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Overview
Creating the Welfare State investigates how private business and public bureaucracy worked together to create the structure of much of the modern welfare state in America. Covering the period from the 1980s to the present, this important volume employs interdisciplinary techniques to demonstrate how politics, economics, law, and social theory merged over the course of a century of policy formulation and implementation. The authors also draw upon previously unconsulted sources from government warehouses and archives to analyze the operation of early federal social welfare programs such as vocational rehabilitation. Their discussions range from those early programs to modern ones such as cost of living pay adjustments and social security disability benefits. This emphasis on the notion of the continuing development of welfare programs is a significant factor in the welfare state controversies--a factor often ignored by other historians and writers.
Synopsis
The business community has been the Number One Enemy of welfare programs, 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.
That's bunk, say Edward Berkowitz and Kim McQuaid. Instead of resisting social programs, businessmen initiated them.
In Creating the Welfare State, Berkowitz and McQuaid show how private businessmen played leading roles in shaping the nation's social security, welfare, and health care programs. 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.