Deal Welfare State Research Articles

Lincoln and Liberty: Wisdom for the Ages

Lincoln and Liberty: Wisdom for the Ages

The post-progressive liberalism of Carl Becker

ABSTRACT This essay uses Carl Becker’s writings of the 1930s and 1940s as a tool for re-thinking the so-called “making of modern liberalism”. It first examines Becker’s Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers, situating that text in a broader discourse concerning the irrelevance of Enlightenment thought to modern reform politics. Becker agreed with his contemporaries that democracy needed to lessen its dependence on eighteenth-century ideas, but he also subtly mocked the notion that modern thinkers could entirely escape the past. Second, it argues that Becker’s writing after Heavenly City was framed by his effort to translate liberal politics into a distinctively “post-progressive” idiom that saw the New Deal welfare state as a prophylactic against social chaos. This essay demonstrates how mid-century reformist intellectuals could integrate conservative and counter-Enlightenment ideas with “modern liberal” politics.

Pattern and Chaos: Ralph Ellison and the Federal Writers’ Project

Beginning with its mazelike underground journey to reach the Lafargue Psychiatric Clinic, Ralph Ellison's 1948 essay Is Nowhere spins out series of surreal fantasies in sketching a character that arises from the impact between urban slum conditions and folk sensibilities.1 Many Harlemites refer to their neighborhood as nowhere, the essay explains, because of the feeling that they have no stable, recognized place in society. . . . One 'is' literally, but one is nowhere; one wanders dazed in ghetto maze, 'displaced person' of democracy.2 Lamenting this displacement, at once social and psychological, the essay prefigures the notion of invisibility in the novel Ellison was writing at the same time.What Kind of Citizen Could Come from Nowhere?This question has offered one of the key fault lines in critical approaches to Invisible Man. Should readers take seriously the narrator's claim in the epilogue that there's possibility that even an invisible man has socially responsible role to play, or is this claim kind of buggy jiving?3 The details of Ellison's employment with the Federal Writers Project (FWP)-a unique, socially transformative moment in which he participated on project designed to encourage participatory citizenship-offer useful perspective. While it kept generation writing and engaged in the business of cataloguing and describing American stuff during the Depression, the FWP particularly offered several African writers-including Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Roi Ottley, Ellen Tarry, Rebecca West, and Richard Wright, among others-a literary home during the 1930s in the wake of the Harlem Renaissance. Though many writers resented their work reporting what must have at times seemed like utterly mundane minutia, Ellison utilized both historical and folk material generated by his FWP investigations to write Invisible Man. He openly recognized his debt in 1977 interview with Ann Banks:For me, being on the Writers' Project was way to broaden my knowledge of Afro-American culture. I'd always liked the stories and things, and I couldn't hear enough of them, so this was throwing me into my own history. Once you touched the history of blacks in New York then you were into history.4Ellison's reminiscent evaluation captures an important dynamic of Invisible Man reflected in its final claim about lower frequencies:5 the difference between awareness of history and touching the materials that form its deep elements.In Invisible Man, Ellison utilized material from his FWP tenure to critique the foundations of utopian progressive thought, placing in its stead critical liberalism, one that was anti-utopian and much more cautious in outlook than much postwar liberalism and, most importantly, emphasized local knowledges and claims on justice against broader plans for reform and modernization. The ideal citizen of the New Deal welfare state as imagined in its documents was historically knowledgeable, socially progressive, and oriented toward modernization. Ellison's work bracketed each of those ideals, highlighting the ways that positivist overconfidence tended to downplay important stories and disguise prejudice, and thus elided crucial elements of ongoing dispossession. While new interpretation of Invisible Man is not the aim of this essay, focus on the New Deal and its cultural activity illuminates broader field of discourses within liberalism with which Ellison was engaged. In particular, Invisible Man's deployment of vernacular culture and history attacks the underpinnings of planning and development advanced by the FWP and other New Deal agencies, discourses central to the New Deal national imaginary before the Second World War and to an international one afterwards.6Though widely recognized as formative experience, the New Deal remains relatively under-analyzed in studies of Ellison. …

Edward D. Berkowitz and Larry DeWitt. The Other Welfare: Supplemental Security Income and U.S. Social Policy.

Edward D. Berkowitz and Larry DeWitt have spent their careers honing a portrait of the centerpiece of the New Deal welfare state—the Social Security Act. Together, they have pulled its previously unknown architects into the limelight, illuminated lesser-known elements of the system, drawn connections to insurance expansions like disability and Medicare, and provided scholars and students with access to primary sources crucial to its historical development. From DeWitt's position as chief historian of the Social Security Administration and Berkowitz's perch as professor of history and public policy and public administration at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., they have modeled generous, cooperative scholarship. In their second collaboration, they bring their knowledge and experience to bear on a distant relation of Social Security in a much later period—the Supplemental Security Income Program (SSI). In the last quarter of the twentieth century, SSI emerged as a large, vital component of the welfare state, but its history, nevertheless, has been little-understood. SSI is a means-tested income-support program for the elderly and disabled who are not otherwise eligible for the larger federal disability insurance program, Social Security Disability Insurance. Created in 1972, SSI has come to serve over nine million Americans and continues to grow annually. Its architects in the Social Security Administration and Congress intended to include elderly and disabled adults as part of a more respectable, federally controlled welfare program—one more generous and more uniform than the previous Old Age Assistance program or the despised Aid to Families with Dependent Children, serving single mothers. In practice, however, the program fell short of those goals. Berkowitz and DeWitt demonstrate how SSI quickly evolved into a system as variable, vulnerable, and unpopular as many of the other means-tested “welfare” programs. Though policymakers desired a truly national program, compromises in the legislative and administrative processes left SSI at the mercy of state and congressional meddling. SSI paid radically different benefits from state to state as a result. The authors also track how shifting target populations generated hostility from lawmakers and the media. Though SSI initially aimed to provide support to the “respectable” elderly and disabled, increasing numbers of mentally disabled, mentally ill, and addicted adults and children soon populated the program. None of them proved to be popular or politically influential clientele. From the moment of the program's birth through the 1990s, journalists and disgruntled members of Congress attacked SSI's recipients. Today, despite the aims of its architects, SSI hovers just above Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and the food stamp program in the eyes of its critics.

RACIALIZING POVERTY AND POOR RELIEF

Here is a dazzling book, one that offers a rich genealogy for reflection about our current preoccupations. Open up any newspaper. Switch on any television news program. What you will read and hear is a cacophony of voices, many of them discordant, on how to fix, fund, and perhaps shrink the federal government's spending on those insurance programs first created in the 1930s by the New Deal welfare state. Equally factious are the debates on immigration policy that some hope will resolve how the republic will meet its future labor needs and how it will placate its rising Latino voting public. Will we deport eleven million workers? Will we construct electrified fences to protect our southern border from “illegal” invasion? Will we offer unauthorized immigrants a path to citizenship? Stay tuned. And while racial politics are clearly at the covert center of these polemics, the discussion of race is rarely overt probably because some now pronounce us a post-racial society.

Where Did All the White Criminals Go?: Reconfiguring Race and Crime on the Road to Mass Incarceration

This article highlights racialized constructions of criminality that surfaced in the wake of mass migrations and immigrations of African American and European workers to the industrial North during the first few decades of the 20th century. This attention to historical patterns is critical to contemporary studies because it shows processes and dynamics that are far less visible in today's criminal justice landscape, overwhelmingly dominated by black and brown faces. Too often, policy researchers deem rehabilitative, nonpunitive approaches to illegality among marginalized and impoverished populations fanciful and too abstract to be implemented. The evidence here suggests that earlier responses to similarly stigmatized white immigrant populations actually led to more humane reforms and shifts away from harsh laws and incapacitation as preeminent responses to social inequality. This earlier reformist moment happened in direct relation to increasingly repressive criminal justice responses to African Americans, which shows how blackness was reconfigured as a more durable criminal identity. Understanding this crucial period also helps to map the long road to mass incarceration. In today's popular postracial discourse about personal responsibility, the guiding logic presumes that the relative absence of white criminals is a product of good citizenship and not discriminatory policies prefiguring the New Deal welfare state. Parables of hard work and law-abidingness have erased this crucial period in the history of incarceration.

Queer Legal History: A Field Grows Up and Comes Out

This essay examines recent scholarship on the legal history of sexuality in the United States. It focuses on Margot Canaday's The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Modern America (2009) and Marc Stein's Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe (2010). It also reviews recent work on the history of marriage, including Sarah Barringer Gordon's The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (2010) and George Chauncey's Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today's Debate Over Gay Equality (2004), and the history of military law Defending America: Military Culture and the Cold‐War Court Martial (2005), by Elizabeth Lutes Hillman. The essay argues that this scholarship is significant because it offers a different view of sex and power than the one derived from the early writing of Michel Foucault. “Queer legal history” treats the liberalism of the 1960s‐1970s as sexually discriminatory as well as liberatory. It underlines the exclusions that were part of public policy under the federal G.I. Bill and the New Deal welfare state.

Hearth and Soul: Economics and Culture in Partisan Conceptions of the Family in the Progressive Era, 1900–1920

Both political scientists and popular commentators have reacted to the culture wars of the 1990s as something new in American politics, a deviation from the durable grounding of politics in economic interests. However, as recent work, along with many of the classic treatments of the Populist and Progressive eras demonstrate, American politics has long been infused with both culture and economics. The interesting question is thus not “which one” but rather “how” these two dimensions of political value have intersected through time and what the dynamics of those intersections reveal. The paper uses congressional family policy debates to demonstrate two alternative policy frameworks during the Progressive Era, each with its own alignment of the two dimensions and one emerging as a harbinger to the New Deal welfare state. Through systematic discursive analysis of committee hearings transcripts of the Fifty-sixth to Sixty-sixth Congresses, it assembles two dominant conceptual frameworks of family as illustrative of the two approaches. The progressive understanding viewed family economics as foundational, circumscribing its cultural qualities and legitimating state intervention. In contrast, the traditionalist conception privileged self-regulating families' cultural qualities as more fundamental, only loosely related to economic condition, such that active state intervention into family economics was seen as inappropriate and ineffective. These alternative approaches to state and family relations viewed culture or economics alternatively as foundational or epiphenomenal, if related at all. As history unfolded, the progressive conception ultimately prevailed in New Deal and postwar social policies, which continued to emphasize the economic dimension as subsuming the cultural one. Investigating the dynamics of intersectionality between economics and culture is suggested as a potential pathway to bridge work emphasizing durable economic interests in politics with other work focused instead on the endurance of moral conflicts in political deliberations, implying that in the Progressive Era the parties were not only divided in terms of which set of issues were more important but also over how the two dimensions of political value related to each other, if at all.

The "New Institutionalism" and the Racial Divide

In Shifting the Color Line, political scientist Robert Lieberman sets out to explain a "profound puzzle" in the complicated history of race and the American welfare state. Why did some policies come to include African Americans "fully and fairly" (pp. 5-6), while others reinforced, even exacerbated, racial disadvantage and division? Complicating the story still further, and adding a much-warranted note of irony, Lieberman reminds us that the policies in question--the three "pillars" of the New Deal welfare state, Old Age Insurance (what most people mean when they talk about social security); Aid to Dependent Children (later Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or "welfare"); and Unemployment Insurance--had common origins not just in the Social Security Act of 1935, but in the politics of racial exclusion that barred the vast majority of African Americans from coverage at the outset. Moreover, when they did finally extend coverage to blacks on a mass scale, the terms and the consequences of inclusion varied considerably from one program to the next. As Lieberman draws it, the contrast is indeed stark: for blacks, large-scale enrollment in social security signaled the "full embrace of citizenship" (p. 21) while promoting integration into the "broad American middle class" (p. 12). The growth of black enrollment in welfare, on the other hand, brought just the opposite: the badge of "dependency" rather than social citizenship and, ultimately, relegation to the ranks of a highly stigmatized, socially and politically isolated black urban "underclass."

There They Go Again: Change and Continuity in American Liberalism

Progressive movement, whatever that was, and to what extent did it represent a significant shift? From the perspective of the late 1960s, historians who emphasized the changes rather than the continuities seemed to have the better of the argument. FDR and many other New Dealers considered themselves the heirs of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, but, as Otis L. Graham, Jr. showed, most old progressives who remained active during the 1930s judged the New Deal welfare state too coercive. And whether or not New Dealers were generally less moralistic than the typical Progressive, as Richard Hofstadter contended (and I would maintain that they were equally moralistic about different issues), they were-out of necessity-more hospitable to urban ethnic groups and political machines.1 Although the question was not resolved, it elicited so much interesting scholarship that a corollary inquiry looked like a historiographical natural: To what extent was Great Society liberalism continuous with the New Deal and to what extent did it represent a significant shift? With political history in eclipse, however, the answers have lately been left to pundits and ideologists. Neoliberal commentators like E. J. Dionne join Newt Gingrich and other conservatives who have made their peace with FDR in arguing that the Great Society brought decisive changes--often for the worse. Specifically, beginning with the Johnson administration, the federal government grew too big, economic entitlements eroded the work ethic, and demands for rights superseded acceptance of personal responsibilities. To his credit, Gareth Davies takes this second question seriously and understands that research is required to reach sensible answers. Unfortunately, his own answers are unduly influenced by current neoliberal conven-

Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900-1965.

Common Sense and a Little Fire traces the personal and public lives of four immigrant women activists who left a lasting imprint on American politics. Though they have rarely had more than cameo appearances in previous histories, Rose Schneiderman, Fannia Cohn, Clara Lemlich Shavelson, and Pauline Newman played important roles in the emergence of organized labor, the New Deal welfare state, adult education, and the modern women's movement. Orleck takes her four subjects from turbulent, turn-of-the-century Eastern Europe to the radical ferment of New York's Lower East Side and the gaslit tenements where young workers studied together. Drawing from the women's writings and speeches, she paints a compelling picture of housewives' food and rent protests, of grim conditions in the garment shops, of factory-floor friendships that laid the basis for a mass uprising of young women garment workers, and of the impassioned rallies working women organized for suffrage. From that era of rebellion, Orleck charts the rise of a distinctly working-class feminism that fueled poor women's activism and shaped government labor, tenant, and consumer policies through the early 1950s.

Retreat and Retrenchment: Progressives and the Welfare State

This article examines the role of liberal ideology in the formation of the welfare state, explores the changing relationships between left-wing ideology and welfare statism, and investigates the causes for the diminishing influence of progressives on social welfare policy. This article investigates the emergence of the liberal hegemony in welfare statism, a phenomenon that marked the New Deal welfare state until the mid-1970s. Moreover, the authors examine the early response of the left to the welfare state and how that response dramatically changed with the election of Ronald Reagan. Also explored is the role played by neo!ibera Is in chipping away at the foundations of the American welfare state. The authors suggest that welfare advocates must recapture the momentum lost to aggressive neoconservative welfare proposals.

Schooling the Postmodern Body: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Enfleshment

While educators the United States are witnessing a reactionary and ultimately fatuous rearguard defense of the alleged transcendent virtues of Western civilization, a neo-corporatist assault on the New Deal welfare state, and what Jim Merod calls the guiltless counterrevolutionary violence of state power (1987, p. 191), they are also experiencing a new vitality the realm of educational theory. The cultural/moral hegemony of mainstream approaches to curriculum, pedagogy, and epistemology is being fissured and some cases torn asunder by new deconstructive postmodern strategies. Largely imported from literary theory and influenced by continental poststructuralism, postmodern strategies (e.g., Derridean grammatology and Foucauldian discourse analysis) have systematically problematized, if not dismantled, the epistemological certainty and transcendent claims to truth that characterize dominant strands of modernist discourse.1 Suffice it to say that there exists a crisis of representation and a steady and sometimes vehement erosion of confidence prevailing conceptualizations of what constitutes knowledge and truth and their pedagogical means of attainment. Keeping mind the conceptual inflation of the term postmodernity and its unwieldy semantic overloadwhich has come to designate a vast array of artistic, architectural, and theoretical practices I want to make clear that I am using it a severely delimited sense. While postmodernism crisscrosses numerous regions of inquiry, I am using it to refer to the material and semiotic organization of society, primarily with respect to what Stanley Aronowitz calls culture and the homogenization of culture (1981, 1983). That is, I am referring to the current tendency toward desubstantialized meaning or literalness of the visual which students seem unable to penetrate beyond the media-bloated surface of things, thereby dismissing concepts such as society? capitalism, and history which are not immediately present to the senses (Aronowitz, 1983). According to Aronowitz, in the last half of the twen-