Social Conferees

When the National Conference of Social Workers at Cleveland (TIME June 7) in final session chose heavybrowed, swift-talking, intellectual Dr. John Augustus Lapp of Chicago as president, there was some surprise in non-professional circles, for Dr. Lapp is a Roman Catholic.*

He is the foremost Catholic layman engaged in social service work, is co-director with Father John A. Ryan of Washington in the social action department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference. His attitude toward society is sincerely catholic; that is, he believes: "The one fundamental base upon which Catholic charities are built is the sacredness of the individual. ... In Catholic philosophy the individual precedes all social organization. . . . The second great foundation block... is the family. . . . The third, solicitude for the poor and the lowly . . . the protection of labor, the promotion of public health and morals."

Catholic he is, but no docile follower of priestly leadership, especially when that leadership wanders from strictly religious confines. At this conference the delegates remembered how, recently, William Cardinal O'Connell, archbishop of Boston, and other prelates fought against child labor laws. Dr. Lapp stepped before the Cleveland delegates and astounded them by stating that he was not only for child labor laws, but was fighting for them. As if released by triggered springs, the conferees pounded their hands in applause.

But he was not through. Cardinals, archbishops, bishops, monsignori, priests and brothers have been favoring modifications of prohibition laws, but he is positively in favor of the most exacting prohibition, of the complete Volstead law, and of the sternest enforcement. The startled conference almost went into a frenzy of delight.

In new President Lapp, the social workers have a man agreeing with their intentions and at the same time one more frank than they dare be about the intricate organization of their activities. Time was, he said, when the idealism of social work was touted everywhere. Girls eager for self-sacrifice (and to earn an independent living) went out to wrestle with the stubbornness of the downtrodden. Many of these became opportunists, whined lucratively to the "nice ladies." Social service work became a mess that had to be straightened out by organization. Yet the once eager girls, stultified and stultifying (there are very, very few Jane Addamses in social service work) over their case records and reports, live on the memories of their ideals, speak loudly about social amelioration, whisper softly about organization.

Dr. Lapp speaks loudly and authoritatively on organization. He knows how to bring it about. And after all, the real effects of such a national social service conference as ended last week, are to stimulate methods of organizing the activities of the loosely cooperating bodies and to prevent those bodies from intruding into one another's fields.

*Not the first Catholic to hold this office. The Rt. Rev. Msgr. Francis H. Gavisk of Indianapolis preceded him in 1910 ; Thomas Mulry of Manhattan in 1906.