The period after 1870 through the middle of the 1920s, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, coincided with the mass migration of Jews to the United States. Nearly three million Jews, primarily from eastern Europe, overwhelmed the numerically small Jewish community already resident in America. Of the Jews who left Europe in those years, approximately 85 percent opted for the United States, a society that took some of its basic characteristics from the particular developments of this transitional historical period. This essay focuses on five aspects of Gilded Age and Progressive Era America and their impact on the Jews. These features of American society both stimulated the mass migration and made possible a relatively harmonious, although complicated, integration. Those forces included the broader contours of immigration, the nation's obsession with race, its vast industrial and economic expansion, its valorization of religion, and its two-party system in which neither the Democrats or the Republicans had any stake in demonizing the growing number of Jewish voters.

In 1877, a Congregational pastor started a modest effort to send New York City tenement children on two-week summer vacations in country homes. The pastor's Fresh Air Fund grew, in the following decades, into a hugely popular program and a celebrated cause. The charity thrived in part because its simple project adapted well to several different reform environments. The fund made a place for itself in the evangelical child-saving efforts of the Gilded Age, the civic-minded reforms of the Progressive Era, and the more individualistic pursuits of the 1920s. In each era, fund leaders cast country vacations as simple means to address middle-class New Yorkers' fears about their changing city, from the influx of immigrants to the spread of disease to rising class tensions.

Tracking the Fresh Air Fund over fifty years reveals the sea changes in child-welfare work between 1877 and 1927, but it also calls attention to continuities often overlooked in the history of child welfare. Throughout the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the fund tapped supporters' constant and deep-seated beliefs in children's potential, the restorative power of the outdoors, and a child's right to play.

In the early twentieth century, amid heightening industrial tensions, many large corporations introduced welfare work to co-opt their employees' loyalties and pacify public anger. Many of the techniques and ideas of what became known as “welfare capitalism” were adapted from charity aid and settlement work. Over time, however, labor relations moved from being identified as a social reform issue—bound up with other issues on which the new profession of social work concentrated—to a business management prerogative. This article argues that professionalization played a significant role in these developments. Philanthropic reformers initially claimed welfare work as part of their professional agenda. However, in the second decade of the century, the social work profession began to narrow its field of operations. As social work's ambivalent claims on the factory and shop floor atrophied, business schools were introducing elements of industrial social work into their new management curriculums. The burgeoning field of professional labor management incorporated welfare work as one of its essential tools.