A Casework Program for Homeless Men?

When the bureau was established in 1925, social workers had been engaged in a long process of professionalization. Crucial to this development was the abandonment by many of social reform in favor a therapeutic, psychiatric approach to their clients that sought to adjust them, as individuals and families, to their environment.^{Footnote 22} This change would be effected through casework, which social work theorist Virginia Robinson described as the “observation and assembling of facts; hypothetical investigation of these facts; and control of the facts for new ends.”^{Footnote 23} Crucial to the way caseworkers structured and interpreted these facts were assumptions about the proper roles for men and women in families and society.^{Footnote 24}

Hoy and Bruno were part of this professionalization process, and their interest in extending casework to homeless men developed out of their longer engagement with social work. Hoy received a liberal arts degree from the University of Missouri and took special training courses in “family casework.” Upon graduation, he became involved in St. Louis’s social work community, and was a caseworker at the St. Louis Provident Association, the city’s primary family casework agency.^{Footnote 25} Bruno enrolled in graduate courses at what is now Columbia University’s School of Social Work and afterward took a lecturing position in sociology and social work at the University of Minnesota in 1914. In the early 1920s, he served as the editor of The Family, a journal dedicated to developing professional casework. In 1925, Bruno moved to St. Louis to become the head of the social work department at Washington University.^{Footnote 26}

The agency that would become the Bureau for Homeless Men grew out of an experiment conducted by the Community Council in 1923. According to Hoy, eighteen thousand homeless lived in the city that year.^{Footnote 27} Community Council board members Emil Steger and Elwood Street developed a program using caseworkers from the Provident Association to try to solve two problems: abuse of the decentralized network of shelters, missions, and work houses, and an increase in street begging.^{Footnote 28} Homeless men who applied for relief at any relief agency would be directed to the bureau, and police, instead of jailing beggars, would refer them there as well. Steger and Street deemed the experiment a success and by 1925 the bureau was established as a separate agency with Bruno as its chair and Hoy as its executive secretary. Bruno and Hoy would develop this individualized, casework approach further in the coming years.

Hoy and Bruno were not the only social workers thinking about homelessness during this period. Manfred Lilliefors, executive secretary of the Social Welfare League in Reading, Pennsylvania, doubted casework could help homeless men. These men, Lilliefors argued, simply wished to work. A seasonal, low-wage economy produced their seemingly shiftless lifestyle, and Lilliefors contended that better employment agencies would best help these men.^{Footnote 29} Roy Gates, of the Joint Application Bureau in New York City, developed a position more akin to Hoy and Bruno. Gates saw homeless men as maladjusted individuals whose time away from their families imperiled them.^{Footnote 30} Gates thought that “the caseworker qualified to undertake constructive work with a family ought to be the best one to untangle the affairs of the homeless man. . . . His return to his home would relieve the family agency, his family probably, and would remove him from the ranks of the homeless.”^{Footnote 31} Gates and Lilliefors staked out two important poles in conceiving the problem of homelessness: it either derived from individual deficiencies, or stemmed from the economy’s structure.^{Footnote 32} In St. Louis, Lilliefors’s arguments gained little traction.

The bureau’s casework program began from the premise that homeless men were essentially deviant. Family alienation was the source of deviancy. Gurman described family as “a natural outgrowth of the very nature of man, [and] every effort should be made toward its preservation.”^{Footnote 33} Estrangement from family meant a man was not “subject to the forces of social control.”^{Footnote 34} Similarly, unmarried men should work toward the formation of a new family. Gurman saw marriage as an unquestionably necessary stage in masculine development. But the life homeless men led on the road and in lodging houses indefinitely postponed marriage.

Hoy further argued that homelessness produced men characterized by “irresponsibility, idleness, independence of movement, and satisfaction that wants no interference.”^{Footnote 35} Begging best symbolized the consequences of family estrangement, and it fueled the homeless existence. Hoy claimed that “as you would expect, beggars as a group have serious mental and physical difficulties as they take very little care of themselves, often owing to the fact that this physical disability is a help in their business rather than a handicap.”^{Footnote 36} This play on words demonstrated the depths of degeneration the agency believed unattached men experienced. Deceit and disability reinforced each other, and the depraved transformations they wrought underscored the urgency and necessity of the bureau’s casework agenda. The bureau distinguished itself from its predecessors not by envisioning homeless men as less corrupt, but by contending that their perceived deficiencies could be corrected through professional casework.

Following Robinson’s casework methodology, bureau caseworkers placed high priority on the gathering of information about its clients. Interviewing the homeless man was therefore a critical component of the bureau’s work.^{Footnote 37} Between 1925 and 1933, the average length of treatment grew from one and half months to five months.^{Footnote 38} Some men experienced up to forty-two interviews.^{Footnote 39} The interview was not only supposed to elicit family history, work record, and physical conditions, but also interests, sex life, mental health, and record of vagrancy. Diagnoses made by bureau caseworkers such as “sex complex” and “abscess of rectum” suggest detailed psychological and physical examinations accompanied many interviews.^{Footnote 40} Gurman argued that this gathering of information was crucial because it allowed him to form a “sympathetic and objective understanding” of a man’s problems.^{Footnote 41} Yet these investigations also pathologized the homeless man and distinguished him by his deviation from the ideal breadwinner.

The caseworker used information culled from the interview to develop a rehabilitation plan. Because family separation was considered “abnormal,” Gurman believed that casework should try to “unite that family.”^{Footnote 42} Gurman’s dictum applied only to white men. One agency case record, for instance, noted that “the colored people generally have less regard for family conventions.”^{Footnote 43} For white men, a skilled casework interview should simply make the homeless man realize “that he wanted to go home.”^{Footnote 44} Gurman argued, however, that “it is utter foolishness and consequently poor casework” to reunite a family without attempting to fix the conditions that spurred separation.^{Footnote 45} If a man had a cavalier attitude toward child rearing, for example, “every effort should be made to inculcate in such an individual the idea of parental responsibility.”^{Footnote 46} Gurman urged caseworkers to “plan with [the family] and try to show them wherein the difficulty lies.”^{Footnote 47} As the agency’s experiences will demonstrate, such vague prescriptions often met a more complex reality.

Helping homeless men find work provides one example. Gurman argued that work should be used for “therapeutic purposes,” and he maintained that “all normal men everywhere prefer to work.”^{Footnote 48} Work stimulated positive changes in a man’s character. An employed man would not only be less likely to beg, but he would also gain skills and income that might stabilize his family life. Surprisingly, the bureau did not keep records of the men for which it found employment. It perhaps had little luck. In contrast to previous relief methodologies, which jailed or expelled homeless men without regard to their personal experience, the bureau reached toward treating homeless men as individuals. Nonetheless, these individualized plans prescribed the same medicine: work and family reunification.

The bureau’s demographic reports also suggest its casework goals would not have been easily met. The agency aided primarily white, native-born, unskilled men who spent part of their lives as transients. These men worked unskilled jobs in Missouri and in the wider Midwest.^{Footnote 49} Between 1925 and 1932, men forty and older comprised half of the agency’s clientele.^{Footnote 50} Many men had therefore passed prime family-forming age. Further, over 60 percent of clients were single, 20 percent widowed, 8 percent married, and 12 percent separated or divorced.^{Footnote 51} Thus, a relatively small number of men had their own families to which they could return. More important, the bureau’s statistics do not reveal whether a family reunion would have been in the best interests of either party.

For the younger, single men, it seems fair to suggest that many left home to find work.^{Footnote 52} Much of the work homeless men found was seasonal, as Hoy himself acknowledged.^{Footnote 53} Casework, which required frequent contact, was simply not designed to deal with this labor system. Further, the unskilled labor these men often performed did not provide a solid foundation to be a family’s sole breadwinner. Job training was not part of the bureau’s program, so helping men find jobs for which they were suited was not a sure way to create breadwinners. Sending them back to their families also posed problems. If a man set off to look for work, he would not want to return home. Similarly, convincing a man to return home who left because of family conflict, or coaxing his family to accept him back, was not always a good option.^{Footnote 54} The men who filtered into the bureau’s casework office, then, were not necessarily abnormal, but men trying to make a living. Attempting to discover their source of deviancy might well be a fruitless endeavor.

Hoy and Bruno did their best to mitigate these problems by hiring caseworkers with experience and education. By 1932, the bureau employed thirty-four caseworkers. All but three had either finished university, had some college experience, or completed special social work training. Taken together, they reveal the outlines of a social work network in Missouri. Some had trained with Bruno at Washington University, while almost all had experience in various institutions around the city, including the YMCA and the Provident Association.^{Footnote 55}

While the level of experience should not surprise, the number of men in the bureau’s employ is striking. By 1930, women made up 79 percent of social workers across the United States.^{Footnote 56} Men, however, comprised 64 percent of the bureau’s workforce. Given the preponderance of women in the profession, the bureau’s staff appears consciously cultivated. Bruno, Hoy, and Gurman were all married men in the 1930s. They might have seen their own life trajectories as normal and measured the progress of their clients against their own experiences. Bruno admitted as much when he wrote that “the social worker’s experience of family habits in his own circle” made a man’s decision to be without a family bewildering.^{Footnote 57} Moreover, if Gurman was correct, and the caseworker needed to make a man feel comfortable, that might best be accomplished with a male caseworker. A bureau document about homeless boys could easily apply to the agency’s older clients: male caseworkers could “sense the problem of this group more directly and win their confidence more quickly than a woman.”^{Footnote 58}

Hoy and Bruno sought to demonstrate the possibilities of casework with homeless men by transforming the Municipal Lodging House into a site of casework in 1926. Although an ostensibly private agency, the publicly funded lodging house provided the bureau with a crucial base of operations. Opened by the city in 1912, the lodging house provided the bureau with the perfect place to perform casework.^{Footnote 59} Men sought relief from a variety of places, but the lodging house’s size, free beds, and food ensured that it would attract the homeless. The city supplied the bureau with free office space within the lodging house and paid the salary of a clerical worker. Although it served as an excellent base, the agency found the lodging house’s conditions detrimental. As Bruno explained, “Lodging houses do not make any further attempt to understand and deal with the social problems of homelessness.”^{Footnote 60} Instead, they aided men in maintaining an unattached life.

To curb perceived abuse, the agency enacted restrictions on how long a man could remain at the lodging house. If a man desired to stay longer than three days, he had to visit a caseworker to determine his need and whether or not he had family connections to which he might turn. This process was repeated every thirty days to keep updated records on the man.^{Footnote 61} The agency also required able-bodied men to work. Any that refused had their stay terminated. If a man returned within thirty days of his last stay, this reinforced his deviant character, and a fresh interview was mandated before he could be registered again.

By 1930, the bureau had applied its casework principles and vision of manhood to a variety of endeavors. Bureau caseworker T. A. Hendricks developed an extensive and lauded antibegging program,^{Footnote 62} and the agency began doing casework with unattached boys in an effort to place them on the proper masculine path.^{Footnote 63} These reforms all revealed a tension in the bureau’s desire to prove casework could be done with homeless men while also meeting their material needs. The reforms demonstrate that the bureau would help a man only insofar as he followed the bureau’s casework agenda.^{Footnote 64}

The Great Depression and Homelessness in St. Louis

The Depression nearly undermined the bureau’s work. In the wake of the Stock Market’s collapse, relief rolls greatly expanded. Before October 1929, the bureau helped on average two hundred men per month.^{Footnote 65} The agency’s annual report for 1933 found that more than twenty-eight thousand men were assisted.^{Footnote 66} This massive increase in the relief population strained the private relief network in St. Louis. The situation was much the same across the country. According to a 1933 study by the Association of Community Chests and Councils, private fund-raising that year reached only 77 percent of the total from 1932. In Philadelphia, the city temporarily shut down relief operations because funds were depleted.^{Footnote 67}

St. Louis’s welfare agencies reorganized to try to meet the bigger load. With funds from the Community Council no longer sufficient, city officials formed the Citizens’ Committee on Relief and Employment (CCRE) in October 1930. City funds now flowed directly to the bureau and other private organizations. The CCRE also coordinated relief efforts in St. Louis and developed a work program for men with families.^{Footnote 68} In spite of these consolidating tendencies, the CCRE wanted to prevent undue municipal centralization and left the daily operations of each agency undisturbed. Representatives from local relief agencies, including Myron Gwinner, the bureau’s assistant executive secretary, even comprised the leadership of the directing board of the CCRE.^{Footnote 69} While the bureau had always cooperated with city government, the creation of CCRE recalibrated the public-private configuration of relief in St. Louis.

CCRE did more than coordinate and provide funds. The stream of public money was finite. Its disbursement placed beneficiaries within a hierarchy that supplied better relief for men with families than for homeless men, a pattern that persisted during and after the New Deal. This division manifested itself most prominently in the work programs developed by the CCRE and the bureau. CCRE provided resident family men with non-means-tested work that paid in cash. In contrast, homeless men had to work off the in-kind relief provided by the bureau. CCRE privileged the work program for family men by providing it with city funds. Conversely, the bureau had to finance its work program with privately raised funds. The work relief for unattached men and the separate funding sources ultimately separated men into two distinct relief pools.^{Footnote 70}

The men in the bureau’s work program were primarily placed at a farm organized by the agency that grew vegetables used in its cafeteria. The bureau transported men each day by truck to the seventy-acre farm in St. Louis County. The men also constructed a local community garden, built a playground for a settlement house, remodeled the Chestnut Lodge (a lodging house operated by the bureau), and worked on a city plaza until the Civil Works Administration (CWA) took over operations. At that point, bureau clients could no longer work on the plaza because the CWA only provided work to men with families.^{Footnote 71}

The bureau’s clients did not uniformly acquiesce in an arrangement founded upon their perceived deviancy. These men had long participated in a distinct masculine subculture that served as a bulwark against relief agencies like the bureau. Frank Tobias Higbie has argued that Midwestern “hobos” developed an ethic of “transient mutuality” forged through a shared experience of life on the road.^{Footnote 72} In this informal system, homeless men aided their fellows in times of need, expecting similar treatment at some future date. More important, these men did not see their life as inhibiting their manhood. As Higbie demonstrated, many saw travel and work away from their families as crucial in the process of becoming a man.^{Footnote 73} While not all men followed the ethic, it nonetheless created a masculine identity distinct from the one proposed by bureau caseworkers.

An outbreak of protests at the bureau in 1932 reflected this shared ethic. Cuts in municipal relief spending that year sparked organized agitation by homeless men. At the end of 1932, the St. Louis Post Dispatch and the St. Louis Globe Democrat reported on a number of disturbances that occurred at the bureau’s cafeteria.^{Footnote 74} The men also organized against the bureau’s work program. A flyer distributed by the “Single Men’s Council” exhorted “Organize – Men Refuse to Work Unless You Get Decent Wages.” Another flyer advertised a meeting that would discuss “the forced labor plan that [the] Bureau [for] Homeless Men will try on us. Come on, men, don’t wait till they make slav[e]s out of you.”^{Footnote 75} While the protests did little to change their situation, they nonetheless show that some homeless men had some conception of themselves as single men with fair claims to just relief. Their demands suggest that they had their own sense of how to improve their lives. Better work and wages, not better casework, galvanized these men to organize.

A New Deal for Homeless Men?

An infusion of federal funds assisted the bureau in surviving these protests. Indeed, federal funds were needed across the country. Sociologist Nels Anderson conveyed the severity of the situation to Congress in January 1933 when he described the thousands of men sleeping in city parks, jail cells, and abandoned buildings.^{Footnote 76} To meet this mounting crisis, President Roosevelt signed the Federal Emergency Relief Act in March 1933, creating the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). FERA had a $500 million appropriation to help states in their relief efforts. Roosevelt placed Harry Hopkins, a social worker and associate of Roosevelt, in charge.^{Footnote 77}

For the first time in the United States, federal funds had been set aside to aid the homeless. Hopkins appointed Morris Lewis, also a social worker, to head FERA’s transient division. Like Hoy, Bruno, Gurman, and Gwinner, Lewis believed caseworkers could not simply minister to the physical needs of homeless men. Lewis maintained that “there must be a spiritual and cultural content in this program. There must be a realization that other qualities consistent with human development are to be applied in connection with this work.”^{Footnote 78} While not an explicit endorsement of the bureau’s program, Lewis thought rehabilitation would be accomplished through casework, which came to occupy “a central position” in the FTP.^{Footnote 79}

Yet important tensions existed within the FTP. On the one hand, a casework program like the one described by Lewis and the bureau suggested that homeless men were abnormal and in need of correctional casework. On the other hand, the FTP’s survival depended on combating such a notion. Homeless men had long been associated with laziness, drunkenness, and “perversions” such as homosexuality. To drum up support for a program that aided suspicious men, FTP officials consciously tried to distinguish their clients from the pre-Depression tramp.^{Footnote 80} Ellery Reed, who conducted a survey of the FTP in 1934, summarized this perspective best: in contrast to the previous era’s men, these new men were “the most enterprising and energetic people of their former communities.” But, as Reed also noted, the FTP sought to adjust unattached men to “normal economic, social, and home ties.”^{Footnote 81} Thus, the program had to navigate between the claim that it rehabilitated abnormal men and the assertion that the public should support the FTP because it aided normal men in a time of trouble. As we shall see, it had little success.

As caseworkers at the bureau’s St. Louis office continued to care for clients, Gwinner joined others interested in homeless men in the state’s capitol in September 1933 to devise a program. Along with Gwinner, religious organizations, private welfare groups, representatives from city relief boards, and state administrators worked to develop the state’s transient program. This configuration of private and local interests was not unique. In a letter to the New York Transient Division, Hopkins wrote that “it is expected that you avail yourself of the use of the personnel of private agencies wherever possible.”^{Footnote 82} In Missouri, Gwinner’s experience was widely recognized by those at the capitol and they nominated him to chair the committee responsible for constructing a transient program.^{Footnote 83}

Gwinner exercised his leadership position by making casework of central importance in Missouri’s program. Gwinner argued that “any carefully planned program” should aim toward the elimination of homelessness. To achieve this goal, casework “should be made available to each individual and any plan developed should be based on casework.”^{Footnote 84} Casework would treat the “personal and psychological problems which were often fundamental to social or economic rehabilitation” of homeless men.^{Footnote 85} Reed also saw this element as critical to the FTP, stating that problems of “personality and human relationships were often back of much of the transient’s difficulty and that they stood in the way of his recovery of normal status.”^{Footnote 86} If a man refused to be interviewed and “to cooperate in any available plan of stabilization,” he would be dismissed.^{Footnote 87} Like the bureau’s efforts as a private agency, Gwinner instilled in the FTP a conception of homelessness as an individual male problem that required therapeutic solutions.

Aside from these conceptual continuities, the arrival of the FTP also reaffirmed the older patterns of relief. For example, before the bureau’s participation in the CCRE, private funds from the Community Council supported the agency as it cared for resident and nonresident men. Under the CCRE, a similar pattern of care prevailed, and a mix of private and public funds continued to support the bureau.^{Footnote 88} With the FTP, federal funds assisted only transients, while state and local funds aided resident men. In practice, this split was not so neat. One Missouri program administrator stated that determining a person’s residency status was nearly impossible, and resident men filtered into all aspects of the program.^{Footnote 89}

The FTP did bring about some alterations in the geography of relief. Men no longer received care solely from urban casework offices like the bureau’s. The FTP created largely rural reference centers designed to prevent men from traveling freely. Reference centers provided immediate, physical relief and arranged for transportation to a treatment center, where men would be interviewed by a caseworker.^{Footnote 90} Treatment centers were established in St. Louis, Kansas City, and St. Joseph. In St. Louis, the bureau’s office, staffed by the same personnel, functioned as the treatment center.^{Footnote 91} Here caseworkers worked toward “rehabilitation of these men stabilized in the local community.”^{Footnote 92} As with the bureau’s private program, treatment-center interviews determined the man’s “various personal characteristics, his residence status, his family connections, the reason he was traveling, and any specific problem which was contributing to his unadjustment [sic].” Once an “intelligent diagnosis” was made, the caseworker engaged in “social therapy in order to effect a speedy readjustment.”^{Footnote 93} The bureau’s conceptual framework for understanding homelessness, then, spread throughout Missouri as a result of these changes.

The increase in casework sites still left Gwinner concerned. He felt that not enough was being done to halt movement within the state and prevent men from leaving it. In early 1934, he created a special program using state and local funds to do just that.^{Footnote 94} While letting men leave the state might reduce the agency’s budget, it too closely reflected the old tradition of “passing on,” which the bureau wanted to supplant with casework. By keeping men close to their families, Gwinner hoped casework might function more effectively. Gwinner boasted that the intrastate program was “preventing the break-up of families and perhaps re-uniting families.”^{Footnote 95} During its one-year existence, the program returned home 64 percent of the men, although only 27 percent went home as a result of the bureau’s casework interventions.^{Footnote 96}

This low success rate was possibly the result of a misdiagnosis of the problem. During interviews in the intrastate program, most men stated that they left home to look for work. Given the Depression, this answer should have been believable. Gwinner, however, read intrastate transiency as a problem stemming from individual male deficiencies. He surmised that “there is generally some other contributing factor which furnishes the final incentive for leaving. Consequently we always try to go behind the reason given and find the real one.”^{Footnote 97} Explicit statements of economic distress merely concealed deeper disturbances. Even if Gwinner had not individualized the problem of homelessness, it is not as if a surplus of jobs existed. But by configuring the problem in such a way, Gwinner and the bureau helped close off avenues for social policy and strengthened the distinction between breadwinning and unattached men.

Aside from reference and treatment centers, and the intrastate program, homeless men were also cared for in camps. By February 1934, Missouri was scheduled to have eight transient camps constructed in St. Louis, Kansas City, Joplin, Springfield, and St. Joseph.^{Footnote 98} The camps were envisioned as companions to the therapeutic program found in the urban treatment centers, and they served simultaneously as homes, sites of work, and centers of rehabilitation for homeless men. John McKinsey, a caseworker in the Missouri camps, illuminated the close connections between home life and reconstructed manhood when he wrote that camp construction, performed almost entirely by the men, would help them feel “they were building themselves a home.”^{Footnote 99}

Like the work programs developed by the bureau and the CCRE, the transient camps reinforced the differential treatment received by breadwinners and unattached men. Indeed, aside from casework, one of the camps’ most important objectives was to prevent homeless men from competing for jobs by keeping them in camps, thereby “relieving the labor market of some of its surplus workers.”^{Footnote 100} Moreover, the work men performed in camps was not allowed to overlap or compete with the “regular” work projects like the CWA and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), whose beneficiaries could prove that relief payments were supporting their family.^{Footnote 101} A directive released by the Missouri State Social Security Commission succinctly summarized this policy perspective: “In general, it is intended that Transient projects should not compete with relief work projects or projects undertaken by the CCC camps.”^{Footnote 102} As a result, men’s labor mostly went toward the construction of the camps in which they lived.

Following the pattern laid out in the years before the FTP, unattached men mostly received direct relief at camps in exchange for their labor. This arrangement was meant to serve as a work test and to help effect a personal readjustment in the man.^{Footnote 103} Some cash allowances were distributed, and the amount was determined by whether the man provided skilled, semiskilled, or unskilled labor. By giving these allowances, administrators hoped to quell street begging and integrate men, at least in a small way, into the surrounding economy.^{Footnote 104} Yet the pay was much lower than that provided to men in the “regular” programs. Eventually, some men in the camps refused to do skilled work when the WPA wage scale was widely released, which showed that unskilled WPA workers received a higher pay rate than the skilled laborers at transient camps.^{Footnote 105}

The men at camp resisted dissimilar treatment in other ways as well. Most men did not stick around the camps long enough to provide labor of any sort, and it is surprising that they were even constructed. Throughout the two-year existence of the FTP in Missouri, 70 percent of the men placed in camps stayed less than one week.^{Footnote 106} High turnover forced many caseworkers to close their cases prematurely: 94 percent of cases were closed because men “left of their own accord.” In contrast, 3 percent of cases were closed because their clients secured employment.^{Footnote 107} Missouri was not alone in facing these difficulties. The program as a whole saw turnover rates of 100 percent some months.^{Footnote 108} But even for the more successful cases, as a New York FTP caseworker rightly pointed out, “What of the day when a man . . . is ready to take hold of his own life again? At present he just goes.” As this quotation suggests, the effectiveness of casework was quite limited. It might aid a man while he stayed in camp, but it could do little to alter the unforgiving, economically depressed world outside the camp’s casework office. Men undoubtedly recognized this and their short stay reflects it.

Camp conditions perhaps served as a greater incentive to leave. Lack of food, overcrowding, and paucity of work plagued the program in general.^{Footnote 109} Gwinner, for example, stated that “prospects of any appreciable number of our men securing employment in the next six months is very poor.” He further noted that the physical condition of the men was low “principally due to [a] long period of time on limited rations.”^{Footnote 110} One food report showed that a camp primarily subsisted on seven hundred pounds of potatoes.^{Footnote 111} Gwinner thought men in camp could be divided in two, “those who accept their present condition which after all is not much worse . . . than that to which they were accustomed; and those who are rather confused, discouraged, and see no hope for the future.”^{Footnote 112}

A depressing environment compounded other, more conceptual problems. If treatment centers were to place men in “the local community,” no precise meaning of the term was given. It might have meant the man’s hometown, but it also might have meant the community around the treatment center. A nonresident man probably had fewer family connections in the latter, however, presumably making it less desirable for a program focused on reintegrating a man into his family. Sending him home could also not guarantee that he would not simply leave again. Moreover, although FTP camps certainly functioned as homes, a crucial aspect was missing: the camps had no “family” or “dependents” with which a man could interact and realize his manhood. Instead, men interacted primarily with one another. Finally, the bureau’s records are surprisingly free of any mention that Gwinner or other agency officials tried to convince Missourians that the FTP was doing good work with normal men. These failures led to new policy directives less than a year in the program’s existence and radically reshaped the FTP.

The Decline of the Federal Transient Program

In April 1934, Hopkins convened a meeting in Washington, D.C., of transient administrators from across the United States to set new rules for the failing program.^{Footnote 113} Hopkins told them that the FTP had failed in its twin goals of providing good casework for homeless men while also convincing the public that the program served worthy people.^{Footnote 114} Hopkins told administrators of grievance letters received from around the country complaining that FTP clients received better relief than they did.^{Footnote 115} More important, Hopkins thought the therapeutic casework program was futile. He reflected upon this failure in his history of the New Deal’s relief experiment, writing that caseworkers “could not make out of these converted warehouses, offices, stores, garages, school houses, or cheap hotels anything but thinly disguised flophouses.”^{Footnote 116} Here, Hopkins called into question the entirety of the bureau’s efforts to transform the old system of mass care into an individualized casework program.

The guidelines Hopkins presented undermined caseworker control over the FTP. Hopkins ended the rule that prohibited men from applying to more than three camps. He reasoned that because men took to the road in search of something, they should be allowed to make that journey unimpeded. Because casework only slowed down this process, Hopkins terminated casework for all but the most serious cases.^{Footnote 117} Social workers could also no longer send men back to their communities. By sending men home, they merely competed for jobs with those individuals who had never abandoned their communities and therefore deserved the work. This rule directly contradicted the bureau’s assertions that men needed to be with their families. Surprisingly, Hopkins also told the administrators that they could not prevent men from drinking in the camp: it was now the man’s home and administrators could not tell a man how to behave in his home. Sadly, Hopkins did not reform pay structure or address the low quality of life at the camps.^{Footnote 118} Two months later, all state transient programs were ordered to begin reducing their budgets.^{Footnote 119}

Unsurprisingly, Gwinner resented these changes.^{Footnote 120} Gwinner and the Missouri transient committee responded to Hopkins by doubling down on casework. They voted for the elimination of the FTP through successful casework. They also voted to strengthen local programs for homeless men, which they viewed as serving on the front lines. If local programs operated effectively, men would not leave home in the first place.^{Footnote 121} The principles established by the disgruntled committee were of course not binding. Hopkins’s initiatives took precedence and signaled the decline of the program.

Hopkins and Gwinner ultimately clashed because they disagreed upon the causes and cures of homelessness. For the bureau, estrangement from family not only caused homelessness but was itself homelessness. Bureau caseworkers viewed their profession as uniquely capable of rehabilitating these men. Without robust, local casework programs, homeless men would never return home. The new policies established by Hopkins threatened not only the caseworkers’ professional expertise but also the existence of their jobs.

Hopkins, who did not fit the “stereotype of a ‘moralist,’”^{Footnote 122} saw homelessness as a problem of unemployment. His changes therefore implied a much different conception of homelessness.^{Footnote 123} Hopkins thought men became homeless not because they were failed breadwinners, but because they went out in search of work. The goal should be to help them find jobs. The larger politics of relief, which equated FERA with the maligned “dole,” made up another crucial component in Hopkins’s calculus. FERA was always intended as a temporary measure because, according to Hopkins, “President Roosevelt is not ‘relief minded.’ He sees relief . . . as a necessary evil to be gotten rid of at the earliest possible date.”^{Footnote 124} The new solution would be a jobs program. With the FTP’s decline, Hopkins argued that the WPA would be the “ideal vehicle” to replace it, and that homeless men would be welcomed into the program.^{Footnote 125}

Hopkins’s well-wishing did not play out in reality. The distinct ways of helping married and unmarried men that developed in the previous years decisively shaped the liquidation of the FTP. A report issued in August 1935 by the St. Louis Relief Administration, the successor to the Citizens’ Committee, revealed that one unattached man had been placed either in the CCC or a “Veteran’s Camp,” while one other man found refuge in a WPA camp.^{Footnote 126} This left 5,372 men in Missouri camps after September 1935 with no place to go. Within three months, the load dropped to 2,639 men. This precipitous decline did not occur because these men found jobs. Only about 500 received either private employment or had managed to make it on to a WPA project, though the exact distribution is unclear.^{Footnote 127} One Missouri transient administrator complained that the WPA seemed determined “to put everyone else to work first.”^{Footnote 128} In New York, unattached men faced similar difficulties finding alternative sources of assistance and were often overlooked by local and state relief authorities.^{Footnote 129} Indeed, WPA jobs were “regularly reserved for married men,” which not only kept women out of the program, but unattached men as well.^{Footnote 130} As Nels Anderson remarked, “Cases of migrants who are assigned to WPA employment are so rare as to be conspicuous.”^{Footnote 131}

After September 1935, transient administrators in Missouri moved men into vacated CCC camps placed under the authority of the WPA. Although the WPA oversaw these camps, men did not receive the same level of support characteristic of regular WPA projects. Instead, they were mostly subsistence camps and they made available a labor supply for National Park Service and Forestry Service projects. Further, the camps were established only to sustain the present relief population and were not permitted to take on any new men.^{Footnote 132} By the end of August 1936, the Forestry Service liquidated its camps and by 1939, the National Park Service did the same.^{Footnote 133} With that action, public support for these men ended, leaving behind only the Bureau for Homeless Men.

Despite the FTP’s decline, some attempts were made to salvage the program. A Labor Department survey in 1936 sought to portray to policymakers the extent to which homeless men still needed assistance. Florida senator Park Trammell worked to amend the Social Security Act in 1936 to include a federally supported homeless program. The bill, however, went nowhere, largely because it was difficult to gather support for an effort that had previously failed.^{Footnote 134} The 1940 Tolan Committee, which directed studies of homelessness and migratory labor in an effort to develop new policies at the federal level, also was unsuccessful in stimulating change. When mobilization for World War II began, the committee’s focus switched to the study of migration for defense-related labor. With this development, attention to homelessness at the federal level faded away.^{Footnote 135}

In 1938, Gwinner stated frankly that homeless relief in St. Louis was “very much disorganized.”^{Footnote 136} But in the preceding decade, his agency built a casework program shaped by concerns over male breadwinning that changed how homeless men received relief in St. Louis. The agency’s experience allowed it to influence the federal government’s efforts in aiding homeless men during the New Deal. After 1935, however, relief for homeless men would not simply return to the years before the FTP, when the bureau operated a robust private program. When the agency’s program of masculine reform was rejected, the institutions that made up its foundations also crumbled. By 1940, with private funds no longer able to support the agency’s caseloads as they had in the past, the bureau stopped providing relief to homeless men.

The fallout from the bureau’s decline further illuminates the origins of the fragmented New Deal welfare state. While the FERA and FTP were always seen as temporary solutions to the Depression, the bureau’s cultivation of the notion that homeless men were deviant, yet amenable to individual transformation through casework, must be seen as a critical component of the program’s decline and subsequent failure to enshrine homeless assistance into the New Deal. The program for which Hoy and Bruno advocated was simply not equipped to perform its task. Nor did it fit within the welfare framework articulated by the New Deal. In this template, certain white men became deserving and entitled to state support, while single mothers were marked as needy and pitied. The bureau attempted to fit homeless men into this model but failed to make a convincing case that its clients were nascent breadwinners. A homeless man’s unattached status marked him as outside the breadwinning framework and therefore he was not entitled to the support reserved for men with families. Although the bureau and the FTP increased the relief available to homeless men, they did not transcend the boundaries of the breadwinner ideal. Instead, they unsuccessfully tried to expand the boundaries.

The decline of the bureau can also help explain the character of homeless relief in the years following its exclusion from the New Deal’s reconstruction of U.S. social policy. Although a “new alignment” in welfare provision arose out of the New Deal that allowed private agencies to perform specialized casework, while public agencies provided general security and relief, the homeless would not find a place within it.^{Footnote 137} Without publicly supported assistance for unattached men, a meager network of religious charity, mutual aid among the homeless, and skid rows formed in its place.^{Footnote 138} When homelessness was “rediscovered” in the 1980s, the impact of the decline of public assistance was clear. A study of homelessness in St. Louis in 1985 discovered that the homeless received very little adequate shelter, food, clothing, or medical treatment from public or private sources. The study also made clear the effect of seeing homelessness as a problem of white masculinity. It found that the detrimental effects of homelessness fell disproportionately on women and people of color.^{Footnote 139} The homeless are still waiting for a New Deal.