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7 Soc. Sec. Bull. 3 (1944)
The Significance of the Money Payment in Public Assistance

handle is hein.journals/ssbul7 and id is 453 raw text is: Bulletin, September 1944 The Significance of the Money Payment in Public Assistance By Jane M. Hoey* Under the Social Security Act the public assistance for which Federal grants are made is defined as money payments' to or in behalf of needy persons. In accordance with the intent expressed by Congress in framing the law and with judicial definitions, the Social Security Board has interpreted money payments to mean that payments must be in cash, checks, or warrants immediately redeemable at par, and that payments must be made to the grantee or his legal guardian at regular intervals with no restriction on the use of the funds by the individual.' THE MONEY PAYMENT in public assist- ance under the Social Security Act is one milestone in the long road to- ward recognition that need itself, not the needy person, is the danger to society, and that the security of so- ciety includes security of the poor. It is one of several provisions in the act which affirm that recipients of assistance have the same personal rights and responsibilities as their friends, neighbors, and others in the community. Recognition that the needy have a right to public aid is more than three centuries old among English-speak- ing peoples. The act's specification of money payments and the interpre- tation of that phrase to assure the re- cipient's right to use his payment as he would money received from any other source is new in principle, however, and still not fully realized in practice. Poor-Law Philosophy and Social Security The money payment as a method of providing assistance reflects a long, progressive development in concepts *Director, Bureau of Public Assistance. IThis article is based in part on Money Payments to Recipients of Old- Age Assistance, Aid to Depend~nt Chil- dren, and Aid to the Blind, a statement on policy and legal and administrative considerations of money payments un- der the Social Security Act (Bureau Cir- cular No. 17, March 1944, prepared by the Bureau of Public Assistance in col- laboration with the Bureau of Accounts and Audits, Social Security Board, and the Office of the General Counsel, Fed- eral Security Agency). 2 Sections 6, 406, and 1006. Guide to Public Assistance Adminis- tration, Bureau of Public Assistance Cir- cular No. 9, sec. 211, p. 1, August 11, 1941. of social responsibilities. The full significance of the method is sharp- ened by comparing the philosophy underlying most practice in the nine- teenth century with recent legisla- tion establishing rights to public aid. The principle underlying the money payment is diametrically opposed to the philosophy of the poor laws, which dominated public relief for many generations and still, unfor- tunately, colors some current prac- tices. Early statutes assumed that the fact that a person was in need in itself branded him as incompetent or worse. Poor relief accordingly was based on the premise that needy persons were suffering from a weak- ness or vice against which society must protect itself and them. As the price of exercising their right to public aid, needy persons had to enter workhouses or poorhouses under what sometimes amounted to penal discipline. Even now some per- sons who receive public aid in the United States are, for that reason alone, stigmatized by the publication of their names in pauper lists, de- prived of the right to direct their family affairs, and denied any oppor- tunity to decide how best to use what- ever aid can be supplied for them. All these penalties, it should be em- phasized, react upon the community as well as on the persons who receive aid, because they weaken or destroy the recipient's capacity for self-direc- tion, judgment, and self-reliance and thus tend to perpetuate his depend- ency. They constitute as vicious a circle as the old penal practice of im- prisoning a debtor and so depriving him of any opportunity to pay his debt. The term social security epit- omizes the difference between the poor-law philosophy and the present- day approach to problems of de- pendency in the United States and other countries. It is the security of society, including the poor, not relief of the poor which is at stake. The focus is on the factors or conditions which make for or perpetuate poverty and insecurity, not on the imputed failings or vices of individuals. The effort is to enable the individual to keep or regain a responsible place in the life of his family, neighborhood, and community-not to cast him out, humiliate or scare him, and deny him an opportunity for self-direction. The basic objective is to conserve human resources in the interest not only of the individual but also of the community and Nation of which he is a part. The advance from the old poor- law philosophy may be seen in a re- mark in an annual report of the Local Government Board of London in the 1870's which declared: Relief given as of right must tend to encourage improvidence to a greater degree than that which, being a matter not of right but of voluntary, precarious, and Intermittent charity, cannot be so surely anticipated as a future re- source.' The report pointed out further that the poor must be given clearly to understand that private outrelief, as contrasted with the workhouse, would be granted only as an indulgence to deserving cases. To this view, one might reply in the words of another Englishman, Win- ston Churchill, speaking 35 years later. If terror be an incentive to thrift, surely the penalties of the sys- tem which we have abandoned ought to have stimulated thrift as much as anything could have been stimulated in this world . . . where there is no hope, be sure there will be no thrift. 0 The Social Security Act is designed to prevent or counteract economic need arising from several major causes - unemployment, old age, death of the family breadwinner, blindness, and loss of parental sup- 'Local Government Board, Third Annual Report, 1873-74, quoted by de Schweinitz, Karl, England's Road to Social Security,. 1943, p. 160. Ibid., p. 159. Ibid., p. 189 (speech at Dundee on un- employment, October 10, 1908).

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