The key to understanding of relief-giving is in the functions it serves for the larger economic and political order, for relief is a secondary and supportive institution. Historical evidence suggests that relief arrangements are initiated or expanded during the occasional out-breaks of civil disorder produced by mass unemployment, and are then abolished or contracted when political stability is restored. We shall argue that expansive relief policies are cyclical - liberal or restrictive depending on the problems of regulation in the larger society with which government must contend [Piven and Cloward, 1971]. It is about a search too, for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recogniton as well as cash, for astonishment rather than a torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying. Perhaps immortality, too, is part of the quest. To be remembered was the wish, spoken and unspoken, of the heroes and heroines of this book [Terkel, 1972: xiii].