industry and the American Medical Association to support this proposal, believing that the maternity benefit systems already in place in Germany, England and France left too many women and their babies uninsured. Lathrop argued in an address before the American Public Health Association's 1918 meeting in Chicago that U.S. leaders needed to address the reasons for poverty in order to address children's health needs—that high infant mortality among the poor and working class in American cities was not just due to ignorance or laziness. Lathrop asked: "Which is the more safe and sane conclusion! That 88 per cent of all these fathers were incorrigibly indolent or below normal mentally, or that sound public economy demands an irreducible minimum living standard to be sustained by a minimum wage and other such expedients as may be developed in a determined effort to give every child a fair chance?" The attitude of most of the staff in the Children's Bureau and other government agencies however, was that women—especially with children—should not work outside of the home even if impoverished. Any connections between children's health and such issues as expansion of workers' insurance, minimum wage or sanitation systems lost credence. The popular strategy remained focused on "Americanizing" immigrant workers and teaching white mothers how to take care of babies. It is important to note that the Bureau chose not to address the horrifyingly high mortality rates among babies in families of color. In the South, much of the public health campaigns were undertaken by African-American, Hispanic or black clubwomen working in their own segregated communities. In 1921 the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Act became the first federally funded social welfare measure in the United States. The law provided federal matching grants to the states for prenatal and child health clinics, visiting nurses for expectant and new mothers, distribution of information on nutrition and hygiene as well as midwife training. Contrary to Lathrop's original ideas, the final version of the law did not provide any financial aid or medical care. The first 30 years of the twentieth century marked a transition between traditional social medicine that included the use of relatives or local midwives and the rise of a modern medical management of childbirth and childrearing by experts outside the family and home. However, as the federal bureaucracy blossomed in the years after World War II, the only agency focused solely on children lost its