Child Welfare

To study and insure the health & happiness of U. S. children, traditionally a presidential concern, President Hoover last year called a White House Conference on Child Health & Protection.* He appointed Secretary of the Interior Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur chairman; Harry Everett Barnard, Indianapolis chemist & sanitarian, director. Last week 1,200 dignitaries and clerics, who investigated for them, and 2,000 secondary experts, assembled in Washington to report, recommend.

Findings. They found that, of 45,000,000 children in the U. S., more than 10,000,000 were handicapped, thus:

Improperly nourished . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6,000,000 Defective speech . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1,000,000 Weak or damaged hearts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1,000,000 Behavior problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 675,000 Mentally retarded . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 450,000 Tubercular . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 382,000 Impaired hearing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 342,000 Totally deaf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18,000 Crippled . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 300,000 Partially blind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50,000 Wholly blind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14,000 Delinquent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200,000 Dependent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 500,000

Hoover on Children. A strong part of the Hoover legend is his love of children. Last week he sadly recited the above figures to his convention. Yet he was optimistic. "That we be not discouraged let us bear in mind that there are 35,000,000 reasonably normal, cheerful human electrons radiating joy and mischief and hope and faith. Their faces are turned toward the light--theirs is the life of great adventure.

These are the vivid, romping, everyday children, our own and our neighbors' with all their strongly marked differences--and the more differences the better. The more they charge us with their separate problems the more we know they are vitally and humanly alive. From what we know of foreign countries, I am convinced that we have a right to assume that we have a larger proportion of happy, normal children than any other country in the world. And also, on the bright side . . . we have 1,500,000 specially gifted children. There lies the future leadership of the Nation if we devote ourselves to their guidance."

Recommendations. The conference made 19 recommendations. Eighteen made up a credo that children should be born healthy, be kept healthy. To accomplish that, the 19th advised that districts, counties and communities should organize (using existing organizations where intelli gently possible) for child health, education and welfare. They should have: 1) trained full-time public health officials with public health nurses, sanitary inspectors and laboratory workers; 2) available hospital beds; 3) full-time public welfare services for the relief and aid of children in special need from poverty or misfortune, for the protection of children from abuse, neglect, exploitation, moral hazard; 4) voluntary organization of children for instruction, health, recreation.

The states should coordinate and amplify local efforts. The Federal government should collate and publish general information, statistics and scientific research. In other words (Chairman Wilbur's) : "No one should get the idea that Uncle Sam is going to rock the baby to sleep."

Children's Bureau. Grace Abbott, chief of the Children's Bureau, is a less scholarly humanitarian than her older sister, Professor Edith Abbott of the University of Chicago. But she is the more militant. Perhaps that is why she has risen to high administrative work in the government and is discussed as successor to her superior, Secretary of Labor James John Davis, who retires to join the 71st Congress as Senator from Pennsylvania when it meets this week (see p. 16).

Director Grace Abbott's militancy made her almost forget her 52nd birthday last week. She was irate because she learned almost at the last minute that a committee of the conference, a committee which Surgeon General Hugh Smith Cumming of the U. S. Public Health Service headed and to which she belonged, was prepared to recommend that child hygiene, maternity and infancy work of her Children's Bureau be transferred to the Public Health Service.

This proposal had a significance deeper than the mere transfer of functions. The Public Health Service in recent years has become more and more important in the Government. Last spring it was strengthened by the creation of the National Institute of Health, which is empowered to accept private donations for research. The medical profession hopes that it will become a department of public health with its chief in the President's Cabinet. In Secretary of the Interior Ray Lyman Wilbur, a doctor, other doctors believe they have a powerful advocate.*

Grace Abbott protested stoutly: "To remove the health work from the Children's Bureau would not merely remove one section of the bureau's activities; it would destroy it as a Children's Bureau."

Surgeon General Cumming's committee decided not to recommend the transfer. But the proposal is not dead. A "continuation committee" of the conference will weigh the matter for future report to conference members.

Birth Control. Secretary Wilbur also got into a fracas, but outside the agenda of the conference. Mrs. Frederick Robertson Jones, president of the American Birth Control League and a conference invitee, wanted the conference to report on birth control. Her efforts (she said) "brought only ridicule and curt replies. . . . Not a single committee was willing to let us put this problem before them." Impatient, she scolded at sociologists: "They are still governed by sentiment and tradition. . . . They refuse to apply biology, even though this science has been concerned with defectives for years. America should not have 10,000,000 defective children. It is time that social service is catching up with science. Instead, it waits until the child is born and is struggling for existence."

She said that Secretary Wilbur had replied to her request: "Our work is with the child; consequently it starts with conception and not before."

* President Roosevelt ordered a White House conference on the Care of Dependent Children in 1909. Result was the Children's Bureau, organized in President Taft's administration and made part of the Department of Labor when the latter was created in 1913. President Wilson in 1919 held a White House conference on Minimum Standards of Child Welfare.

*Teachers, who want a department of education, believe Secretary Wilbur their advocate because he is president on leave of absence of Stanford University.

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