Poverty And Wealth In The United States
Poverty and Wealth
At the beginning of the 1800s lost poor Americans to the South resembled the poor of Europe. Wealthy people or local governments gave them "outdoor relief," consisting of food, firewood, or small amounts of money known as alms, primarily from a sense of the policy or community responsibility. Inherited English tradition, required towns to take care of their poor. Industrialization and immigration brought poverty of a new kind and on a new scale to American cities in the 1820s, intensifying in the economic crises of the late 1830s and the 1850s. The number of people needing help increased dramatically, in part from the isolated nature of all industrial jobs and in part from recurring financial panics. …show more content…
Like tramps farther north, farmers moved frequently. But unlike tramps, they usually moved as families, relocating from one plantation to another at the end of crop seasons. Many white families in the Upper South, suffering from debt and the loss of the open range on which they had kept livestock, also became farmers. In the early and mid-1800s American policies about poverty shifted away from outdoor relief to efforts to teach the poor how to escape their poverty. Beginning in 1817 with New York's Society for the Prevention of poverty, institutions collected the poor under one roof, oversaw their actions, and forced them to work. The state of New York formalized this policy in 1824 with the County Poorhouse Act, which required every county to build at least one institution to house its poor and, ideally, to teach them the emerging middle-class ethics of thrift, constant industry, and sobriety. In the 1840s the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor encouraged wealthy male volunteers to visit the poor to share lessons about surviving and thriving in the American economy. In the 1850s the Children's Aid Society attempted to reform the environment of poor boys, especially by sending the boys out of cities into the supposedly healthier environment of the rural American West. Southern proslavery theorists replied that their region had no poor people. Slavery, they said, saved the South from poverty, insecurity, crime, and possible
At the beginning of the 1800s lost poor Americans to the South resembled the poor of Europe. Wealthy people or local governments gave them "outdoor relief," consisting of food, firewood, or small amounts of money known as alms, primarily from a sense of the policy or community responsibility. Inherited English tradition, required towns to take care of their poor. Industrialization and immigration brought poverty of a new kind and on a new scale to American cities in the 1820s, intensifying in the economic crises of the late 1830s and the 1850s. The number of people needing help increased dramatically, in part from the isolated nature of all industrial jobs and in part from recurring financial panics. …show more content…
Like tramps farther north, farmers moved frequently. But unlike tramps, they usually moved as families, relocating from one plantation to another at the end of crop seasons. Many white families in the Upper South, suffering from debt and the loss of the open range on which they had kept livestock, also became farmers. In the early and mid-1800s American policies about poverty shifted away from outdoor relief to efforts to teach the poor how to escape their poverty. Beginning in 1817 with New York's Society for the Prevention of poverty, institutions collected the poor under one roof, oversaw their actions, and forced them to work. The state of New York formalized this policy in 1824 with the County Poorhouse Act, which required every county to build at least one institution to house its poor and, ideally, to teach them the emerging middle-class ethics of thrift, constant industry, and sobriety. In the 1840s the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor encouraged wealthy male volunteers to visit the poor to share lessons about surviving and thriving in the American economy. In the 1850s the Children's Aid Society attempted to reform the environment of poor boys, especially by sending the boys out of cities into the supposedly healthier environment of the rural American West. Southern proslavery theorists replied that their region had no poor people. Slavery, they said, saved the South from poverty, insecurity, crime, and possible