Dana Webster Bartlett was an American Congregationalist minister, settlement house director, and writer. He was an early advocate of the City Beautiful movement. He was born October 27, 1860, in Bangor, Maine, and educated at Iowa College in Grinnell, Iowa through 1882. He also attended Yale University and Chicago Theological Seminary. He was pastor of Phillips Church, Salt Lake City. He moved to Los Angeles in 1896, where he founded the Bethlehem Institute, also called the Bethlehem Institutional Church. The Institute was a non-denominational social, educational and social service center for working class and immigrant people which covered six city lots. He reached out to Chinese, Japanese and Molokan populations (he encountered the first Molokans to enter Los Angeles, and became a patron of their community [1]). He influenced social work education and research, helping organize field research by students from the University of Southern California and Occidental College who would visit the slums of Los Angeles and write up their findings. He is one of the honorees in the California Social Work Hall of Distinction. A Progressive, he campaigned for public baths, social reforms, and workers’ rights to organize.
Works:
- The Better City: A Sociological Study of a Modern City (Los Angeles: Neuner Company Press, 1907)
- The Better Country (Boston: C.M. Clark, 1911)
- The Bush Aflame (Los Angeles: Grafton Publishing, 1923)
- Our Government in Social Service, or a Nation at Work in Human Uplift
