David Craig Adie

Background

David Craig Adie was born on September 3, 1888 in Hamilton, Scotland, the youngest of four children of Lawrence and Madeline (Cooper) Adie. His father was a railway passenger agent, and the family's resources were meager.

Education

Adie attended school in Edinburgh but left at an early age to apprentice as a bookbinder.

Although he lacked a formal education, he read a good deal on his own.

Career

Early in career David Adie became a labor organizer and in 1913, after a brief stay in Canada, he emigrated to the United States. He settled in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he found work in 1914 as assistant secretary of the Minneapolis Civic and Commerce Association, responsible for cultivating good relations between business interests and trade unions.

When the United States entered World War I, Adie became an adviser to the Minnesota Public Safety Commission, which was responsible for the recruitment and placement of workers in factories. He also directed the reorganization of the state employment service, which regulated farm labor.

An appointment as associate secretary of the War Labor Policies Board in 1918, a year before he became a citizen, took him to Washington, D. C. , where he developed his skills as a labor arbitrator.

After the war, in 1919, he became the impartial chairman of the arbitration board for the men's and boys' clothing industry in New York City, with responsibility for settling industrial disputes in some 2, 000 factories employing about 70, 000 workers. Adie then served briefly, from 1921 to 1922, as campaign manager of the American City Bureau in New York, which encouraged chambers of commerce to participate in civic and social service activities. His work with this organization stimulated his interest in social work, and in 1921 he became the general secretary of the Charity Organization Society of Buffalo, New York, the oldest group of its kind in the nation. Under his leadership the Society's focus shifted from community social work to family welfare and casework. Adie started lecturing at the University of Buffalo, which he helped to organize. He also was one of the founders of the Buffalo Council of Social Agencies, which acted as a coordinating center for about seventy-five local charities, and served as its first executive secretary.

Late in 1929 Adie was appointed by Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt to the New York State Social Welfare Board. Three years later the board elected him State Commissioner of Social Welfare. In this capacity Adie appointed the heads of the city and county welfare districts, supervised their activities, enforced the public welfare law, and administered institutional and hospital care for delinquent children and the disabled, as well as public assistance programs for the aged, the blind, veterans, and dependent children and mothers.

He was also an ex-officio member of the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration, which had been established in 1931 as a depression agency to provide public assistance to the unemployed through home and work relief.

In 1937, after the federal Works Progress Administration had largely supplanted the state's work relief program, the TERA was disbanded and Adie assumed responsibility for its home relief operations.

Adie died at the age of fifty-four of peritonitis following surgery for a duodenal ulcer at the Albany (New York) Hospital. His body was cremated at the Earl Crematorium in Troy, New York.

Achievements

• Adie helped establish a school of social work at the University of Buffalo and was a co-founder of the Buffalo Council of Social Agencies.

Works

More photos

• book

  • State Plan for the Local Organization and Development of Emergency Welfare Services: New York State War Council

Religion

Deeply religious, he had been a Methodist lay preacher in Scotland, but later became a Unitarian.

Politics

Early in his youth, before leaving for United States, he was a member of the Independent Labour Party of Scotland.

Views

Adie was convinced that welfare had become a science requiring the services of highly trained personnel. He believed that permanent public assistance and social insurance programs were necessary to compensate for the inability of the economic system to provide everyone with the means of self-support.

He felt that the resurgence of the economy at the end of the decade would create new job opportunities, but he nevertheless warned that aid to the blind, the aged, and other groups of unemployables would continue to increase.

Convinced that unemployment was a national problem, he favored the broadening of federal social insurance, the implementation of state and federal rehabilitation services, and the creation of a federal welfare program which, through grants-in-aid to the states, would establish nationwide standards of eligibility and minimum and maximum allowances.

Personality

Adie was a compassionate individual who had deep insight into others and an ability to identify with the oppressed. In his speech he always retained the Scottish burr.

Connections

On July 31, 1916, he married Ann Herr of Minneapolis, by whom he had one daughter, Jean Cooper.

Father:

Lawrence Adie

Mother:

Madeline (Cooper) Adie

Spouse:

Ann (Herr) Adie

Daughter:

Jean Cooper

References

• Democracy Cares: The Story Behind Public Assistance in New York State (Classic Reprint)