Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor
The Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (AICP) was a charitable organization in New York City, established in 1843 and incorporated in 1848 with the aim of helping the deserving poor and providing for their moral uplift. The Association was one of the most active and innovative charity organizations in New York, pioneering many private-public partnerships in education, healthcare and social services.
The AICP was established in 1843 as an offshoot of the New York City Mission Society due to the stress put on that organization's charitable activities as a result of the Panic of 1837 and the depression which followed. It pre-dated other well-known charitable organizations such as the Children's Aid Society, founded in 1854, the State Charities Aid Association (1872) and the Charity Organization Society (1884). The directors of the new charity, made up of some of the city's richest people, believed that the existence of the city's apparently permanent indigent population was not due to economic conditions or adversity, but instead could be best explained by some fault in the poor themselves, which the AICP was determined to fix. The organization was consistently opposed to "gratuitous charity", meaning charity efforts which were not tied to moral reformation, such as free soup kitchens and missions which provided shelter to all without regard to their character. It particularly disdained governmental efforts to alleviate the plight of the poor, as opposed the work of private agencies such as itself, although it was convinced to accept large amounts of money from the city after 1876, as one of the favored organizations chosen as a conduit for governmental largesse.
Robert Milham Hartley, formerly secretary of the New-York City Temperance Society for 10 years, was chosen as the AICP's first executive secretary. Hartley, using the teachings of Thomas Chalmers, Joseph Tuckerman, and French philanthropist Joseph Marie, Baron de Gerando, played a key role in establishing the Association, and was instrumental in demonstrating a connection between overcrowding and unsanitary conditions and mortality. Hartley proposed to solve the problem of poverty by encouraging poor people to move to the country; “Escape then from the city . . . for escape is your only recourse against the terrible ills of beggary; and the further you go, the better.” Hartley also exposed the unsanitary practices of the “swill milk” system in a publication called An Historical, Scientific and Practical Essay on Milk as an Article of Human Sustenance. He was the first American to make a sustained argument that milk was the perfect food. By the early 1850s, the AICP was the most influential charity in New York, and its program was soon imitated in many other American cities. The association stressed character building as a way to end poverty, and took steps to insure that only the "deserving" poor received charity: idlers, malingerers and vagrants were to be sent to workhouses to do hard labor, while the depraved and debased were to be locked up in penitentiaries was a warning to others not to follow their path. Volunteers, usually middle-class Protestant laypersons, worked to get poor people to abstain from alcohol, become more self-disciplined, and acquire the work ethic. At first, the Association employed only male "visitors", but after Hartley's retirement in 1876, it became the first charitable organization to use women for this task as well, beginning in 1879.
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