Creating the Welfare State: The Political Economy of Twentieth-Century Reform

Abstract

The business community has been the Number One Enemy of welfare programmes according to most historians. History credits liberals and bureaucrats with bravely forging our social welfare system in the face of pressure and strident protest from businessmen. Edward Berkowitz and Kim McQuaid disagree. They argue that instead of resisting social programmes, businesssmen initiated them. In Creating the Welfare State, Berkowitz and McQuaid aim to show how private businessmen played leading roles in shaping the nation's social security, welfare, and health care programmes. They demonstrate how progressive businessmen like Edward A. Filene and Gerard Swope worked with their opposite numbers in the federal government, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Arthur Altmeyer, to fashion a social welfare system tailored to an industrialized work force. Creating the Welfare State combines the perspectives of two disciplines: policy history and business history. The resulting synthesis suggests a new way to view the progressive era, the new era, and the New Deal. The new preface and afterword add a current focus to this revised edition and help a new generation of readers place the debates over national health insurance and social security financing into historical perspective.