Mrs. Cook. No, sir.

Senator DONNELL. Is it about 40 million mothers in the country, as you understand?

Mrs. Cook. I believe that the figure is something like that.

Senator DONNELL. I am mistaken about that; it is 3 million mothers and 40 million children.

Mrs. Cook. Yes, sir.

Senator DONNELL. One final question, and that is purely on a matter of draftsmanship of the bill, and as to what it actually means. On page 4 in providing what the State plan must provide, it is stated that

it shall provide that as services and facilities are furnished under the plan they shall be available to all mothers and children in the State or locality who elect to participate in the benefits of the program—

and that raises the question at once as to whether a child can make any election.

In the first place, the legal question is that a minor cannot make any election, and in the second place, the practical question is, let us say, as to a child of very tender years, whether or not this language obligates the child, himself, to make an election, whether it shall be made by guardians, or by the parents, or in the case of orphans, children without guardians, how the child's election shall be made.

Have you given consideration as to whether or not there should be an amendment as to who shall make this election for the children? Mrs. Cook. I understood it to mean that the State or the locality did the electing, and not the mothers or the children.

Senator DONNELL. I do not think so, because the word used is "who" and not "which," it says:

* they shall be available to all mothers and children in the State or locality who elect to participate in the benefits of the program.

As to those entitled to receive those benefits, I am wondering if you think there should be some provision in the bill which would clarify the method of election by a minor child.

Senator PEPPER. Would not that be already provided by law, that legally a child cannot make an election except through his guardian or through his parents, and would it not mean that they shall be elected in the same manner provided by law?

Senator DONNELL. I am not sure, Senator, that there is any power in the child to make an election, even through a guardian. That is to say, the election would be made by the guardian.

Mrs. Cook. I think possibly we might refer to immunization pro

grams.

In our work, in our Summer Round-Up, we encourage parents to have their children immunized for diphtheria. It is required by State law-I think, in almost all of the States, to have inoculations for smallpox, but not for diphtheria.

We promote this program, but the immunization cannot be effected unless the parents sign that they are willing.

Senator DONNELL. Would you tell us, please, where your home is, and with what particular local branch of the National Congress of Parents and Teachers you are connected?

Mrs. Cook. I live in Indian Head, Md., 40 miles south of here, and I am a member of the Indian Head School Parent-Teacher Association, a local unit of the Maryland Congress of Parents and Teachers. Senator DONNELL. Are there any further questions?

(No response.)

Senator PEPPER. Thank you very much, Mrs. Cook.

We appreciate your coming here. All of us commend you for the work that the parent-teacher organizations are doing all over the country.

Mr. Russell Ballard, of the Hull House, Chicago, we will be happy to hear from you.

STATEMENT OF RUSSELL W. BALLARD, DIRECTOR, HULL HOUSE, CHICAGO, ILL.

Mr. BALLARD. Senator Pepper, Miss Lillie Peck, secretary of the National Federation of Settlements, regrets her inability to be here and has asked that I represent the board of trustees, and I am also here representing the Chicago Federation of Settlements and Neighborhood Houses.

I am also here representing a lot of children throughout the Nation who cannot speak for themselves.

I have worked with a great many children.

After I finished with soldiering, Senator Fulbright, in your State, during the last war, I came into an industrial community and worked in this community with a large number of children before there were any local services as were provided after the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935, and I want to make some observations, before and after, we had the services from the Children's Bureau at the Federal level, and a county welfare unit in which I served for 5 years.

I am profoundly interested in the individual child and his satisfactory adjustment to society and for this reason I appear before this committee representing the board of directors of the National Federation of Settlements and the Chicago Federation of Settlements and Neighborhood Houses in support of S. 1318. I shall address myself, primarily, to title III of this act, Child Welfare Services.

The war years have focused national attention upon the antisocial behavior of youth. The causes, prevention, and treatment of juvenile delinquency have been given much consideration. I am so greatly interested in preventing failures among youth that I consider it a privilege to speak in behalf of legislation which will contribute greatly to stabilizing the lives of dependent and neglected children, and thus become, as I think this law will, an effective instrument in prevention. I lived 20 years in an industrial community and reared my family among neighbors of different cultural backgrounds.

During this time, my work in public education for 15 years, in public welfare for 5 years in a local county has brought me in touch with large numbers of children.

For 11 years, as a school principal, I was associated daily with some 1,200 children, who, for the most part, came from families of low income. The physical and emotional problems of children and prob

lems arising in the home and in the community are observable in the classroom.

During these 11 years, we met with many frustrations because social services were not available in a modern up-to-date American com munity, nor were there financial resources, often so important in planning for the protection and care of children in need.

There were no child-welfare services, no foster-home program, and no child-guidance clinic. The most serious cases of dependency and neglect were sent to institutions, while the less serious too frequently became involved in delinquent behavior. The probation service then was disgracefully ineffective, and the delinquent boy was committed to an institution because there were no other treatment facilities available.

The school knew that the learning and conduct of 9-year-old Tom, an intelligent third-grade boy, was unsatisfactory because the boy had never recovered from the emotional shock of seeing his father kill his mother with a poker and then commit suicide. The aged grandparents were unable to cope with Tom and his two brothers. If there had been trained intelligence available to plan the care of Tom in those early years in a suitable, substitute home, I am convinced, in the light of my later experience, that Tom would have escaped institutional commitment.

Since the Federal Social Security Act was passed in 1935, allotting a limited fund to the Children's Bureau to assist in raising the standards of child care, professional services for children have been provided in many counties in America not resistive to social change.

Under title V, part 3 of the act, the Children's Bureau has demonstrated the possibilities for better service to children when there is Federal, State, and local cooperation in developing these services. However, at this late date, in only 500 counties in America is there available so much as one child-welfare worker, paid from public funds, who is devoting full time to supervising children in need or assisting the court which reaches out to protect them.

I tell you, it is frustrating and disquieting to be faced daily with serious problems of children and be unable to do anything about them because resources for care and social treatment are unavailable.

What could be done for the 12-year-old boy with the highest intelligence among 240 sixth-grade children who cried whenever he was called upon to recite before a class? There was no child-guidance clinic to help isolate the primary cause of the difficulty of which crying was only a symptom.

I want to pass in review before you for a moment, Charlie and Joe. Charlie and Joe were not dots on a statistical chart indicating rates of delinquency. They were neglected boys who entered the Michigan City Penitentiary in 1929, together with older boys, to serve a life sentence for murder. Their homes were in my immediate neighborhood. One should earlier have been separated from his drunken parents; the other should have been removed from the one-room shack constructed by the father before he contracted tuberculosis, and, as Charlie says, "He sat in the house for 9 years and spit blood."

My letter to the chief probation officer-selected not on a basis of merit-recommending that Joe be sent to an institution to protect him from his parents, went unheeded, and they were committed at 14 and 15 years of age. There was no where else to turn since the Social Se

curity Act was yet to be enacted, and the Federal Children's Bureau was without authority and without funds to improve the standards of child care in my community.

In 1936, after the Indiana Welfare Act was passed to conform with the provisions of the Federal Social Security Act, it was my privilege to direct the organization of a local county welfare unit. It was then I learned about title V of this act and the appropriation of $1,500,000 to provide help and guidance to the States and local communities and I needed guidance as a local county welfare administrator. With the cooperation and supervision of the Children's Bureau in Washington and the children's division of the Indiana State Department of Public Welfare, it was possible to organize a county children's Bureau and to develop and expand the services to dependent and neglected children and children in danger of becoming delinquent. In developing local child-welfare services, the best staff available was assembled, but it was the supervision that I got from the upper levels of government that set us on our way.

Our county children's bureau, in 1939, permitted the use of local funds to send 400 boys and girls of our county through high school, who could not otherwise have gone, and I am interested in equalizing educational opportunity as well as opportunity for medical care. They had become ineligible for aid to dependent children at age 16. It was recognized that without help and guidance in planning, and without decent clothes and sufficient food, these young people with an excellent educational prognosis would have dropped out of school; and doubtless some of them would have taken to the highways. It was because most of our counties failed to provide adequate services that many immature girls from poor homes found their way to army camp communities during the war years.

This county children's bureau, because of the generosity of an enlightened and socially conscious public, provided the service and the funds that helped to bridge the gap from youth to maturity and, at the same time, to equalize educational opportunity for these deprived youth.

Incidentally, these 16-year old boys, in 1939, were kept in their own homes and helped through high school, were psychologically better prepared to serve their country in the crisis which was to follow so shortly. A democracy which meets the needs of its people is secure, whether in peace or war.

You, gentlemen, who have the responsibility for enacting social legislation and appropriating money to implement a program so necessary to the betterment of our children, are denied, I regret to say, the opportunity to observe what your efforts means to a particular child. It is a great Government, and one worth fighting for and fighting to preserve, that makes it possible for a county child-welfare visitor to figuratively reach down into the Public Treasury and lay her hand on a child losing eyesight and take him to an eye specialist so that he might see again.

We want this service for our own children and we are uncomfortable so long as any child in any county in America is hurt by his social environment and denied his equal chance.

I am convinced that in spite of the multiplicity of your responsibilities you will not lose sight of the benefits to the individual child of an expanded child-welfare program encompassed in S. 1318.

In addressing myself to this committee which has under consideration legislation so far-reaching in its implications, I am trying to compare the services available before and after 1936.

I would remind you that title V of the Social Security Act, in our experience, provided the stimulus for the establishment in our county of the first full-time completely staffed child-guidance clinic under the supervision of the county children's bureau.

It then became possible to study the causes that led up to a boy's stealing or to other manifestations of antisocial behavior. Once causes were isolated, we could help the boy intelligently. When a child had to come before the juvenile court, the judge welcomed pertinent and important information from the clinic which helped him in reaching a decision.

Now, it might not have helped, though I believe that it would, if the facility of a child-guidance clinic had been available in those earlier years to study the difficulties which confronted my two schoolboys, Charlie and Joe, who were committed to the penitentiary. Their prison records were excellent, and, after 15 years, they were released for supervision.

As I came to learn of the value of child-welfare services in subsequent years, I have wished to God many times that funds and professional services might have been available for me to serve these boys, whose needs I recognized.

Again, title V of the Social Security Act stimulated the Indiana Welfare Act of 1936, which gave to the children's division of the State welfare department, in addition to other responsibilities, the authority to license public and private child-caring institutions which conform to proper standards.

Under this authority one institution was closed in Indiana because the management was more interested in saving money than in saving children. We had the responsibility of making other plans for a number of children who were wards of the department. In those instances where children could not be reunited with their families, foster homes were provided. There is never enough love to go around in institutions, and foster-home care pays great social dividends.

A brother and sister, aged 13 and 15, had spent too many years neglected in this particular institution before we had a county welfare department.

The county could pay for their food and clothing but failed, as do so many counties today, to provide a friendly understanding social worker who will see that children removed from their community are not forgotten. Just keeping children in an institution will not do any good, unless they are prepared to reenter the community and unless the community is prepared to receive them.

These two children had no recollection of their parents or relatives, but were under the impression that they were of Italian extraction. Insufficient records revealed that this fact was true, and that the deceased parents were of Catholic religion.

The brother and sister had never known anything about Catholic religion, and they were placed in a Catholic home and introduced to the faith of their parents for the first time.

Two years after removal from the institution, although both children had made progress, the boy told me that he was going to "take