THE SALVATION ARMY— A CRITICISM

C. C. Carstens, Ph.D., Secretary, Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children
November 1, 1907

The extraordinary development of the Salvation Army during the forty years of its existence, not alone in England and the United States, but in many other countries of the civilized world, has stamped it in the minds of a majority of people as a successful enterprise whose policies have been justified by its widespread success and whose work does not, for that very reason, require the careful scrutiny to which other charities should be subjected. How far this popular attitude is due to the worship of success and how far to the attitude of the Salvation Army's officers it is difficult to determine. It is doubtless true, however, that the Salvation Army fosters the impression that this is a different kind of philanthropy to which the usual tests should not apply.

It is the purpose of this paper to question the wisdom of this attitude on the part of the giving public toward the work of the Salvation Army, and to point out certain tests which may very well be applied to any large charitable enterprise and by which the success of the Salvation Army also should be measured.

Responsibility or the soul's welfare

The contributors, subscribers, or donors to any charity, in short, that part of our community by means of whose gifts an enterprise continues to exist and to grow, and which in the case of the Salvation Army has caused it to grow to national and international dimensions, have a responsibility in any philanthropic undertaking which but few of the donors realize. The donor is not swayed as much as in times past with the benefit he himself derives, but even now his motives are not singly for the interest of the charitable beneficiary; he still considers his own interest or his soul's welfare. This generation has, however, made great progress in applying tests to determine what benefits will result, and it has learned to keep such control of many an enterprise as will ensure its careful administration and adaptation to the needs of the day. In the ultimate analysis the donors to the Salvation Army must get much of the credit for the good results which General Booth's family has been able to accomplish with the funds placed at their disposal, and likewise must, to a considerable extent, be held responsible for any evils that may have resulted or for their failure to place their money in other hands where it might have done even more good.

Perhaps a philanthropist is still entitled to the privilege of establishing such an enterprise as is dear to his heart and of lavishing upon it his thousands or millions granting that it is clearly for a moral purpose, although an increasingly large number of thinking men and women would place even such individual enterprises under the supervision of a governmental agency. The giving public is, however, less and less ready to give large funds unless they can be placed in the hands of trustees who work without pay and who give an account of their stewardship to their constituency every year in such terms as will make it clear to the contributors where the enterprise stands.

Safeguards for philanthropy

To what extent does the Salvation Army answer these simple safeguards? The work of the Salvation Army in the United States is carried on through three distinct corporations: — The Salvation Army, incorporated under the laws of the State of New York, May 12, 1899 ; The Salvation Army Industrial Homes Company, also incorporated in 1899; and The Reliance Trading Company, incor- porated November 29, 1902.

The organization of the Salvation Army is as follows: Miss Booth is President ; William Peart is Vice-President ; William Con- rad Hicks, Treasurer ; Gustav H. Reinhardsen, Secretary ; Madison J. H. Ferris, Legal Secretary. The directors are the above-named officers with the exception of George A. Kilbey, who is substituted in the place of Mr. Reinhardsen. This is then clearly not a board of trustees in the usually accepted meaning of the word in charitable enterprises but more like a board of directors of a financial corpo- ration, each director and officer being an employee of the company. The Salvation Army Industrial Homes Company and the Reliance Trading Company are New Jersey corporations, of both of which Miss Evangeline Booth, Commander of the Salvation Army, is President, and Ransom Caygill, a capitalist, who is not officially connected with the Salvation Army, is treasurer and busi- ness manager. A number of the directors of the Salvation Army are also said to hold a considerable amount of preferred stock of their business philanthropies.

Profits over charity

Donors of old clothes, shoes, furniture, magazines, newspapers and books, give them not to the Salvation Army but to a corpo- ration which pays six per cent dividends on preferred stock guar- anteed by the Salvation Army. Housewives have generally sup- posed that the salvage as far as it could be used went direct to the poor instead of being sold for a profit, and that magazines and newspapers and books were distributed to hospitals, prisons and the homes of the poor instead of being baled for profit to pay interest on a loan with which to finance the corporations. Likewise, the profits from the sale of the "War Cry" and the "Post" fountain pens go not to the Salvation Army, but to the Reliance Trading Company. In England a much more critical attitude has been taken on the part of the general public toward these business philanthropies, and in well-informed circles the financial policy of the Salvation Army has been watched with considerable concern. Under the title of "The High Finance of Salvationism," Mr. Manson, in his recent book, 1 gives a chapter of interesting information regarding the Army's financial history during the last twenty years. The earliest large enterprise of its business philanthropies was the Salvation Army Building Association, Limited, formed in 1884. Its object was principally the negotiation of loans to advance the aims and objects of the Salvation Army. The management of the enterprise re- mained independent of the Army, and on this account, it seems, trouble arose which led to its liquidation. "The directors were not willing to lend their shareholders' money to the Army on the conditions as to interest or security to which the Army might have been prepared to agree."

In "Darkest England," General Booth had among other plans proposed the founding of a poor man's bank, but when the Reliance Bank, Limited, was founded, the original design of lending money to the "little" man had become altered to that of borrowing money from him. The bank lends money to the Army. In its balance sheet for March 31, 1904, one-third of its apparent assets consisted of "loans on mortgage of Salvation Army house, shop and hall property."

The arrangement then amounts to this: General Booth is sub- stantially the Reliance Bank, Ltd. As banker he borrows money from the public and lends a large proportion of it to himself as general of his religious organization; as general he receives from public contributions to his corps, money wherewith to pay himself interest in the capacity of lender, and it is this money which enables him to pay his investors their interest at the starting point.

Financial struggles

The bank has not been able to find enough capital for the Army, so the Salvation Army Assurance Society, Limited, was incorporated. The bankers of this society are the Reliance Bank, Limited, which again is General Booth. About five-sixths of the society's 293,108 policies in force in 1903 were industrial and 54 per cent of its premium income was swallowed up in management expenses and agents' commissions. As long as investors keep their confidence in business philanthropies that maintain no safeguards but the personal honesty of General Booth and his associates and successors, the enterprises may remain prosperous. But will this confidence last?

The Salvation Army is apparently as much a church denomina- tion as the Methodist Episcopal Church, the Church of Christ, Scientist or Dowieism, with whose doctrine of faith-healing General Booth's Church has much in common. There is this important dis- tinction that the Salvation Army members do not bear the total ex- pense of its maintenance, and therefore the general public is asked to contribute. This "people's church" has a religious and social pro- gramme. By means of the latter it has succeeded in interesting a large segment of every other church denomination, and has ob- tained large funds, part of which are used in the furtherance of its religious plans with which, however, many of its largest donors have little or no sympathy.

The amount of money expended in the religious work of the Army in the United Kingdom during the last fifteen years is esti- mated at $30,000,000 while only about $2,500,000 has been expended upon social work, a ratio of twelve to one. If an accu- rate statement of each of the two departments of the Army's work could be made, and an accounting for moneys expended in each department could be rendered, any unfair criticism that may now be current regarding the use of the funds gained by means of the "social" appeal, would disappear. So far the public have not been given the proper means of judging of the efficacy of the organiza- tion's work in proportion to its cost, and therefore the question naturally arises whether the Army's hesitation to give accurate figures is a necessary part of its plans.

Annual reports

For some years the Salvation Army has published "annual statements" of its three corporations. These contain balance sheets of the various departments of the New York and Chicago head- quarters. Annual statements for 1906 were audited by The Audit Company of New York City, 43 Cedar Street, and mark a large advance over those of previous years. They are, however, but a fragment of what the public should have. They give even those accustomed to examine financial reports but a slight notion of what has been done during the year with the money that has flowed into its treasury, and they are quite unintelligible to the average person who may get a chance to see them. No annual report containing an account of the work the Army has accomplished during the twelvemonth is published. No detailed statement of the contribu- tors and the amounts of their contributions or of the detailed expenditures, is made public. To the large majority of the intelli- gent public, the "annual statements," with their formidable array of figures serve but to hide the true state of affairs of the Army.

The nearest approach to an "annual report" is a little pamphlet called "Where the Shadows Lengthen," published by the Reliance Trading Company in 1907. This contains various groups of statis- tics, but, with the exception of the Prison Gate Mission, nowhere tells the period to which these statistics apply. If the Salvation Army is not willing to state with accuracy the time during which this work has been done, can it blame the public if the reliability of its figures is questioned?

Important as an adequate and intelligent statement of its work and an annual statistical and financial report is, the Salvation Army should, in the second place, be judged as other enterprises are judged, by the purposes it is aiming to accomplish and the measure of its success in carrying them out.

Goals and purpose

What and how much is the Salvation Army actually doing with the human beings for whose benefit it was called into existence? As before referred to, it has two aims, to reach both body and soul. Its doctrine of salvation promulgated in large measure in its daily meetings is, however, not the basis of its appeal to the general public, but rather its social work, and it is because of the Salvation Army's social efficiency that large and small contributions come to its support from outside of its own ranks.

It is not an easy task to get a correct estimate of the work of any large enterprise even where careful reports are available, but in the case of the Salvation Army, with the divergent character of its work in different places, its inadequate statement of results and its unsatisfactory statistics, this is almost impossible. But one can certainly not be blamed for taking a critical attitude toward an enterprise which has stood so much in a class by itself.

We shall prefer to attribute the establishment of the rather shaky business philanthropies and the weaknesses in administration to the necessity of borrowing large lump sums for which General Booth believed the public would furnish the interest through their annual contributions but which he could not hope to obtain as gifts. General Booth undertook a large scheme and his ambitions fostered by the devotion of his staff officers and many of the rank and file outran his resources.

It is, however, reasonable to suppose that a "people's church" like the Salvation Army has reached its position of confidence which enables it to appeal successfully year after year without making full, accurate and intelligent accounting, because it has also on the credit side of its ledger a large measure of beneficent, religious and social work which has satisfied the community's rough-and-ready test in individual cases. The community has learned that while possi- bly the "Salvation lassie" could not boast of college training or foreign travel, her garb was the symbol of a life of simplicity and devotion; it has learned that the enthusiasm and self-sacrifice and devotion of its men and women, with an optimism that overcomes obstacles, often led them into hovel, gutter or brothel from which others would hold aloof, but from which they would now and then win back some sinking soul to decency and self-respect. Some of its rescue homes for women are among the most effective, and some of its lodging houses for men are among the best that can be found in their class.

But while we give credit for a large measure of self-sacrificing work, is it unfair to inquire what the Salvation Army is doing with a group of more or less clearly defined social tasks, or if its activities have not run in these channels, to consider what other social tasks it has set itself to do.