Social Policy in the United States

Future Possibilities in Historical Perspective

Theda Skocpol

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780691037851, 9780691037868
• eBook ISBN: 9780691214023
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

Health care, welfare, Social Security, employment programs--all are part of ongoing national debates about the future of social policy in the United States. In this wide-ranging collection of essays, Theda Skocpol shows how historical understanding, centered on governmental institutions and political alliances, can illuminate the limits and possibilities of American social policymaking both past and present. Skocpol dispels the myth that Americans are inherently hostile to social spending and suggests why President Clinton's health care agenda was so quickly attacked despite the support of most Americans for his goals.

CHAPTER ONE

State Formation and Social Policy in the United States

“AMERICANS may be defined as that part of the English-speaking world which instinctively revolted against the doctrine of the sovereignty of the State and has . . . striven to maintain that attitude from the time of the Pilgrim Fathers to the present day” (Pollard, 1925, 31). Citizens of the United States view themselves as fortunate not to be subject to any overbearing “state.” And observers rightly have trouble identifying elements of concentrated sovereignty in the American political system— except, perhaps, when the USA acts aggressively on the world stage. There are, of course, excellent historical reasons why Americans lack a strong or positive sense of the state. Nevertheless, we can learn a surprising amount about American politics by treating state-society relationships in strictly analytical terms.

To imagine that the United States has been a dynamic society and capitalist economy unencumbered by any state would be an ethnocentric illusion. Instead, the specific organizational forms that state activities have taken in America have profoundly affected the social cleavages that have gained political expression and helped to determine the sorts of public policies that U.S. governments have—and have not— pursued from the nineteenth century to the present day. Drawing on my own current research, I can illustrate this argument by exploring why the historically evolved patterns and phases of U.S. public social provision have differed from those characteristic of European welfare states.

SOCIAL POLICIES IN THE UNITED STATES

Modern “welfare states,” as they eventually came to be called, had their start between the 1880s and the 1920s in pension and social insurance programs established for industrial workers and needy citizens in Europe and Australasia. Later, from the 1930s through the 1950s, such programmatic beginnings were elaborated into comprehensive systems of income support and social insurance encompassing entire national populations. In the aftermath of World War II, Great Britain rationalized a whole array of social services and social insurances around an explicit vision of “the welfare state,” which would universally ensure a “national minimum” of protection for all citizens against old age, disability and ill health, unemployment, and other causes of insufficient income. During the same period, other nations—especially the Scandinavian democracies—established “full employment welfare states” by deliberately coordinating social policies, first with Keynesian strategies of macroeconomic management and then with targeted interventions in labor markets.

Comparative research on the origins of modern welfare states typically measures the United States against foreign patterns of “welfare state development.” America is considered a “welfare state laggard” and an “incomplete welfare state” because it did not establish nationwide social insurance until 1935 and because it never has established fully national or comprehensive social programs along European lines. But this approach overlooks important social policies that were distinctive to the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also distracts us from analyzing why U.S. social policies since 1935 have been characterized by sharp bifurcations between “social security” and “welfare,” as well as by persisting federal diversity in certain policy areas.

Early American “social policy” included state and local support for the most inclusive system of primary and secondary public education in the industrializing world (Heidenheimer 1981; Rubinson 1986). It also included generous local, state, and federal benefits for elderly Civil War veterans and their dependents. By 1910, the U.S. federal government was giving old-age and disability pensions to over a third of all elderly men living in the North and to many widows and orphans (and some elderly men in the South) as well (Skocpol 1992, chap. 2). In terms of the large share of the federal budget spent, the hefty proportion of citizens affected, and the relative generosity of the benefits by contemporary international standards, the United States had become a precocious social spending state!

In the early 1900s, a number of U.S. trade union officials and reformers hoped to transform Civil War pensions into more universal publicly funded benefits for all working men and their families. But this was not to be. Many social reforms were enacted into law during the progressive era, but not measures calling for new public social spending on old-age pensions or other kinds of working men’s social insurance. The United States thus refused to follow other Western nations on the road toward a paternalist welfare state, in which male bureaucrats would administer regulations and social insurance “for the good” of breadwinning industrial workers and their dependents.

Instead, America came close to creating a pioneering maternalist welfare state, with female-dominated public agencies implementing regulations and benefits for the good of women and their children. From 1900 through the 1920s, a broad array of protective labor regulations and social benefits were enacted by state legislatures and the national Congress to help adult American women as mothers or as potential mothers (for full details, see Skocpol 1992, Part 3). The most important of these “maternalist” social policies were mothers’ pensions enacted by forty-four states to authorize regular benefits for impoverished widowed mothers, laws enacted by all but two states to limit the hours that women wage earners could work, laws enacted by fifteen states authorizing minimum wages for women workers, and the federal Sheppard-Towner Infancy and Maternity Protection Act of 1921, which authorized the U.S. Children’s Bureau to supervise federal matching payments subsidizing local and state programs for maternal health education. Overall, a remarkable number of policies for women and children were enacted in the United States during a period when proposed regulations and benefits for male industrial workers were defeated.

The Great Depression and the New Deal of the 1930s subsequently opened possibilities for old-age pensions and social insurance. In what has been called a “big bang” of national legislation (Leman 1977), the Social Security Act of 1935 created a basic framework for U.S. public social provision that is still in place. Public health insurance was omitted from the Social Security Act, and later schemes for universal national health benefits also failed. Yet three major kinds of nation-spanning social provision were included in the 1935 legislation: federally required, state-run unemployment insurance, federally subsidized public assistance, and national contributory old-age insurance.

Unemployment insurance was instituted in 1935 as a federal-state system. All states were induced to establish programs, but each individual state was left free to decide terms of eligibility and benefits for unemployed workers, as well as the taxes to be collected from employers or workers or both. Unemployment benefits and taxation became quite uneven across the states, and it remained difficult to pool risks of economic downturns on a national basis or to coordinate unemployment benefits with Keynesian demand management. Despite efforts in the 1930s and 1940s to nationalize unemployment insurance and join its operations to various measures of public economic planning, no such explicit joining of “social” and “economic” policy developed in the postwar United States.

Public assistance under the Social Security Act was administered through a set of programs already existing in certain states by the early 1930s, for which the federal government would henceforth share costs. Assistance for the elderly poor and for dependent children (previously “mothers’ pensions”) were the most important programs to receive new federal subsidies. Free to decide whether they would even have particular programs, the states were also accorded great discretion to decide matters of eligibility and benefits and, in practice, methods of administration. Over time, as old-age insurance expanded to cover virtually all retired employees in the United States, federal old-age assistance became proportionately less important than it was originally. Meanwhile, by the 1960s, the Aid to Dependent Children program (now Aid to Families with Dependent Children [AFDC] providing benefits to caretakers as well as the children themselves) expanded enormously with a predominantly female adult clientele. Labeled “welfare,” AFDC has very uneven standards of eligibility, coverage, and benefits across the states, generally providing the least to the poorest people in the poorest states and leaving many impoverished men and husband-wife families without any coverage at all.

Since 1935, the one program originally established on a purely national basis, contributory old-age insurance, has usurped the favorable label “social security” that once connoted the whole and has become the centerpiece of U.S. public social provision. Payroll taxes are collected from workers and their employers across the country. Ultimately, retired workers collect benefits roughly gauged to their employment incomes, with some redistribution toward the low-wage contributors to the system. After 1935, additional programs were added under this contributory insurance rubric: for surviving dependents in 1939; for disabled workers in 1956; and for retirees in need of medical care in 1965. Equally important, “social security” grew in coverage and benefits, as more and more employees and categories of employees were incorporated during the 1950s and benefit levels were repeatedly raised by Congress. By the 1970s, the United States, uneven and often inadequate in the help provided to unemployed and dependent people, had nevertheless become reasonably generous in the benefits offered to retired people of the working and middle classes.

“Welfare” became an explicit area of U.S. political controversy and policy innovation only during the 1960s, when the War on Poverty and the effort to create a “Great Society” were declared. For the first time since 1935, major new programs of needs-tested public assistance were established in the form of in-kind aid through Food Stamps and Medicaid. In 1972, moreover, old-age and other assistance programs (originally established as federal programs under Social Security) were nationalized, ensuring more standardized benefits. Still, the much larger AFDC program remained federally decentralized—and standards for other benefits, such as medical care, are often tied to this uneven standard bearer of the American welfare system. In turn, U.S. welfare remains, as always, both institutionally and symbolically separate from national economic management, on one hand, and from non-means-tested programs benefiting regularly employed citizens, on the other.

EXISTING THEORIES AND THEIR SHORTCOMINGS

Among those seeking to understand the development of social policies in the United States, several approaches currently hold sway. Each offers insights but falls short of offering fully satisfactory explanations of the historical phases and policy patterns just reviewed.

One school of thought can be dubbed the logic of industrialism approach (e.g., Cutright 1965; Wilensky and Lebeaux 1965; Wilensky 1975, chap. 2) because it posits that all nation-states respond to the growth of cities and industries by creating public measures to help citizens cope with attendant social and economic dislocations. Once families are off the land and dependent on wages and salaries, the argument goes, they cannot easily cope with disabling accidents at work or with major episodes of illness, unemployment, or dependent elderly relatives unable to earn their keep. Social demand for public help grows, and all modern nations must create policies to address these basic issues of social security without forcing respectable citizens to accept aid under the demeaning and disenfranchising rules of traditional poor laws.

Plausible as this sounds, recent cross-national studies on the origins of modern social insurance policies have demonstrated that urbanization and industrialization (whether considered separately or in combination) cannot explain the relative timing of national social insurance legislation from the late nineteenth century to the present (see Flora and Alber 1981; Collier and Messick 1975). The United States in particular does not fit well into the logic of industrialism schema. Not incidentally, proponents of this perspective have tended to include data for “the U.S. case” only when doing cross-national analyses of social insurance for the period after 1935. Before the 1930s, the United States is an awkward outlier: This country was one of the world’s industrial leaders, yet “lagged” far behind other nations (even much less urban and industrial ones) when it came to instituting public pensions and social insurance. Nor does this perspective help us to understand why the United States prior to 1935 emphasized public social provision first for veteran soldiers and then for mothers but not for working men.

Another school of thought—let us call it the national values approach—accepts many underlying dynamics posited by the logic of industrialism argument but introduces a major modification to explain why some nations, such as Bismarck’s Imperial Germany in the 1880s, initiated modern social policies at relatively early stages of urbanization and industrialization, whereas others, most notably the United States, delayed behind the pace of policy innovation that would be expected from the tempos of urbanization and industrialization alone. The answer, say proponents of this approach (e.g., Grønbjerg, Street, and Suttles 1978; Kaim-Caudle 1973; King 1973; Rimlinger 1971), lies in the values and ideologies to which each nation’s people adhered as urbanization and industrialization gathered force. Cultural conditions could either facilitate or delay action by a nation-state to promote social security, and cultural factors also influenced the shape and goals of new policies when they emerged. Thus Gaston Rimlinger (1971), one of the ablest proponents of the national values approach, argues that early German social insurance policies were facilitated by the weakness of liberalism and the strength of “the patriarchal social ideal” and “the Christian social ethic” in nineteenth-century Germany (p. 91). In the United States, however, laissez-faire liberal values were extremely strong and a “commitment to individual achievement and self-help” led to a “tenacious” “resistance to social protection” (Rimlinger 1971, 62).

Like the logic of industrialism approach, the national values school fails to notice, let alone explain, U.S. Civil War benefits or social policies for mothers and children. These approaches focus solely on modern social insurance and old-age pensions. Yet even here, general deductions from national values simply cannot give us adequate answers to many crucial questions about timing and programmatic structure.

Laissez-faire liberal values were in many respects more hegemonic and popular in nineteenth-century Britain than they were in the nineteenth-century United States, yet in the years before World War I, Britain enacted a full range of social protective measures, including workers’ compensation (1906), old-age pensions (1908), and unemployment and health insurance (1911). These innovations came under the auspices of the British Liberal Party, and they were intellectually and politically justified by appeals to “new liberal” values of the sort that were also making progress among educated Americans around the turn of the century. Under modern urban-industrial conditions, the “new liberals” argued, positive governmental means must be used to support individual security, and this could be accomplished without undermining individuals’ dignity or making them dependent on the state. If British liberals could use such ideas to justify both state-funded pensions and contributory social insurance this way in the second decade of the twentieth century, why couldn’t American progressives do the same? In both Britain and the United States, sufficient cultural transformation within liberalism had occurred to legitimate fledgling welfare states without resort to either conservative-paternalist or socialist justifications (see Orloff and Skocpol 1984 for further elaboration of this argument).

Then, too, when American “New Dealers” of the 1930s at last successfully instituted nationwide social protections justified in “new liberal” terms, why did they end up with the specific array of policies embodied in the Social Security Act? Why was health insurance left aside, despite the availability of liberal rationales for it just as good as those put forward for unemployment and old-age insurance? And why did the public assistance programs subsidized under Social Security actually cement the dependence of many individuals on the arbitrary discretion of state and local authorities, rather than furthering individual dignity and the predictable delivery of citizen benefits as a matter of “rights”? A final query is perhaps the most telling: Given the clear value priority that Americans have always placed on individuals getting ahead through work, why did the New Deal as a whole fail to achieve proposed measures to guarantee jobs for everyone willing to work? Arguably, the social security measures that were achieved were less in accord with long-standing American values than governmental commitments to full employment would have been.

Arguments stressing the impact of either industrialism or national values on social policy development tend to downplay political struggles and debates. During the past fifteen years, however, many historians and social scientists have analyzed the political contributions of capitalists and industrial workers in shaping patterns of social policy since the 1930s in the capitalist democracies. As part of this trend, two sorts of class politics perspectives have been applied to American social politics: One highlights what is called “welfare capitalism,” and the other stresses “political class struggle” between workers and capitalists.

Proponents of the welfare capitalism approach (e.g., Berkowitz and McQuaid 1980; Domhoff 1970; Ferguson 1984; Quadagno 1984) take for granted that corporate capitalists have dominated the U.S. political process in the twentieth century, and they look (in various ways) for economically grounded ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: American Social Policies: Future Possibilities in Historical Perspective
• Chapter One: State Formation and Social Policy in the United States
• Chapter Two: America’s First Social Security System: The Expansion of Benefits for Civil War Veterans
• Chapter Three: Gender and the Origins of Modern Social Policies in Britain and the United States (with Gretchen Ritter)
• Chapter Four: The Road to Social Security (with G. John Ikenberry)
• Chapter Five: Redefining the New Deal: World War II and the Development of Social Provision in the United States (with Edwin Amenta)
• Chapter Six: The Limits of the New Deal System and the Roots of Contemporary Welfare Dilemmas
• Chapter Seven: “Brother Can You Spare a Job?” Work and Welfare in the United States
• Chapter Eight: Targeting within Universalism: Politically Viable Policies to Combat Poverty in the United States
• Chapter Nine: Is the Time Finally Ripe? Health Insurance Reforms in the 1990s
• Chapter Ten: From Social Security to Health Security?
• Conclusion: Remaking U.S. Social Policies for the 21st Century
• Index