Official proceedings of the annual meeting: 1923

320

THE HOME

ferent to anything not material. Put a dollar sign before this figure, I,060,858 child
laborers, and it becomes something worth considering, something considered in the
financial sheets of the papers. And when, sometimes, a muffled urge for something less
materialistic pushes up in us, we seize haphazard on an abstraction; Americanization,
for instance. Americanization! That terrible word that means flag raising mostly.
When the only Americanization worth the breath to pronounce it would be changing
the industrial work to make impossible such starved, drab lives as the Radskys.
But sometimes we get a little more excited and say, "there ought to be an investigation!" And we are right; there always ought to be that! So we go out and count
up misery and get a big figure, like this child-labor figure, and we try and bludgeon the
country into doing something about it. But, alas, the bludgeon only stupifies us; we
do nothing about it.
For government, state, and city bureaus and private, social agencies have been
making investigations and helping the poor for years-this is the fiftieth anniversary
of this conference-and, after all, what has been accomplished? Of course a few dents,
reforms here and there, a little higher age limit for working children in some states, a
little better enforcement of well-meaning measures in some communities, a cleaning up
of one neighborhood or another, or individuals helped over hard places. But all our
labors and statistics have not as yet secured for us even so obvious or elementary a protection as a supreme court proof federal child-labor law.
Students wrangle with statistics, social workers wrangle with their patches of
poverty, supreme courts wrangle with technicalities, and our great American wealth
flows swiftly along by the billions of dollars. But who is trying to tap America's great
wealth of energy, our proud, valiant energy, whose fullness and alertness has created
so much of what America is proud-luxuries and comforts and high standards of living
for a few; who is trying to tap this energy to do something about the low standards
of living and hunger and dearth and squalor and emptiness of life, which stalk as an ever
present shadow to our national wealth? Must the task be left to the colossal patience
of the social worker, willing to keep on laboring, moving millimeter by millimeter
toward an uncertain millennium, out somewhere beyond the horizon?
Indeed the social worker is not without blame for public indifference. For the
social worker knows the facts; but all too seldom does he interpret them to the public.
Every social worker has had said to him at one time or another, "You must have
interesting experiences getting information from all kinds of people." Yes, the investigator can tell tales of people and adventures, of being overturned in a Dakota snowdrift, of stumbling by accident on a hidden mountain still, or of being mistaken for a
revenue spy; and so on. And the social worker can tell far more unusual tales than
the ordinary story of the Radskys. Indeed anyone in this audience could match story
with story, could tell adventures of social workers and the social worked-material
that might make novels or epics. But deep down within you, you would refrain from
telling your own particular problem, for, quite independent of poverty, each person
has his own aspirations and strivings and defeats, and sometimes successes, that are of
paramount importance to himself. And yet each one of us seems almost less than
nothing in that dramatic total which strides boldly through the many heavy volumes
of the I920 census.
Behind every statistic, the individual, and ahead of every individual, a statistic.
Indeed, we are a sandwich, stuffed between a birth certificate and a death certificate,