Julia C. Lathrop

American policymaker and public administrator

• Born: June 29, 1858
• Birthplace: Rockford, Illinois
• Died: April 15, 1932
• Place of death: Rockford, Illinois

As the first woman to head a federal agency, the U.S. Children’s Bureau, Lathrop identified and shaped significantly twentieth century public policy for children. The Children’s Bureau was the first national government agency in the world created solely to consider the problems and concerns of children.

Early Life

Julia C. Lathrop (LA-thrawp) was the first of five children, two girls and three boys, born to Sarah Adeline Potter Lathrop and William Lathrop. Her mother was graduated as valedictorian from the first Rockford Seminary (later renamed Rockford College) class in 1854. An enthusiastic woman suffrage advocate, Sarah Lathrop also urged the creation and maintenance of art and cultural organizations in her community. William Lathrop was a prominent attorney and one of the founders of the Illinois Republican Party. Elected to the state general assembly and Congress, William Lathrop was a reform-minded politician who supported civil service legislation, woman suffrage, and various social welfare issues.

Julia Lathrop attended her mother’s alma mater for one year before transferring to Vassar College, where she earned a degree in 1880. During the next ten years, Lathrop worked in her father’s law office and as a secretary for two local manufacturing companies. In 1890, she moved to Chicago, where she joined Rockford College graduates Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr at their recently established Hull House settlement. Lathrop remained at Hull House for twenty years.

Life’s Work

Lathrop’s association with Hull House placed her in contact with one of the most significant social reform networks of the Progressive Era. In addition, beginning in 1893, she began volunteer work as a Cook County agent visitor. Assigned to investigate relief applicants living within a ten-block radius of Hull House, Lathrop saw the desperate circumstances of many ordinary people in an increasingly industrial and urban America. Many of her findings were published two years later in Hull-House Maps and Papers (1895). Her work came to the attention of reform governor John P. Altgeld, who appointed Lathrop to the Illinois State Board of Charities in 1893. In this capacity, she visited each of the state’s 102 county “poor farms” and almshouses. Particularly appalled by the grouping of children, the elderly, the mentally ill and disabled, and the sick in the same institutions, Lathrop spent the next twelve years lobbying for the creation of separate facilities for these constituencies. As a result of her efforts and those of other prominent activists, Illinois built new state hospitals for the insane and, in 1899, established the nation’s first juvenile court system in Cook County. In 1901, Lathrop resigned her state appointment in protest when Altgeld’s successor circumvented the board’s authority by giving jobs to political supporters rather than adhering to the state’s civil service laws.

Lathrop believed that the political spoils system resulted in the appointment of poorly qualified staff. From 1903 to 1904, she and another member of the settlement house network, Graham Taylor, devised and implemented courses designed to produce trained individuals for careers in social work. Educators Edith Abbott, Sophonisba Breckinridge, and others later joined Taylor and Lathrop in this effort. Their “college” was incorporated in 1908 as the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy (made part of the University of Chicago in 1920). In the meantime, newly elected Governor Charles Deneen had reappointed Lathrop to the State Board of Charities, where she served from 1905 to 1909. She also became one of the founders of the Illinois Immigrants’ Protective League (1908) and continued to work as a trustee for that organization until her death.

These years also brought Lathrop deeper into child welfare work. In 1909, she attended the first White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children. At that meeting, participants heartily endorsed a proposal to establish a federal children’s bureau. New York’s Henry Street Settlement founder Lillian D. Wald and the National Consumers’ League’s Florence Kelley had first suggested the idea for a federal bureau mandated to investigate and report on American children as early as 1903. In 1905, the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) made the creation of such an agency its highest legislative priority. The measure received little attention, however, until the 1909 White House meeting. Over the next three years, supporters lobbied Congress on the proposal’s behalf.

On April 9, 1912, President William Howard Taft signed legislation establishing the U.S. Children’s Bureau in the Department of Commerce and Labor. The next step was to find a Children’s Bureau chief who would be acceptable to all concerned. Taft asked the NCLC for advice. In response, members of the NCLC board met with President Taft on April 15 and named Lathrop as their first choice. Although she was well known to most social welfare reformers in Illinois, Lathrop was not a nationally recognized children’s rights advocate. NCLC board member Addams lobbied strongly on her behalf. A year earlier, Lathrop had published a report on public schools in the Philippines after completing a trip around the world with her sister Anna Case. This study, combined with the NCLC’s recommendation, Lathrop’s experience in Illinois, and assurances from Attorney General George Wickersham that there was no legal restriction to appointing a woman, led Taft to name her as Children’s Bureau chief on April 17, 1912. Although national woman suffrage was not made a part of the constitution for another eight years, many Americans believed that child welfare work was a proper domain for women. Therefore, Lathrop became the first woman to head a federal bureau.

Under Lathrop’s direction, the Children’s Bureau hired a staff, selected fields of work, and designed and implemented a program for the “whole child.” The U.S. Children’s Bureau was the first national government agency in the world created solely to consider the problems of children. Limited by a paltry appropriation of $25,640 and a staff of only fifteen, Lathrop was determined that financial obstacles should not hinder the bureau’s beginnings. She built on statistical work already completed by other government agencies and supplemented her staff with volunteers from the General Federation of Women’s Clubs and other private organizations. This tactic proved to be a valuable source of public support for the agency.

The chief also made an astute choice of infant mortality as the bureau’s first subject of original investigation. Although its institution was generally a popular idea, some individuals believed that the Children’s Bureau might violate parental and states’ rights as well as serve as a wasteful duplication of federal activities. The American Medical Association complained that the Public Health Service should deal with child health issues. Other critics questioned the suitability of a childless “spinster” for such a job. Sensitive to such criticism, Lathrop realized that the study of infant mortality was probably the least debatable topic under the Children’s Bureau’s mandate. The United States lagged far behind many other countries in the collection and analysis of such data. Furthermore, no branch of the federal government, including the Public Health Service, had investigated why so many babies died before their first birthday.

The Children’s Bureau found that the United States’ 1913 rate of 132 deaths per 1,000 live births ranked behind seven comparable nations. The effort to save babies’ lives became the flagship issue for the Children’s Bureau. The popularity of this work enabled Lathrop and her staff later to address more controversial issues, such as child labor regulation, juvenile delinquency, and mothers’ pensions. Although her political prowess is often overlooked, Lathrop was an astute politician as well as a competent administrator.

During her tenure as chief, the Children’s Bureau’s budget increased tenfold, and the effort to reduce the nation’s high infant mortality rate resulted in passage of the pioneering 1921 Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Act. In addition, the agency was given the responsibility for enforcing the first federal child labor law, the 1916 Keating-Owen Act. Lathrop brought former Hull House resident Grace Abbott to Washington to head the bureau’s Child Labor Division. Although the Supreme Court declared the Keating-Owen law unconstitutional in 1918, this legislation and the Sheppard-Towner Act served as blueprints for the children’s programs included in the 1935 Social Security Act and the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act. Thousands of mothers wrote the bureau for advice, and the chief and her staff carefully answered every letter. Overall, Lathrop’s strategy firmly established the Children’s Bureau as the major source of information and advocate for America’s children. By 1921, Lathrop was one of the most popular and well-known federal bureaucrats. Her election to presidency of the National Council of Social Work in 1918 also shows her status as a political insider who had contacts with a vast reform network. Confident that the Children’s Bureau was a permanent part of the federal bureaucracy, Lathrop resigned as Children’s Bureau chief in August, 1921. Ill with a hyperthyroid condition but not wanting to jeopardize the pattern of work she had established, Lathrop convinced President Warren G. Harding to appoint Abbott as her successor.

For the remainder of her life, Lathrop lived in Rockford with her sister. During these years, she remained active and served as president of the Illinois League of Women Voters (1922-1924), as an assessor for the League of Nations’ Child Welfare Committee (1925-1931), and as an adviser to a presidential committee examining conditions at Ellis Island (1925), and she continued to work for the rights of minors. Two months before her death, Lathrop orchestrated a campaign to keep Russell Robert McWilliams, a seventeen-year-old Rockford boy convicted of killing a motorman, from execution under Illinois’s death penalty. McWilliams was granted a reprieve after Lathrop’s death. Lathrop died in Rockford on April 15, 1932, at the age of seventy-three.

Significance

Although Lathrop never married or had children of her own, her legacy is most important in the field of child welfare. In its first decade of work, the U.S. Children’s Bureau identified major issues and designed the blueprint according to which federal child welfare policy has developed. Furthermore, even though she did not seek the appointment of chief and actually had little to do with the effort to establish the bureau, Lathrop’s acceptance of the job and the strategy she implemented secured a role for women in child welfare policy development and implementation. Her appointment also set a precedent that was not broken until President Richard M. Nixon appointed the Children’s Bureau’s first male chief in 1973.

Although Lathrop’s “whole child” philosophy did not survive federal restructuring in 1946, which reduced the agency’s influence, the Children’s Bureau’s first decades of work highlighted the vulnerability of children and opened public debate on how best to preserve “a right to childhood.” Lathrop’s ability to act as “statesman” as well as politician made her a successful bureaucrat who helped to legitimize the notion that the federal government’s responsibilities include the welfare of its youngest citizens.

Bibliography

Addams, Jane. My Friend, Julia Lathrop. New York: Macmillan, 1935. A biography of Lathrop that focuses on her life to 1912.

Ladd-Taylor, Molly. Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890-1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. This work underscores the role of women in the development of the American social welfare system and includes a discussion of Lathrop’s part in this process.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. Raising a Baby the Government Way: Mothers’ Letters to the Children’s Bureau, 1915-1932. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986. An edited collection of letters sent to the U.S. Children’s Bureau asking for advice or other assistance. Includes some of Lathrop’s responses and an overview of the bureau’s early work.

Lathrop, Julia, et al. The Child, the Clinic, and the Court: A Group of Papers by Jane Addams, C. Judson Herrick, A. L. Jacoby, and Others. New York: New Republic, 1927. An excellent source of Lathrop’s opinions concerning the role of the state in child welfare.

Lindenmeyer, Kristie. A Right to Childhood: The U.S. Children’s Bureau and Child Welfare, 1912-1946. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Lathrop figures prominently in this history of the federal agency she headed.

Meckel, Richard A.“Save the Babies”: American Public Health Reform and the Prevention of Infant Mortality, 1850-1929. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. While focusing on the national effort to reduce infant mortality, this work includes an examination of the Children’s Bureau’s role in the effort to save babies’ lives.

Muncy, Robyn. Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. An important work examining how Lathrop and Grace Abbott worked to keep child welfare policy as a proper domain for women.

Parker, Jacqueline K., and Edward M. Carpenter. “Julia Lathrop and the Children’s Bureau: The Emergence of an Institution.” Social Service Review 55 (March, 1981): 60-77. An excellent brief overview of the Children’s Bureau and its work under Lathrop’s tenure.

Stivers, Camilla. “Unfreezing the Progressive Era: The Story of Julia Lathrop.” Administrative Theory and Praxis 24, no. 3 (September, 2002): 532. Discussion of Lathrop in relation to the Progressive movement, including information about her work at Hull House and with the Children’s Bureau.