Welfare

Welfare

Description

The American welfare state emerged during the twentieth century. Over the course of a hundred years, the nation fashioned a complex web of social insurance and means-tested programs, financed and administered at all levels of government. Today, most Americans share a commitment to protecting the most vulnerable from extreme economic hardship. What has yet to emerge is a true consensus about how that commitment should be balanced against a variety of other social policy goals that Americans value, such as a belief in limited government and the primacy of individual responsibility. Moreover, the American welfare state remains less extensive and less generous than those in most other industrialized nations. The oldest roots of American social welfare policy are in England, in the Poor Laws of 1601 and 1834. American antipoverty policy was, in its colonial origins, a patchwork of locally administered programs offering minimal assistance to the most obviously blameless among the destitute. Administrators were preoccupied with the social dangers of “pauperism,” a dispirited dependency among the poor. While the programs reflected a salutary symbolism of public concern with the poor, in practice they were inadequate to the challenges of industrial society. The 1900s ushered in the Progressive Era and a wave of new public efforts to prevent poverty and protect children. Many states created programs of social Insurance, including workers' compensation and unemployment insurance; in part, they hoped to induce employers to take better care of their workers. Moreover, the “Child Saving Movement” led most states to enact “mothers' pensions,” to help morally upright widows survive without abandoning their children. None of these programs, however, could address the suffering brought on by the Great Depression of the 1930s, which left one-fourth of the workforce unemployed in 1933. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal made social welfare policy an overarching concern of the federal government. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration provided funds to state governments to help the poor. The Civil Works Administration provided public employment of last resort during the winter of 1934. And the successor Works Progress Administration created many low-wage, means-tested jobs. The Supreme Court invalidated some New Deal legislation, such as the National Industrial Recovery Act (A.L.A. Schecter Poultry Corp. v. United States (1935)) and the Railway Pension Act (Railroad Retirement Board v. Alton Railroad (1935)). Undeterred, Congress pressed forward with an ambitious interventionist agenda. Roosevelt proposed to “pack” the Court with sympathetic justices, and under political pressure the Court underwent a change of philosophy, allowing the national government a greater role hi economic affairs (NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. (1937)) (see COURT PACKING). The signature enactment of the New Deal was the Social Security Act of 1935. Responding in part to a political crusade led by Francis Townsend, the Act created a federally financed and administered retirement insurance program of “old age pensions” for people who had worked in certain sectors of the economy and had, along with their employers, paid payroll taxes on their wages. The Act also created a federally financed but state-administered unemployment insurance program. The Act created means-tested programs to assist the elderly poor and the blind poor, in each case run by the states but partially financed by the federal government under a structure known as “cooperative federalism.” And the Act created Aid to Dependent Children (“ADC,” later to become Aid to Families With Dependent Children, or “AFDC”), a program of cooperative federalism designed to support certain needy children. ADC authorized states to provide support for the children of divorced, separated, and never-married mothers, as well as the children of widows. But, at least initially, states were not required to take full advantage of that authority. They could choose to offer benefits only to those families where the mother maintained a “suitable home.” Most states used that discretion to manage the sexual conduct and workforce participation of their clientele.

Source Publication

The Oxford Companion to American Law

Source Editors/Authors

Kermit L. Hall

Publication Date

2002

Welfare

Find @ NYU

Share

COinS