SPEARHEADS FOR REFORM, THE SOCIAL SETTLEMENTS AND THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT 1890-1914.

ByAllen F. Davis '53. New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1967. 322 pp. $7.50.

In the first monograph to appear in the Urban Life in America series published by Oxford Press, Allen Davis of the University of Missouri has examined the revolution wrought in American philanthropy by those who opened the first settlement houses in our worst urban slums in the 1890s. Drawing many of their ideas from English. experience, Robert Woods, Jane Addams, and others met the "urban crisis" of that era with an unconventional response which earned for them the hostility of the charitable "establishment." It took several years for the National Conference of Charities and Correction to accept the social settlements which were concerned less with individual cases of need and more with the social and economic causes of community-wide disease and poverty.

As the book's title suggests, the settlements became nurseries of programs to reform our urban centers. Davis shows how demands for better housing, more parks and playgrounds, labor legislation for women and children, and union recognition emerged from the attempts of the settlement workers to get to the root of the city's problems. Their experimental approach in instructing the immigrants had a profound impact on educational thought and practice, primarily through John Dewey who had close ties with Hull House in Chicago and the Henry Street Settlement in New York. These same workers provided the intellectual ballast for the Progressive party campaign in 1912 through their diagnoses of and remedies for social ills.

Focusing on the 17th and 19th wards in Chicago, Davis effectively illuminates the cultural and political conflict between the settlement house and the local ward boss. Less successful is the chapter on municipal reform which ascribes to the powerless social workers a more significant role than they deserve in what was primarily a businessmen's crusade. The author's analysis of the individuals attracted to work in the settlements provides a useful corrective to the provocative, but impressionistic studies of the Progressives written in the fifties. Davis sees the workers as motivated primarily by religious idealism, instead of the anxieties resulting from a "status revolution."

The reader would be aided if some of the biographical data on which many of his conclusions about these early social workers are based were provided in an appendix. By pointing up the diversity of views and responses within the movement in this carefully researched work, Davis has performed a notable service in liberating us from a reading of the Progressive era based upon the thought of a few atypical reformers.

An Assistant Professor of History at Dartmouth, Mr. Benjamin earned his doctorateat Columbia University last June. He iscompleting a study of the PhiladelphiaQuakers from the Civil War to 1920.