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inspiration from the exchange of experiences and the addresses that will be given here.

Cleveland, this week, is being thoroughly educated on the safetyfirst movement with the National Safety Council meeting here. We all need to be educated on the safety movement. We are all automobile drivers, and I think we all need to profit by the experience of Cyrus Day, who was the never-give-way type of driver and suffered the ultimate result of such a policy. And it was so recorded on his tombstone:

Here lies the body of Cyrus Day,

He died maintaining his right of way.

He was right, dead right, as he sped along,

But he's dead, right dead, just as if he had been wrong.

[Laughter.]

As Doctor Little has said, there are three phases in the program of dealing with public or industrial hazards.

The first is accident prevention, the next is workmen's compensation, and your work, civilian rehabilitation, is the third.

I think it is your work that gives the most personal satisfaction, because accident prevention is more or less indefinite and intangible. It is a preventive measure; it is hard to see any concrete results. And of course, workmen's compensation is more or less materialistic. It is simply trying in some way to compensate financially for the injury received.

In your work, however, you do get a real personal satisfaction. You are brought into social and personal contact with men and women who are discouraged or downhearted after some accident, or because of disease, and you are able to bring them a new hope, a new outlook on life, and a renewed courage. That is worth-while work, and you must feel a personal satisfaction in it that we can not feel in some of the other phases of accident-prevention work.

Again, I bring you most hearty greetings from the Association for Crippled and Disabled and from all other social agencies here in Cleveland. I know that your convention will be an unqualified success, and that we will all receive inspiration for the future and a new vision of the tremendous possibilities that lie ahead of us in this really worth-while work of civilian rehabilitation.

Chairman LITTLE. I presume that we have been engaged in this effort long enough to know that rehabilitation, at its best, is expert case work. What the social workers discovered years ago and the technique which they developed we are applying when we succeed at all in rehabiltating the crippled.

The introduction of this kind of work into Government activities has been an experiment. Many of us have wondered if it would

succeed or whether it would become involved in laws, rules, regulations, in bureaucratic red tape, and whether perhaps the necessary amount of initiative and imagination which must be employed in rehabilitation would be strangled. Upon the whole we have made very satisfactory progress and have kept the work largely free from inhibiting restrictions.

In so far as I know the mind of the rehabilitation workers of the country, they have all conceived it to be essentially high-grade case work. We are fortunate in the opening of our conference that we have to address us one who has himself gone through the various phases of social work, learning the methods at first-hand, then guiding various organizations; one who understands the philosophy, technique, and accomplishments of the work, and who himself has had for years an influential relationship to the governmental bodies of a great State.

Among all the social workers of our country I have never known any one who has displayed quite so much finesse in handling the governmental side of a social problem as the gentleman who is to speak to us, and no one who has had more success in handling the detailed social questions which come under his direction than the Hon. Homer Folks, of New York City, who is now to address us. THE PLACE OF VOCATIONAL REHABILITATION IN THE SOCIAL PROGRAM

Hon. HOMER FOLKS, New York City

Mr. Chairman and members of the National Civilian Rehabilitation Conference: In so far as I can speak as a representative of social work, of social workers, and of social work organizations, I am obliged to come before you distinctly in the rôle in which M. Calliaux is now making his appearance in Washington in meeting with Mr. Mellon, that of a person who comes to acknowledge a debt, a great debt, perhaps a debt which can not entirely be paid but on which he wishes to pay an installment. And if there are some other foreign countries who are a little slow about coming over to speak up, I think that this organization may afford to the authorities at Washington a very valuable suggestion, and that is, the way to get them to do it is to ask them to come and make a talk. That, at least, is Brother Little's method, and a successful one, too. We in the field of social effort, which is so many-sided and so inclusive and so varied that I should shrink from any effort to define it, are certainly under very great obligation to the Federal Board for Vocational Education, to the State boards for vocational education, and to the organizations cooperating with them for taking up this particular subject and dealing with it in a comprehensive and effective manner.

Again, I am glad to realize that one activity after another in that varied field, representing the different misfortunes and troubles towhich the human race is subject, has been taken up by those whoarrive at a special interest in a particular subject, and who with the zeal and the enthusiasm of devotion to a particular thing are able to cultivate that phase of the field more intensively, more thoroughly, and to much greater result than would have been possible by thosewho are aiming to cultivate the entire field at the same time.

And, equally, we are under great obligations and we hasten toacknowledge them, to the International Society for Crippled Children which Mr. Allen represents, and to the other organizations affiliated with his group which, during the last few years, have brought the crippled child from out the maze of obscurity, forgetfulness, negligence, and complacence with which they have been chiefly regarded, into the foreground of attention, and have madehim a first claim and mortgage upon the humanitarian conscienceand feeling of the people of our various States and localities.

And I have one more little debt to discharge at the outset, and that is to the city in which we meet. No one who is at all familiar with the growth and development of social work in this country could ever think of coming to Cleveland and speaking in Cleveland without acknowledging the remarkable leadership which that city has exercised in many of the most important fields of social work. If I were to pick out one way in which it would seem that the city of Cleveland-I mean the citizens of Cleveland-have stood out above those of any other large city in the country, it would be this: That they have adopted for themselves a real genuine conviction that social work should be and can be planned upon a detailed knowledge of facts; that we can have a fact basis for the social development of a city, and for a social agency as thorough, as sound, and as dependable as the knowledge upon which business men depend in outlining their business activities. Elsewhere, in varying degrees, social activities are developed because some person takes a particular interest in some particular thing. They rest more or lessupon the basis of sentiment, of assumption, and upon only to relatively small degree upon a careful examination of the actual factsand needs of that particular locality at that particular time. Thus,. to my mind, it is absolutely essential to the growth and development of social work that it shall pass on from that quasisentimental beginning to one of the established forms of activity which are based upon ascertained knowledge, and which shape their policies in accordance with the facts as they are learned from time to time.

Having, at least, acknowledged to a fair degree the debts which my colleagues and myself owe to this organization, and to others, and having pledged our genuine interest, appreciation, and coopera-

tion, I will express a few other thoughts that have occurred to me in regard to this subject of rehabilitation, as to its place, so to speak, in this social program.

It is very interesting, in the first place, to note that apparently it was that very deep interest in the disabled soldier, genuine, universal, and sincere, though perhaps short lived-it was that which, after all, gave us this impetus toward rehabilitation which promises to leave with us a permanent, well-conceived, well-knit plan for dealing with disabled civilians.

It often seems to me as though we in this country must have had a meeting in our sleep and solemnly resolved that we would not learn anything from the war; that everything must be as it was before; and that if it looks different it has got to be made the same as before; that we are not going to modify our manner of living, of thinking, and of doing in any respect because of that great catastrophe which we like to forget and put behind us, and fall back to the things we were doing before. But, at least, we can congratulate ourselves that out of that maze of mystery and con fusion there has emerged, among other things, this civilian voca tional rehabilitation plan which promises soon to be nation-wide. I suppose that if I were to speak to most popular audiences or even to a good many groups of people interested in some other phases of social work, or health, or welfare, that it would be quite news to them that a real and substantial effort to rehabilitate disabled civilians is of so recent an origin. They would take it for granted that it had been done long ago. I think I did, Doctor Little. I think I was surprised, really surprised, to find how little had been done, because if there is any one proposition about which there never would have been any difference of opinion, and which, if presented anywhere at any time to any group, would have had absolute unanimity of favor, it would be the proposition that a disabled man should be helped to restore himself to the best earning capacity of which he is possible. The only way I can reconcile the fact that it did not come about sooner is to think of that underlying trait of human nature which seems to me to be one of its least attractive, though very common, phases, and that is, that when we are agreed and convinced that a certain thing ought to be done with the utmost ease we slide into the belief that it has been done, particularly if 'a recognition that it ought to be done and has not been done would leave on our shoulders a considerable weight of moral responsibility to get it done.

I think, therefore, it was that characteristic of human nature which is so optimistic and which feels because a thing is so obviously desirable, that, of course, somebody has attended to it, that accounts for the recency of the inauguration of the rehabilitation of the dis

abled civilian. It is rather discreditable; it is rather shameful that for so long a time, notwithstanding the great developments of science and medicine, notwithstanding the progress in developing appliances to take the place of limbs that have been lost, that so little had been done, that nothing in a really comprehensive way had been done to give to the physically disabled some knowledge of the results of the experience of others. And so it was that, whether child or adult, they had to find their way, if at all, as best they could, relatively unaided, back to whatever degree of self-support or of earning capacity they could reach. They had to guess at what they could do, or how they could do it. And, of course, the wiser ones and those with most initiative guessed better than those who did not have so much to guess with. But it was a guessing job and an individual job without any effort to capitalize the previous experience of the many who had gone on before.

Looking at it in a detached way, I was greatly astonished to find that 39 States, I believe, in a period of five years had enacted statutes for rehabilitation services. I asked myself, "How did it come about, and what other instances have there been in which any social progress, any social-welfare project so quickly found such wide acceptance in so short a time?" Because, you know, when a thing depends upon the action of several States individually it isn't their habit to achieve uniformity in any short time; in fact, I think I would say, having studied a good many of these things, that it is not their habit to ever achieve uniformity.

We have been trying, just as one little instance, for a good many decades to arrive at so simple a thing on the part of all the States as to know how many people are born in them and how many die in them per year and of what they die. And we haven't gotten there yet. Whenever we begin to speak about the mortality statistics of the United States of America, we have to stop immediately and say, "Of such part of it as up to this time keeps such statistics and keeps them in such a way that they are fairly dependable," and that cuts out a considerable area.

So, then, there must have been some unusual and compelling force to bring to pass such a remarkable result. I think there were two or three things about it. First, the impact of the interest in the disabled soldier, and second, the group of men at Washington who devoted themselves to the subject. I don't know who they were, but I know there must have been such, just arguing it out, or it wouldn't have happened. And I have a good deal of a feeling that our chairman was there when it happened, but I really do not know; I have never asked him. But the third factor was that rather unusual matter of Federal aid to the States on a 50-50 basis. It isn't, I know, very popular to say anything in favor of Federal aid

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