Robert Hunter championed the cause of ordinary working people during America's first encounter with a rapidly widening gap between the rich and poor, unregulated corporate power, unresponsive political parties, and the undue influence of money in the political arena. Aside from campaigning successfully to ban the employment of children in mines, factories and sweatshops, his pioneering book, Poverty (1904), documented the existence of widespread poverty in the midst of the unprecedented wealth of the Gilded Age. His proposed solutions — including a living wage, unemployment insurance, workplace safety regulations, workers' compensation for industrial injury, and pensions for widows, orphans, and the elderly — were adopted by many states and municipalities, foreshadowing a number of federal programs later included in President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Many wealthy people like Hunter fought for remedies to what they saw as an unjust economic system that had gotten out of balance, was causing too many social casualties, and was undermining democracy in America. While the proposed solutions seemed radical at the time, they saved the free market system from the consequences of its worst flaws, and ended up staving off more revolutionary action. Hunter wrote several books and countless magazine and newspaper articles advocating the social reforms that he believed were necessary. In addition to Poverty (New York: Macmillan 1904), the following are the most important and still instructive today: Socialists At Work (New York: Macmillan, 1908), Violence and the Labor Movement (New York: Macmillan, 1914), Labor in Politics (Chicago: Socialist Party of America, 1915) Why We Fail As Christians (New York: Macmillan, 1919), The Links (New York: Charles Scribner's & Sons, 1926), Revolution: Why, How and When? (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940). In addition to his social reform activities, Hunter wrote what has become a classic book on golf course design (The Links) and created some of the most beautiful golf courses in the world, including the Cypress Point Club at Pebble Beach, California. Source: Brawley, Edward Allan, Speaking Out for America's Poor: A Millionaire Socialist in the Progressive Era (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2007). 1 ACTIVIST SAVES BROTHER FROM TB DEATH SENTENCE AND INITIATES A NATIONAL PREVENTION CAMPAIGN Edward Allan Brawley Things could not have looked blacker for Robert Hunter as he and his mother readied themselves, just over a hundred years ago, for the long train trip from the Midwest to Arizona to visit his dying teenage brother. Initially sent home from Phillips Exeter Academy, his prep school in New England, with a diagnosis of severe bronchitis, the youngster was later found to be suffering from tuberculosis. This was a virtual death sentence in those days, the prevailing medical view being that this was a hereditary and incurable disease. Such was the opinion of the imminent specialist consulted by the Hunter family. The best that could be hoped for young Hunter was that whatever brief time he had left would be more bearable in Arizona’s clear, hot, desert air than the harsher climate of his home state of Indiana. At the time this family crisis occurred, Robert Hunter was working as a social worker in Chicago and living in Hull House, the famous settlement house founded by prominent social reformer and Nobel Laureate Jane Addams. During the late-1800s and early-1900s, the settlement house movement reflected the Progressive Era’s concern for securing a living wage, safe working conditions and sanitary housing for American society’s most needy residents, especially those who had migrated from rural areas or, more often, from foreign countries to seek economic opportunity in the booming and teeming industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest. College-educated young people like Hunter took up settlement house work out of the altruistic urge, usually based on religious principle, to assist and uplift the poor. However, many quickly found their attention drawn to the appalling conditions under which their poor neighbors lived and worked and the desperate need and insecurity that plagued young and old, healthy and sick, hard-working and indolent, discouraged and dissolute alike. In Hunter’s case, his brother’s health crisis occurred when he was in the midst of a systematic study, under the tutelage of Addams, of the appalling conditions of most of Chicago’s low-income housing. The 2 findings and recommendations flowing from this study were published in his book, Tenement Conditions in Chicago, in 19011 and immediately established his reputation as a competent researcher and effective social reformer. In preparation for his trip to Arizona, Hunter gathered all the books, pamphlets and research reports that he could find on tuberculosis, including the most up-to-date findings. His thorough study of the literature revealed that there was a growing body of medical research which was showing that it was an infectious disease that could be controlled and, more importantly for Hunter’s brother, could be cured, if caught in time. Upon their arrival in Arizona, Hunter and his mother found the boy in terrible shape and, to add to their dismay, the care he was receiving reflected the old thinking that nothing much could be done for him. Casting desperately about for some hope, they discovered that a Major Appell who headed the U. S. Army Hospital near Silver City, Nevada, was obtaining good results by employing the new treatment methods with the tuberculosis patients under his care. Civilians were ordinarily ineligible for treatment in military hospitals but, given the perilous state of the young man’s health, he was admitted under a clause in the Army’s regulations that permitted the treatment of life-or-death cases. Under Dr. Appell’s care, he recovered in three months and, with continuing rest, a healthy diet, and regular outdoor activity, he was expected to make a full recovery which, in fact, he did. In the meantime, armed with the new medical research findings on the causes, prevention and cure of tuberculosis, Hunter returned to Hull House and convinced Addams to take the initial steps in what they hoped would be a campaign to stamp out TB in Chicago. With the assistance of Anita McCormick Blaine, heiress to the McCormick (International Harvester) fortune, a dinner meeting of the City’s most imminent physicians whose support would be needed was held at the Blaine home. After dinner, Hunter addressed the gathering on what he had found out about TB and exhorted them to immediate action. Unfortunately and perhaps not surprisingly, most of the distinguished physicians present did not take kindly to being lectured by a brash young man completely lacking in medical credentials. Several of them attacked him mercilessly, in response to which he became even more impassioned but increasingly ineffective in advancing the cause he was championing. In the end, he succeeded only in offending the doctors present and embarrassing himself 3 and Addams by his inexperience and lack of diplomacy. As he later recorded in his memoirs, “The evening was utterly disastrous and after we boarded the street car on the way back to Hull House, Miss Addams was silent and distressed. From that day until the day I left Hull House, the subject of tuberculosis was never again mentioned.”2 Aside from this unfortunate incident, Hunter had a remarkable record of social reform successes in Chicago, especially for a young man still in his twenties. In addition to the campaign against slum housing reported in Tenement Conditions in Chicago, he established the country’s first municipal shelter for homeless people and developed a network of free dental clinics for poor children. Based on these achievements, he was recruited to be the Head Resident (that is, the Director) of the University Settlement in New York City. While Hull House was more famous than the University Settlement, the latter was older and more prestigious, having Rockefellers and Roosevelts among its sponsors and on its governing board. It was there that Hunter met his future bride, Caroline Phelps Stokes, daughter of one of the richest men in America and heiress to a multimillion-dollar share of the Phelps-Stokes-Dodge fortune that flowed in part from substantial mining and railroad interests in the Southwest. Based on his growing reputation as an effective social activist, immediately upon his arrival in New York, Hunter was tapped to head the campaign to end child labor. Under his leadership, the crusade quickly secured passage of comprehensive State legislation banning the employment of children in factories, mines and sweatshops. The laws passed in New York set the benchmarks for the rest of the nation. Shortly thereafter, in 1904, his pioneering, best-selling, and most influential book, Poverty, was published.3 The plight of poor children had been brought shockingly to the public’s attention by the photographs of Jacob Riis,4 Lewis Hine5 and Ernest Poole,6 all of whom were allies of Hunter in the successful fight for effective child labor laws. However, in Poverty, Hunter documented, for the first time, the magnitude of the problem — at least ten million, and perhaps as many as twenty million, Americans did not have enough food, clothing and shelter to maintain them at a minimal level of health, decency and productivity. Furthermore, he identified the causes of this situation and the consequences of allowing it to continue in the midst of the unprecedented wealth of what had come to be called America’s Gilded Age. He also demonstrated convincingly, contrary to 4 prevailing beliefs, that the vast majority of poor people were poor through no fault of their own and that their plight could be prevented by appropriate government intervention. His proposed remedies – banning child labor, enforcing factory and mine safety, providing unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation for industrial injury or death and widows’ pensions — were adopted by many states and localities and foreshadowed the national programs enacted in the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.