What remains to be written about the histories of charity organization societies (COSs), the National Council on Charities and Correction (NCCC), pauperism, science, and Americans' attitudes toward the poor? Brent Ruswick sets out to reframe our understanding of scientific charity in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, hoping to show that it was more complex, more changeable over time, more incipiently progressive, and more durable than we have typically thought. He chronicles the efforts of reformers to systematize charitable giving in an age of social, economic, and demographic upheaval; and to distinguish through objective investigation and analysis “worthy” from “unworthy” candidates for aid, hoping to prevent the degenerate “pauper”—understood as biologically unfit and dangerous to the republic—from thriving and propagating. But a range of factors, including shifting scientific ideas and economic depressions, especially that of the 1890s, moved leading reformers to rethink their assumptions about who was liable to be poor and why, pushing the movement by the early twentieth century toward more environmentalist thinking, advocacy for more generous public relief policies, a vast expansion of the category of the worthy, and an abandonment of the very idea of the pauper.

In telling this story—which can be summarized here only sketchily and incompletely—Ruswick demonstrates tensions between the practices of local rank-and-file charity workers and administrators on one hand and the ideas of national leaders and spokespersons who sought to articulate the nature and purpose of the movement on the other. Acknowledging that historians have rarely seen scientific charity as either scientific or charitable, Ruswick takes seriously his subjects' efforts to develop science-informed policies that reflected both their fear and distrust of the poor and their desire to improve the latter's condition. He thereby finds in scientific charity “a much more complex and historically significant movement” than scholars have been inclined to recognize (28).

The reader is confronted immediately by an ambiguity that pervades the book's structure. The opening anecdote concerns conditions at the Marion County Poorhouse, which served the city of Indianapolis and its environs. Because a substantial portion of Ruswick's primary sources are Indianapolis related, this beginning seems to signal that the book will use charity organization in Indianapolis as a case study. But the book is not a systematic study of scientific charity in Indianapolis; rather, the city functions sometimes as the context for the work and developing thought of the nationally prominent minister and charity activist Oscar C. McCulloch and on other occasions as a source of data on local practices, especially as they diverged from or lagged behind policy pronouncements emanating from the distant NCCC national leadership. The author claims that in the 1870s, attitudes toward the poor in Indianapolis were “typical of many American communities” (39). But the author does not clearly state why he returns continually to that particular city, which vanishes from the introduction after the poorhouse anecdote, reappears irregularly through the proceeding chapters, but makes no appearance in the concluding chapter or epilogue. What made Indianapolis especially apposite for this study of scientific charity—other than the presence there of Oscar McCulloch, until his death in 1891—remains a mystery.

Other points in the book give the reader pause. Ruswick occasionally moves into the realm of speculation, as when he suggests that local charity workers may have retained more hereditarian and moralistic views of the poor than did their increasingly environmentalist and reformist national leaders because the latter had increasingly distanced themselves from actual poor people, and thus experienced a “soften[ing]” of their perspective on the impoverished (187). Perhaps—but no evidence for this is adduced. In the realm of ideas, the author's analysis of both hereditarian and environmentalist intellectual currents among charity workers and officials might have benefited from greater attention to the role of Lamarckism, which gets only passing mention but which often facilitated this generation's blending of environmental with hereditarian ideas. Lamarckian assumptions may have explained the particular ways in which reformers believed that hereditary predispositions, when nurtured and expanded within squalid environmental conditions, could conduce to degeneration and hereditary pauperism—a grim example of that merging of moralism with science that characterized the scientific charity movement.

Finally, one wonders just how fully the pauper vanished after the Progressive Era. Ruswick asserts that while contemporary poverty discourse still emphasizes individual responsibility, today's putatively undeserving poor do not seem “to be so numerous, distinct, wretched, [or] threatening” as the Gilded Age pauper was believed to be (34). But in the vast literature on impoverished “other Americans” since the 1980s, has that population not frequently been seen as a looming “underclass,” a menacing mass of “others” who flout the values of mainstream America and increase their numbers by propagating all too freely? Although Ruswick expresses in the book's epilogue his reluctance to make too much of his topic's recent resonances, given his assertions, he might have engaged with this literature.

Ruswick's epilogue reflects what remain some of his book's particular strengths, which include not only a fresh recounting of a seemingly familiar story but also a certain authorial modesty—an unwillingness to draw neat but facile lessons from the past and a reluctance to sit in simple judgment over figures whose shortcomings he has forthrightly chronicled. Oscar McCullough is usually reduced by historians to an intellectual precursor of the eugenics movement, and so he was, in part. But Ruswick finds in him an individual who continued to struggle with the rush of his time's events—with depressions, labor strife, and class conflict—and whose ideas changed significantly before his early death. We have here a far more rounded and complete version of McCulloch that we have usually gotten. The same could be said of the scientific charity movement as a whole. Ruswick acknowledges that Americans continue to judge the poor on moral grounds, and harshly; perhaps he should take heart from the very story he has told, which affirms the possibility that people may change.