New Jersey Emergency Relief Administration Training Unit Records

According to the Social Research Council of the federal Committee on Social Security, the New Jersey Emergency Relief Administration faced an enormous task when it was organized in 1931. In 1929, the average New Jerseyan's income began to fall precipitously, from a pre-depression $839 per year to $429 per year in 1933. Far from affecting only the marginally poor or chronically indigent, 45 percent of relief recipients had been earning more than $1,500 per year, a modest to comfortable living in 1929. In the early years of the Depression, responsibility for relief efforts was relegated to municipalities, an arrangement seen to be workable since, in 1925, less than one percent (25,000 people) of the New Jersey population were on relief. Through the early 1930s, however, this number skyrocketed. New Jersey provided the additional challenges of being both densely populated and geographically diverse. When it was clear that the cities were unable to cope with the demand for aid, a special session of the New Jersey legislature created the New Jersey Emergency Relief Administration (NJERA), allocating it ten million dollars to repay the municipalities to retain supervisory control over relief to long as it contributed to relief coasts, by December of 1933. 160 cities, populated by almost half the people in New Jersey, ceded administrative authority to the state. The state was wholly unprepared to assume these massive relief needs and relied on 5,000 volunteers to act as family visitors. When this arrangement failed, the volunteers were replaced by state workers, whose ranks swelled from 1,400 in July 1933 to 5,800 in July 1935(1)

Because of the relatively high number of trained social workers in the state, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration determined that New Jersey was capable of organizing and funding its own training program. Critical in preparing state workers for the social, financial, administrative, and supervisory responsibilities they would encounter as NJERA workers were the variety of orientations, seminars and courses offered to staff through the Training Section of the Family Service Division of NJERA. The training effort of the New Jersey Emergency Relief Administration began in November 1933 with the appointment of Dr. Emma Schreiber as State Director of training activities. An important circumstance of the NJERA's and the training program's development was that the original legislation that created the NJERA only mandated its existence for one year, thus precluding any long-tern planning. Even though a later law provided for NJERA for three years, its training programs would continue to reflect the makeshift character of NJERA itself. Through 1935, the leadership, name, and internal organization of the training effort would change continually. In May 1934 Dr. Schreiber resigned and Jessie P. Condit assumed the position of Director of Training. When Condit was called to head the Family Service Division of NJERA in the summer of 1934, Mary F. Bogue became Manager of the Training Section.

NJERA experimented with a variety of training environments, methods, syllabi, case loads, and class sizes in trying to determine the most thorough and cost-effective was of preparing staff. Though $2,000 was allocated in 1934 for half and full scholarships for credit courses at Rutgers University and Dana College, it was found that nearly one-third of the students failed to earn a passing grade. In response, Mary Bogue began to organize localized, internally conducted training. One effort was to instruct new workers in the rural counties of New Jersey, and to this end Helen K. Hyatt and Helen Robinson were sent to different county relief offices from the fall of 1934 through 1935. More than 700 NJERA workers attended these courses, which generally met once a week and lasted for twelve weeks. In June 1934, a Training Center with a separate director, Mary Gardner, was established in the local Emergency Relief office in East Orange, in order to provide supervised fieldwork for NJERA trainees. The Training Center also provided month-long institutes for students with "potential leadership ability." For these programs, guest lecturers were often invited to speak. Committee groups of students were also formed to study NJERA administrative problems such as social work ethics and job qualifications for NJERA home visitors. (2)

Perhaps the most successful venture, a "Training Unit," combined formal schooling, professional involvement and case work in a five-month program for four promising NJERA caseworkers. The students attended courses at the New York School of Social Work and carried 10 to 15 cases at the Training Center in East Orange, supervised there by Magdalen Peter. The Training Unit was also encouraged to participate in professional networks through assigned readings from periodicals and newsletters, through group conferences, and though attendance at state or national institutes such as the National Conference of Social Work. To this nucleus of highly motivated and trained students were added two other small groups, one in April of 1935 and the other in July, each sharing the field experience of the New York School students for three months. Leaders of the NJERA training program would eventually promote the instruction of small groups of senior case workers and supervisors, such as in the Training Unit, "in line for advancement in their own organizations." It was hoped that instructing such natural leaders would "equip them to do a better job as supervisors of small groups of workers, and to interpret more intelligently to their own units and to the community the objectives of the Emergency Relief Administration." (3)

In 1936, the federal government stopped subsidizing state relief administrations and heightened the priority of categorical grants and work projects such as the Civilian Conservation Corps. Coordinating the efforts between localities and the federal government became more critical than the state's role in organizing local relief efforts. This trend, coupled with the inability of the New Jersey legislature to agree on a source of funding for continued NJERA, led to the dissolution of the Emergency Relief Administration by legislative enactment in July of 1936. (4)

(1) Douglass H. MacNeil's Seven Years of Unemployment Relief in New Jersey, 1930-1936, pages 13-56, 265. (2) Mary Bogue, report to Mrs. Winthrop D. Lane, Manager of the Welfare division of the NJERA, July 10, 1935. (3) Mary Bogue, "Report to Mr. Compton on the State Training Program," 1934. (4) Manual of the Legislature of New Jersey, 1936, page 576.