Wilbur Cohen and American social reform.

Abstract

WILBUR J. COHEN, who lived from 1913 to 1987, had a major impact on American social welfare policy. He nurtured the old-age insur ance program into America's largest and most successful social program, and he spearheaded the drive to create the programs of the Great Society. Al though Cohen's life became submerged in the many programs he helped to establish and expand, his history is a compelling case study of what might be called modern bureaucratic reform. Unlike such pioneering social welfare professionals as Florence Kelley and Jane Addams, Cohen made many of his contributions from within the bureau cracy at a time when the state had become an agent of its own expansion. And unlike those earlier reformers, Cohen served as a diplomat who shut tled between the cerebral world of professional policy analysis and the pragmatic world of legislative politics.