Food for the hungry, shelter for the poor
By Ellen Crawford
The Forum - 10/17/1999

This region of the country has a long history of taking care of its poor.

Long before public assistance, families and friends helped each other when times were tough.

That self-reliance prevailed, even well after the mid-1800s, when territorial and legislative assemblies made counties responsible for providing aid. Counties found that lending a hand was necessary only in public emergencies or when a catastrophe struck an individual family.

During the late 1800s and early 1900s that responsibility alternated between counties and townships, eventually settling with counties.

Cass became one of about 26 North Dakota counties to open a poor farm, a place the destitute could go for food and shelter. Cass County opened a hospital for the poor at the same north Fargo site.

Private social service agencies also developed during this period and have continued to be an important source of help to this day. More than 300 organizations or agencies in Cass and Clay counties provide some type of social service to the poor, elderly and vulnerable, Cass County Social Services director Kathy Hogan says.

St. John's Orphanage and the North Dakota Children's Home and Aid Society, both established in Fargo in 1897, were among the earliest of these nonpublic efforts.

That helping, caring spirit made this region one of the stops for the so-called orphan trains, which carried more than 200,000 homeless children from New York City streets to live with families in rural areas all over the country in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Depression spurs action

Public assistance didn't become a massive, nationwide effort until the severe drought and crop failures of the Depression. North Dakota and Minnesota farmers were among the hardest hit. Counties faced a major disaster at a time when they had no welfare offices, few social workers and little time for planning or training.

The federal government came to the rescue in 1933, creating the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. In this part of the country, much of that funding went to farmers and ranchers to feed their livestock as well as their families.

The federal government, through the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, also bought cattle from farmers and ranchers whose range land disappeared to drought and grasshoppers.

Nearly 1 million North Dakota cattle became government property during the summer of 1934. About 50,000 of those animals were shot and the meat was processed and shipped out of state,

according to Thor Tangedahl, a former state social service director who wrote a history of the state's human services. Some of the meat also became available for North Dakotans.

In 1933, Congress created the Civilian Conservation Corps, a work program for young men between the ages of 17 and 23.

Two years later Congress formed the Works Progress Administration, later known as the Work Projects Administration, which provided people with jobs on public projects such as highways and parks.

North Dakota entered a new era in public assistance in March 1935, when it appropriated money for the first time, from the sales tax, for relief to the poor. Until then funding came from federal and county governments.

Caseworkers visited people's homes to determine their eligibility for public assistance. But some county welfare officials went a step further. They required relief applicants to hand over their license plates.

"If they were really poor, went the reasoning, they should not be driving," Tangedahl wrote.

Children's services grow

Services especially for children also date back to the turn of the century here. The North Dakota Legislature, for instance, provided for a juvenile court in 1913, a mother's pension in 1915, a Children's Code Commission in 1919 and the North Dakota Children's Bureau in 1923.

The mother's pension, which provided up to $15 per child, was the forerunner of the federal aid to families with dependent children. The code commission drafted 25 bills, 20 of which the 1921 state Legislature passed, that covered all aspects of child welfare.

The private sector also did its part for children.

In the 1920s Harriett Campbell Jones of Lisbon, N.D., traveled throughout the state to find children with crippling disabilities and bring them to medical specialists, primarily at Shriners' hospitals.

The North Dakota State Elks Association launched a statewide program for children with crippling disabilities in 1930 and held its first diagnostic clinic the following June.

The Anti-Tuberculosis Association started Camp Grassick near Dawson, N.D., in 1928 for children exposed to the disease or at risk of contracting it.

Ahead of its time

Amendments to the Social Security Act in 1962 required all states to have a comprehensive social service program available for everyone no later than 1975. States in this area already were well on their way to doing just that.

The 1960s also ushered in federal programs still in use today, including food stamps, Medicare and medical assistance for low-income families, as well as a child support program and incentives to get people off welfare and into a job.

Jeanne Kelly, a retired Fargo woman, is very grateful that public assistance was there when she needed it.

"It's what saved me," says Kelly, who in the 1960s was a recently divorced mother with six children ranging from 11/2 to 12 years old.

"We were still below the poverty level but, hey, I could feed my kids," she recalls. "I learned to make every penny stretch a nickel's worth."

After three of her children graduated from high school, she decided, at age 44, to fulfill her dream of going to college.

"It was a chance to get me off the welfare rolls for good," she says. "I was not raised on welfare. I came out of a standard, middle-class family."

With help from welfare to support her family, some vocational rehabilitation funds and student loans, she attended North Dakota State University and in 1976 graduated with a degree in sociology.

"I became gainfully employed, I paid taxes," she says. "It took me the full 10 years to pay off my school loans, but I did it."