service will be of the kind earlier rendered,
but improved as knowledge rapidly advances. Two new dimensions
greatly extend this service. We have noted both: one is service over-
seas and the other is the provision of all the service that helps to make
up for scanty opportunity. It would hardly be possible to over-state the
importance of these new dimensions.
 Memorial Resolition
Bryn Mawr College

January 11, 1956

Be it resolved, that the Faculty of Bryn Mawr College record
their sense of sorrow and loss at the death of Professor Hath-
way, and that this resolution be spread upon the minutes.

Marion HATHWAY was born in 1895 in North Tonawanda, New

York. She received her A.B. degree from Radcliffe College in 1916.
Even during these college years her interest in social work had begun
to emerge, for she chose Social Ethics and Economics as her major
field and engaged in volunteer services as a student. After a short period
as a teacher in a college preparatory school in Boston, she went to
Washington as Statistician for the Bureau of Personnel of the War
Department. She next took the step which started her on her long
career in social service when she became Finance Secretary for the
Y.W.C.A. in the West Central Field. During the following few years,
until she began her period of graduate study at the University of Chicago
in the School of Social Service Administration, she continued to round
out her apprenticeship in the field of social welfare.
In 1927 she received her M.A. degree from the University of Chicago
and in 1933 her Ph.D. During these years at the University of Chicago,
her devotion to the welfare of people was brought to fruition under the
tutelage of Edith Abbott and Sophonisba P. Breckenridge. The ideals
which had developed in Marion Hathway as a young woman were thus
crystallized into a standard of service which remained a measure for
the rest of her life.
In 1927 she began her college teaching career as Instructor in Soci-
ology at the University of Washington, combining the teaching of courses
in the introduction to the social work field with many community
activities, the goals of which were improvement of the level of services
THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES 64

to individuals by legislation, community organization, and development

of professional standards of training.
In 1932 she joined the faculty of the Division of Social Work of the
University of Pittsburgh and in 1934 became Assistant Director. She
became Executive Secretary of the American Association of Schools of
Social Work in 1938, and in this post did much to develop standards
for professional education in this field. In 1941 she returned to the
University of Pittsburgh as Professor of Public Welfare where she
remained until she came to Bryn Mawr as Director of the Department
of Social Economy in 1951. During her sabbatical leave from Pittsburgh
and during several summers, she held the position of Visiting Professor
in a number of schools of social work, including the American University
in Washington, D.C., and the University of Hawaii and the University
of Puerto Rico.
Her publications include many articles in professional journals. She
was also the author of a book published by the University of Chicago
Press, entitled Migratory Worker and Family Life. She was the co-
author of two books, Public Relief in Washington and Education for
the Public Social Services. She was also the editor of a Social Service
Series for Houghton Mifflin Company, a series in which three volumes
have been published.
In addition to her contributions in teaching and writing, she served
in a variety of positions in national organizations, including the American
Association of Schools of Social Work of which she was President from
1942-1943, the American Association of Social Workers, and the
National Conference of Social Work; she was also a member of several
important Federal advisory committees. Most recently she was a member
of the Governor’s Advisory Committee on Mental Health in Pennsyl-
vania. She also served on many local committees in the areas in which
she lived.

Throughout these many and varied activities of her professional life,

a consistent pattern of service is revealed — service intended to further
a better life for the multitude of individuals through her chosen profession
of social work. Her years of professional activity have spanned a period
through which social work has evolved as a profession. The impact of
Marion Hathway’s life on the profession can best be measured by the
devotion of her former students and colleagues who may be found
from East to West and North to South.
 Memorial Resolution—Bryn Mawr College 65

Professor Hathway came to Bryn Mawr College as Director of the

Department of Social Economy in September of 1951. From her long
experience in education for social work, by her high standards and
ideals, and by her abounding energy in reaching out into the community
she extended the influence of the Department in both local and national
social work circles. Her social consciousness and the breadth of her
interests provided an ideal towards which the students could strive.
Her interest and devotion to the individual student far exceeded that
usually expected of a director of a department.
She strengthened and extended the work of the Department by
securing the accreditation of the concentration in psychiatric social work,
by obtaining training grants from the National Institutes of Mental
Health, the Office of Vocational Rehabilitation of Department of Health,
Education and Welfare, and the Department of Welfare of the Common-
wealth of Pennsylvania. By obtaining these additional funds the number
of stipends to students was increased and the faculty resources of the
Department were expanded.
But in this strengthening of the professional content of the program,
she never lost sight of the need to broaden the training of students in
the Department by work with related departments of the College. This
was particularly evident in the doctoral program which she viewed as
a true integration of knowledge in the social sciences and social work.
She at once made herself an integral part of the college community.
She participated actively in meetings of the Faculty, and was promptly
called upon to serve on the Graduate Committee. She was also active
in other organizations such as the Bryn Mawr Chapter of the American
Association of University Professors and reached out to learn and to
share the interests of her colleagues. In all these relationships her
unremitting energy was apparent. She demonstrated her ability in organ-
ization, stood for broad and liberal views on issues that arose, maintained
an attitude that was independent but friendly and sympathetic, and
revealed a spirit at once loyal and courageous, never afraid to take an
unpopular stand in defense of her own convictions. Thus she won and
held the respect and affection of her colleagues and associates.
A list of the published writings
of Marion Hathway

1928. THE YOUNG CRIPPLE AND HIS JOB, Social wee Monographs, No.
4. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928. 130
(Editor) HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL SERVICE RESOURCES OF
SEATTLE, 1928. 31 pp.
11929" “The Cripple and His Job,” THE CRIPPLE, London, England, Vol. V
(April 1929), No. 20, pp. 196-200.
1930. THE COST AND VOLUME OF SOCIAL WORK IN SEATTLE. Seattle:
Seattle Community Fund, 1930. 114 pp.
“The Migrant Family and Social Agencies in Washington,” SOCIAL
FORCES, Vol. 9 (December 1930), No. 4, pp. 232-235.
1931. (Edited and revised) SOCIAL SERVICE DIRECTORY OF SEATTLE,
1931. 42 pp.
(Edited and compiled) DIRECTORY OF SOCIAL SERVICE RE-
SOURCES OF WASHINGTON, 1931. (Mimeographed)
1934. THE MIGRATORY WORKER AND FAMILY LIFE, Social Service
Monographs, No. 21. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934. 240 pp.
PUBLIC RELIEF IN WASHINGTON, 1853-1933 (with John Rademaker).
Olympia: Washington Emergency Relief Administration, 1934. 120 pp.
“Dorothea Dix and Social Reform in Western Pennsylvania, 1845-1875,”
WESTERN PENNSYLVANIA HISTORICAL MAGAZINE, Vol. 17
(December 1934), No. 4.
1934-1936. (Editor) PENNSYLVANIA SOCIAL WORK, Quarterly Journal of
Pennsylvania Conference on Social Welfare, 1934-1936.
1937/7 “The Right to Training,” SOCIAL WORK TODAY (October 1937), pp.
11-12.
1939. “Relation between General Education and Education for Social Work,”
NATIONAL SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF EDUCATION, 38th
YEARBOOK, Part II, 1939, pp. 249-255.
“Trade Unions for Social Workers,” SOCIAL WORK TODAY (June
1939), pp. 32-34.
“Social Work Education and Practice,” SURVEY MIDMONTHLY, Vol.
75 (June 1939), pp. 172-174.
“Training for Public Welfare and Social Work,” SOCIAL FORCES, Vol. 18
(October 1939), No. 4, pp. 61-64.
“The American Association of Schools of Social Work Changes its
Membership Requirements,” THE COMPASS (March 1939), pp. 7-9.
1940. “Social Action or Inaction: the Challenge” in TRAINING FOR SOCIAL
WORK. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1940, pp. 33-43.
“Education for Public Social Services,’ NATIONAL CONFERENCE OF
SOCIAL WORK, PROCEEDINGS, 1940, pp. 585-597.
“Education for Social Work,’ in EDUCATION OF WOMEN IN A
DEMOCRACY. New London, Connecticut: Council on the Education and
Position of Women in a Democracy, 1940 (pamphlet), pp. 22-23.

67
THE MARION HATHWAY MEMORIAL LECTURES 68

1941. “The Present Emphasis in Professional Education,’ AMERICAN ASSO-

CIATION OF MEDICAL SOCIAL WORKERS, BULLETIN (July 1941).
“Education for Social Work,” SOCIAL WORK YEAR BOOK, 1941, pp.
173-186.
1942. “The Primary Responsibilities of Social Workers in the United States,”
THE COMPASS (June 1942), pp. 13-18.
“Professional Education in Puerto Rico and Hawaii,” THE FAMILY,
Vol. 23 (July 1942), pp. 191-193.
“What Changes do we Face?” WELFARE, Vol. 8 (January 1942), No. 3,
Pennsylvania Conference on Social Work, pp. 39-46.
(Editor and co-author) EDUCATION FOR THE PUBLIC SOCIAL
SERVICES, Report of the Study Committee, American Association of
Schools of Social Work. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1942. 324 pp.
1943. “Education for Social Work,” SOCIAL WORK YEAR BOOK, 1943, pp.
187-199.
“Utilizing Available and New Personnel in Meeting Present and Future
Demands for Social Workers,” THE COMPASS (September 1943).
1944. “Social Action and Professional Education,” NATIONAL CONFERENCE
OF SOCIAL WORK, PROCEEDINGS, 1944, pp. 363-373.
1946. “The Need is the Criterion,” CITIZEN CIO, Vol. I (March 1946), No. 5.
“Medical Social Work and Professional Education,” AMERICAN ASSO-
CIATION OF MEDICAL SOCIAL WORKERS, NEWS LETTER, Vol.
19 (September 1946), No. 4.
“Twenty-five Years of Professional Education for Social Work — and a
Look Ahead,” THE COMPASS, Vol. 27 (June 1946), No. 5, pp. 13-18.
1947. “Our Responsibilities in 1947,” TWENTY-SEVENTH TERRITORIAL
CONFERENCE OF SOCIAL WELFARE, PROCEEDINGS, Honolulu,
T.H. (April 1947), pp. 39-50.
1948. “Preparation for Social Responsibility,’ PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION,
Five Papers Delivered at the Twenty-ninth Annual Meeting, AASSW.
New York: American Association of Schools of Social Work, 1948
(pamphlet), pp. 39-46.
“Education for Social Work,” PITT, University of Pittsburgh (Winter
1948). “Gaps in Education and Training,’ NATIONAL CONFERENCE
OF SOCIAL WORK, PROCEEDINGS, 1948, pp. 465-472.
“The Use of Resources in Regional Planning for Professional Education
for Social Work,” in REGIONAL PLANNING FOR SOCIAL WORK
EDUCATION. Nashville: Conference sponsored by Vanderbilt University,
Scarritt College, and Peabody College, June 8-9, 1948. Papers compiled
by Lora Lee Pederson. Pages 82-95.
ICA, Editor, SOCIAL SERVICE SERIES, Houghton Mifflin Company. (Four
volumes published, 1949-1956).
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