Before the Roar: U.S. Unemployment Relief after World War I and the Long History of a Paternalist Welfare Policy

Abstract

Soon after assuming leadership of a federal initiative to encourage unemployment relief in communities across the country, the former U.S. Army colonel Arthur Woods turned to the Saturday Evening Post to exhort his fellow citizens to action. With millions out of work in the fall of 1921 and with winter fast approaching, Woods warned that indifference to the plight of the jobless threatened everything from the country's political institutions to what he characterized as the nation's masculine essence. Through persistent joblessness, he contended, the “useful, employed member of the community is transformed into a frank and virtually unashamed public ward.” While at first “a man who has just lost his job is seldom a burden on his fellows,” with time the unemployed lose “their self-dependence and have admitted to themselves and their neighbors that they are the public's charge.” These types of men, Woods explained, “you see them in bread lines, in municipal lodging houses, and on the bitter cold nights they occupy park benches, surely beds of anarchy. Their coverlets are grim philosophy and old newspapers.”1