US Charity label: A.D.A. Relief Fund???

A friend sent me an item for my "Ada" collection. The cover is mailed from Piedmont, West Virginia, December 21, 1936, and obviously contained a greeting card. On the back is a stamp-like charity label, red background with a white candle and green holly leaves. It says A.D.A. RELIEF FUND. Any clues? Somehow it isn't toothy enough to be the American Dental
Association...

Could be Am Dental Assn. see below.

ItÂ’s Time for a Change

Here we present the American Dental Associations own timeline for their organization. Comments are made at certain dates that correspond to the information presented in this book. As you can see, every effort was made to be factually accurate in this book, and the information corresponds exactly to the ADA timeline presented on their world wide web site. The web address is given at the end of this chapter so the reader can verify that this is indeed the ADAÂ’s own document. http://www.ada.org/p&s/history/timeline.html

ADA Timeline (abridged)

1840: First dental college, the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery;
American Society of Dental Surgeons established.

1859: 26 dentists meet in Niagara Falls, NY, to form a professional society. This meeting was held because the previous dental society had self-destructed because of the amalgam controversy.

1860: The first ADA Constitution and Bylaws adopted.

1897: ADA merged with the Southern Dental Association to form the
National Dental Association.

1901: National Bureau of Standards (NBS) established.

1913: NDA adopts a new Constitution and Bylaws, establishing the House of Delegates and Board of Trustees;
The Journal of the National Dental Association first published under title Bulletin of the National Dental Association;

NB ===> NDA Relief Fund aids San Francisco earthquake victims.

1920s: ADA Relief Fund activities continue; group life insurance established.

1922: NDA renamed the American Dental Association.

1923: American Association of Dental Schools established.

1929: Annual Session meets in Washington, DC, just 20 days before stock market crash.

It was at this session that Sweeney and Souder presented their belief that no mercury vapor was released by amalgams, which is now known to be false. What were they afraid of? With 30,000 members, the answer is obvious: to much invested for amalgam to be banned. This was 1929, inexpensive composites are 40 years in the future. Is there a link between amalgam and the hysteria in the stock market during 1925-29?
Mercury causes erethrism, a dangerous nervous condition. Circuit breakers have been installed in the present because People Cannot Be
Trusted Anymore with their stocks.

1930s: More than 36,000 ADA members, representing about half of the
U.S. dentists; ADA has 85% market share by the end of the 1940s.

1931: ADA headquarters on north side of Chicago, then moved to a larger building in 1943.

1936: ADA Council on Dental Education formed. (snip)

Thanks, Blair - I find it strange that a dental group had a relief fund of sufficient size to merit issuing labels, but 1936 WAS the Depression. I wonder if it was for out-of-work dentists or for people who needed dental care and couldn't afford it - probably the latter. And I bet there were a lot of those in need. You see a lot of pictures from those years of middle-aged and even younger people who have toothless smiles.

I can remember it too, Ada.

Till not a so long time ago young people, before signing the marriage contract, replaced their usually strong and healthy teeth by false ones, in order to have calculated costs during their family future. Incredibly, but this happened here, in Switzerland.

I doubt that they will be ever commemorated on stamps...

Fortunately, the immense majority of today's people can afford the (high)
costs of dental services.

By the 1930s the membership of tha ADA was in the tens of thousands.
I assume that their members bought the labels to support the fund.
Originally it was set up to aid San Francisco disaster victims (1906 Earthquake?), but later the ADA was involved in dental clinics for the poor (1920s). I imagine the Depression just made things even worse. When you are starving, who has money for the dentist?