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(This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)
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Joseph Lee was an American social worker, author, and philanthropist. He served as a President of the Massachusetts Civic League from 1897 to 1935 and a President of the National Recreation Association from 1910 to 1937.
Background
Joseph Lee was born in Brookline, Massachussets, into Boston's Brahmin caste, the fourth son and seventh of eight children of Henry and Elizabeth Perkins (Cabot) Lee. He was a cousin of Richard C. Cabot, physician and social worker, whose father, James Elliot Cabot, a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lee singled out as one who had especially influenced him. From his own father, a banker, young Lee inherited not only an independent income but an independent cast of mind. This made him a free-trader, a Democrat, a Unitarian, and a convinced advocate of birth control and of the restriction of immigration to numbers that assured assimilation.
Education
He attended Noble's School in Boston, was graduated from Harvard in 1883, and in 1887 received an LL. B. degree from Harvard. In 1926 Harvard conferred an LL. D. upon him, Lee said it was an appropriate degree because he had spent a large part of his life "doctoring laws. "
Career
Upon graduation Lee was admitted to the bar, though he never practised law. A man who disdained living in luxury as a means of personal fulfillment, Lee early in life began to question the extravagant use of wealth and to deplore the deprivations of the poor. So deeply did he feel these matters that at one point he considered divesting himself of his property and visited Count Tolstoi to discuss the question, though the Russian writer discouraged the impulse. Instead, Lee lived on a modest scale, giving generously of both his time and money in the aid of social betterment. In his giving he favored causes intended to strengthen community life and individual development, rather than charities that merely blunted the effects of poverty. An adherent of John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith, he sought to strengthen men to cope with life as they found it, not to enervate them with dependency-creating forms of assistance. One of his favorite maxims was: "Don't tie on the flowers, water the plant. "
His first book, Constructive and Preventive Philanthropy (1902), which expressed these ideals, established him among those who were setting new criteria for charitable and philanthropic endeavor at a time when the modern conception of social work was taking shape. Lee's specific efforts to improve community life fell into three categories: the better functioning of democratic institutions, notably local government, and the enactment of social legislation; the improvement of education; and the cultivation of play and recreation.
To the first end he organized the Massachusetts Civic League in 1897 and served as its president until 1935. Lee's interest in education eventuated in personal service and great generosity to the graduate department of education at Harvard, of which he was an Overseer for many years, in service (1908 - 1917) as an elected member of the Boston School Committee (board of education), and in his support of the School Visitors' Association, of which his wife was one of the organizers. Among his special concerns were the age at which children left school, the needs of both gifted and dull children, school medical inspection, attention to children with physical defects, school lunches, and the wider use of school buildings for adult classes and community affairs. Important as was Lee's work in these areas, his service to the recreation movement will be longest remembered. To him play was a vital necessity.
For his second book, Play in Education (1915), he deliberately chose the word "play" rather than "recreation" to lift the concept above that of mere pastime activities. He once wrote to a friend: "Play constitutes the serious element in work. It is the element that differentiates a profession from a task, the side of work that contains the ideal and that makes the lawyer, doctor, soldier live up to his professional standard regardless of the effect upon his income or his life. " He saw play as a great universal force, enabling a man to develop the best in him--physically, mentally, morally, and perhaps above all, creatively--and through opportunity for spontaneous association to realize his full social potential as a citizen in a free society. Character and social attitudes were the ends. The means included everything from great national parks to the simplest devices for encouraging children's play in city neighborhoods. He raised the function of play from the lowly state of being regarded with veiled puritanical hostility to general acceptance as a bulwark both of a well-balanced personality and a rounded education. Lee's initiation into the recreational movement came through Miss Zilpha D. Smith, a Boston social worker, who early in the 1890's enlisted his aid in making a survey of play space in badly congested neighborhoods. He was assigned two districts, one in the North End and the other in the South End of Boston. In both, playgrounds were soon opened. There and elsewhere Lee closely examined recreation programs and studied problems of administration.
By 1906 he had published several articles which had brought him national recognition, and he was elected a vice-president of the newly organized Playground Association of America, of which Luther Halsey Gulick, 1865-1918, was president. In 1910 Lee became its president, a post which he held until his death. Under his guidance the organization evolved into the National Recreation Association, and Lee's name became a legend. This "tall, spare New Englander with mobile white mustache and kindly blue eyes" was canny in weaving recreation into community planning, in striking while the iron was hot, and in reaching what he called the jugular vein in dealing with his opponents. Humorous, candid, capable of great indignation at what he conceived as injustice, he nevertheless was not vindictive and never bore grudges.
During the first World War President Wilson asked Lee to develop recreational facilities for soldiers on leave away from camp, and for this purpose an affiliate of the National Recreation Association, the War Camp Community Service, was organized. Lee served as its president. For some time before his death he suffered from arteriosclerosis, but pneumonia was the immediate cause of his death, which occurred at his summer home in Cohasset, Massachussets. Burial took place at Walnut Hills Cemetery in Brookline.
(This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)
Connections
Lee's beliefs were happily and strenuously put into practice in his personal and family life. In this he enjoyed the full support and assistance of his wife, Margaret Copley Cabot, whom he had married on May 20, 1897. Mrs. Lee was deeply concerned with the kindergarten movement and with the more general application of the principles laid down by the German educator Friedrich Froebel. She and her husband raised four children: Margaret, Susan Mary, Joseph, and Amy. In 1930, ten years after her death, Lee married Marion Snow, his secretary, who actively shared his interests throughout the rest of his life.