Protecting Soldiers And Mothers: The Political Origins Of Social Policy In United States

Protecting Soldiers and Mothers PROTECTING SOLDIERS AND MOTHERS The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States Theda Skocpol THE BELKNAP HARVARD PRESS UNIVERSITY Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England OF PRESS Copyright © 1992by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 1995 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Skocpol, Theda. Protecting soldiers and mothers: the political origins of social policy in the United States / Theda Skocpol. p. ern. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-674-71765-1(cloth) ISBN 0-674-71766-X(pbk.) 1. Public welfare--United States-s-History-c-icth century. 2. Public welfare-United States-History-20th century. 3. United States-Social Policy. I. Title. HV91.S56 1992 92-8062 361. 973--dc20 CIP Dedicated to the memory of my mother, Jennie Mae Becker Barron, and my father, Allan Ernest Barron PREFACE This book grew out of the most exciting things that can happen to a scholar: the discovery of startling new facts and the reworking of preconceived notions to accommodate new possibilities. Let me introduce Protecting Soldiers and Mothers by recounting the unexpected turns of thought and investigation that led to its creation. More than a decade ago, I plunged into the study of public social policies in the United States, planning in due course to produce a book about the roots and subsequent evolution of the Social Security Act and other economic and welfare programs of the New Deal. I intended to trace U.s. policies from the 1930S and 1940s, through the War on Poverty and the Great Society, to the present, and to situate U.S. policies by comparing them with those of the major "welfare states" of Europe. As "background" for this study, I decided to spend a bit of time-one summer--eoming to terms with the failure of the United States to adopt European-style social insurance policies between 1900 and 1930. That would be a prelude to my discussion of the "real action" in U.S. social politics, from the 1930S to the present. In the midst of the summer of 1982, happily in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, I encountered Isaac Max Rubinow's Social Insurance, With Special Reference to American Conditions. Much of Rubinow's book was, as I had expected, an attempt to hold out European examples for the United States to emulate. But then I arrived at the chapters on old-age pensions and found Rubinow claiming in 1913 that many elderly Americans were already receiving public benefits under the rubric of pensions for Union veterans of the Civil War. Fascinated by his description of the breadth and expense of these old-age benefits, I asked myself how historians of U.S. social welfare could have overlooked them-assuming that Rubinow was even close to correct in his empirical description, a matter which I soon set out to investigate. I was even more intrigued with Rubinow's belief in 1913 that Civil War pensions would serve as an "entering wedge for a national system of old-age pensions." Why hadn't that turned out to be true? Before long, I found contemporaries of Rubinow's, fellow reformVB Vll1 Preface ers such as Henry Rogers Seager and Charles Richmond Henderson, who argued that Civil War pensions were actually an obstacle rather than an entering wedge for broader systems of old-age pensions and workingmen's insurance. These progressives acknowledged that many elite and middle-class Americans of their day were repelled by the "political corruption" associated with the expansion of Civil War pensions from the 1870S to the 19lOS. I realized that Civil War pensions were fascinating, not only because they