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In the closing years of the nineteenth century a few Americans began
to discuss social insurance in earnest. Social insurance as a concept
clearly reflected the institutional approach in welfare. Its advocates
considered dependency a problem primarily of the social system--rather
than of breakdown of relationships or of personal faults for which the
needy should be stigmatized--and they aimed to spread the burden of
dependency more rationally, regularize financing, and assure recipients
their benefits on the basis of objective qualifications rather than
of official discretion, But the actual structuring of the institution
was another matter. Social insurance as a historical development often
compromised the ideal of rationalizing welfare, and represented the
institutional approach only in varying degrees.
The first evidence of Americans' interest in social insurance was economists’
and others’ allusions to foreign experiments, France had operated national
old age, accident, and death insurance on a voluntary basis since the
1850s and 1860s, It was the systems that Chancellor Otto von Bismarck
set up in Germany-in the 1880s, however, that attracted world-wide attention.
The Germans were more radical and systematic, building on the principles
of compulsory coverage, contributions by both employers and employees,
and some subsidy from the state, From Germany the movement spread, with
modifications, among other European peoples. In the 1890s Denmark, followed
by Australia and New Zealand, led one branch of the movement off into
a rather different direction by inaugurating a system of old-age pensions
paid entirely out of the state treasury, using as criteria means and
character tests rather than past contributions by the beneficiary or
his employer. English reformers, to whom Americans had often looked
for leadership, agitated during the 1890s for Denmark-style old age
pensions, and won passage of a workmen's (accident) compensation law
in 1897; but the English social insurance movement did not reach real
fruition until Parliament passed an Old Age Pensions Act in 1908 and
health and unemployment insurance laws in 1911.
The German systems were the most highly rationalized, structured as
they were around actuarial calculations, compulsory participation, and
contributions as the objective criterion for granting benefits. Non-contributory
systems also reflected a degree of rationalization, in that they aimed
to give help without stigma, regularize benefits and finances, and spread
the burden of welfare to all tax-payers; but with their means and character
tests and their gratuitous benefits they smacked of traditional personalized
and discretionary forms of welfare. Of still another variety was the
English workmen’s compensation law, which provided that employers had
to pay benefits to victims of industrial accidents according to a fixed
scale, but did not specify that they had to carry insurance. By not
spelling out the particular institutional patterns for financing and
guaranteeing benefits, the law left the door open to a great deal of
structural confusion and irrationality, As American reformers began
to respond to the European precedents, they demonstrated that when faced
with the actual task of structuring social insurance mechanisms they
would too apply the institutional approach in varying degrees and ways.
They responded first with academic discussion, then by formulating widely
different programs for mothers’ pensions and workmen’s compensation.
It was about 1890 that American editors and other writers began to
take frequent note of the European social insurance movement. For the
first decade and a half the writing was not voluminous, although after
about 1905 it began to grow more rapidly. Three early authors in particular
demonstrated the differing, sometimes conflicting emphases and purposes
that social engineers might build into the new institution.
John Graham Brooks was graduated from the Harvard of Divinity School
in 1875. After three years of further study in German universities,
however he took up a career not as a minister, but as an economist and
reformer. Thereafter he discussed his findings and his further ideas
in a lengthy government report that United States Commissioner of Labor
Caroll D. Wright had printed in 1893, and in subsequent articles and
addresses.1 Brooks' major
contributions were two: he provided Americans with their first detailed
description of European social insurance, especially the German model;
and he demonstrated that the institutional approach in welfare was not
necessarily antithetical to a concern for morality.
In keeping with the institutional approach Brooks subjected social
insurance to a fairly hardheaded analysis. He candidly doubted many
of the claims that German social reformers made for the new device.
There was no real evidence, he reported, that it had made laborers so
content that they would reject socialism, or that it taught workers
the value of thrift, or that it made for better employer-employee relations,
or that it reduced the burden of poor relief to the degree that the
proponents claimed. He doubted, moreover, that the chief good of social
insurance lay on “strictly economic grounds.” Yet he thought it a worthwhile
institution, because it worked to “social advantage.” Accident insurance
had produced a large body of new statistics and an unprecedented public
appreciation for industrial safety. Health insurance had popularized
knowledge of hygiene, and helped people who needed special treatment
obtain it. Social insurance as a whole had produced university courses
and international congresses which in turn spread the new data. It made
for more careful classification of the causes of misfortune. And even
more broadly, it stimulated the broad public consciousness and concern
necessary for social reform.2
Best of all, social insurance was a moral force. Nations were following
Germany’s example not because of demonstrable material results, Brooks
wrote in 1893, but because the idea was so “obviously ethical” and so
in touch with the new feeling of social obligation.” Many of the ablest
thinkers on social affairs” had perceived that “the principle of insurance
is distinctly ethical in its nature.”3
The morality that Brooks saw in social insurance was that of personal
relationships and the institutional approach, not simply that of personal
relationships and character such as COS emphasized. Social insurance
was a device deliberately designed to “distribute the burden of life’s
misfortunes so that they fall most lightly on the weak, the unfortunate
or unlucky,” Brooks declared in 1906. It was “structurally a part of
modern society.” It represented an “organized morality.”4
Brooks recognized that his moral defense of social insurance clashed
head-on with cherished American doctrines of voluntarism, self-help,
and anti-governmentism. But he believed that unfortunate as it was for
private, voluntary mutual-aid institutions, they were of too little
effect and "the evidence is overwhelming that society is unwilling
to wait for the self help institutions to deal with social ills."
At one point he suggested that society would simply have to choose between
self-help and state socialism. But then he turned the self-help argument
on its masters and suggested that with true democracy in government
the ultimate form of self-help was state action. To him the German bureaucracy
demonstrated that the state could at least be an efficient and capable
organization and an admirable social instrument; so there was “something
churlish in objecting to an experiment, at least, on its part.”5
Conceiving of social insurance as still in the experimental stage,
Brooks did not crusade for its immediate adoption in America. He hesitated
because he was aware of the difficulties of designing smoothly-functioning
structures, not because he doubted the principle. “Can the state so
manage this ethical principle as really to help the weaker classes,"
he asked, or will the machinery prove so expensive that the cost of
living among such classes will not be lessened?"
He could not answer his own question, Although educational and moral
results were already in evidence, he argued in 1893, to assess the "material
results ten years at least must pass." Twelve years later
he thought that the United States needed yet another ten years before
it be ready for social insurance, He continued to advocate the reform,
and eventually argued for it even on the basis of economic and material
results.6 But with his hesitation and his advancing
years (he was 64 in 1910) he never became a vigorous social insurance
crusader, His contribution was that of an educator and a moral philosopher.
William F. Willoughlby was an expert on the staff of the United States
Commissioner of Labor in the 1890s. In the previous decade he had studied
at Johns Hopkins University under the German-educated labor economist
and reformer Richard T. Ely, and he too was interested in social insurance.
In 1898 he published a substantial book on the subject in a series which
Ely edited.7
In the end, however, he drew back from the radical approach to the institutionalization
of welfare that Germany's state compulsionism represented, and became
notable chiefly for demonstrating the confusions that could result if
social engineers tried to build social on the principles of private
insurance and make it embody the ethic of individual self-help.
Willoughby viewed welfare problems quite as much in institutional terms
as did Brooks. His book covered quite comprehensively the various technical
problems involved in engineering a smoothly functioning set of insurance
institutions, and made clear that he considered social insurance a new
kind of welfare technique. "The modern movement for insurance represents
the effort to substitute for the old relief funds, which two often were
founded upon a charitable basis, institutions founded upon scientific
principles ….” he wrote. “The significance of this difference can be
seen in the use of the word ‘insurance’ instead of ‘relief’”. The history
of social insurance was somewhat analogous to “the triumph of organized
charity over indiscriminate alms-giving.'' But this reform went a step
further. Its object is to replace relief by a system under which each
makes use of a fund that he himself has assisted to create."8
Yet, although Willoughby used the language of institutions and systems,
he hesitated to follow his own concepts to their logical conclusion.
Logically, the drive toward a thoroughgoing, well-rationalized system
of welfare led to compulsory coverage, so as to exempt nobody in the
classes to covered from either the benefits or the responsibilities
of the system and compulsory coverage meant governmental action, perhaps
even governmental operation of the welfare institutions. Willoughby
declared that he did not wish to make a judgment a priori
against such an increase in state power as did the Social Darwinist
Herbert Spencer, nor for it as did the socialists.9 Yet, like marry opponents of social insurance,
Willoughby feared governmental compulsion to the extent that he readily
let it check his aspirations for a more systematic, institutionalized
welfare system. The thrust of his whole book was to draw attention to
the possibilities inherent in voluntary schemes of insurance.
At the outset Willoughby criticized social insurance commentators,
particularly Brooks, for becoming so enamored with the compulsory systems
of Germany and Austria that they overlooked the voluntary schemes that
had emerged in Europe in the fifty years just past. Such plans,
he believed, were far more relevant to the American student than were
compulsory systems. He thought that of the various voluntary plans trade
union benefit systems and the mutual-aid and "friendly societies"
wherein workmen took the initiative and insured themselves were among
the most ideal. In them the spirit of fraternity was high, and because
they avoided salaried officials and expensive headquarters, the cost
of overhead was low. He was well aware that historically such institutions
had often mixed gratuitous charity freely with very primitive forms
of insurance. But he pointed out emphatically that in England friendly
societies were, with only a minimum of governmental supervision, divesting
themselves of purely charitable features and developing sound insurance
principles. On the American scene the most important voluntary welfare
institutions were the relief departments that several of the large railroad
corporations operated for their employees. Especially in the areas of
accident and sickness insurance he found their benefits liberal, their
financing consistent with the insurance principle of adjusting contributions
to risks, and their classification of risks broad enough to cover the
various needs of employees. These, more than any other institutions,
he thought, were setting precedent for workingmen's insurance in the
United States. If the government wished to encourage social insurance,
let it encourage such voluntary action.10 His quarrel
was less with governmental intervention than with compulsionism.
Willoughby was by no means blind to the shortcoming, of voluntary plans.
He summarily dismissed private commercial insurance because of its high
overhead costs. Even in his favorite railroad relief department he found,
in addition to various technical difficulties, that provisions for old
age and invalidity were quite inadequate. And completely intolerable
was the fact that the employers’ schemes often penalized very heavily
the worker who left his company’s employ, by allowing him no vested
right to the benefits toward which he had contributed. Nor did Willoughby
try to avoid the compulsionists’ main criticism, that voluntary institutions
could never achieve adequate coverage because they would fail to enlist
the very persons who needed protection most. Meeting the argument head-on,
he replied first that really sound voluntary insurance programs had
appeared only so recently that nobody could say how short they would
fall when fully developed. He thought that the trend was for employers
to provide much more insurance since their attitudes were changing and
their industries becoming better organized. Then he proceeded with his
main objection: the cost of compulsion was simply too high. Citing what
were soon to be clichés of American as well as foreign social
insurance opponents, he argued that compulsion would create vast bureaucracy
which would not be flexible enough to suit local conditions; that it
invited fraud and malingering on an enormous scale; and that it put
a country’s industries in a bad competitive position. Such arguments,
insofar as they had substance, were consistent with an attempt to rationalize
the welfare sector, for they pointed to possible frictions and malfunctioning
in the proposed system. But he included others that were extraneous
to considerations aiming at a rationalized, well-functioning welfare
system: that social insurance was “socialistic,” “class legislation,”
and destructive of self-help.11
Thus while Willoughby faced the problems of voluntarism frankly,
he made his judgments partly on the basis of a political-social fundamentalism,
rather than deciding merely whether voluntary or compulsory institutions
would produce maximum welfare.
Turning his face away from compulsionism, Willoughby adhered slavishly
to the principles governing private insurance. Insurance was a “true
science,” he pointed out, that had to be built on careful actuarial
estimates and on such considerations as adjustment of contributions
to risk.12 For
voluntary insurance, he was of course fully correct; but he failed totally
to explore the differences that introducing governmental compulsion
and the taxing power might allow in structure of the institution. Consequently
the effect of his book was to foster a concept of social insurance patterned
much more closely on the private insurance model than it needed to be.
One disservice to the movement was his insistence upon entirely separate
systems for separate risks—accident, sickness, invalidity, old age,
and unemployment. Since the nature of the risks differed, he argued,
some of them relating to occupational hazards and some not, some long-term
and others short-term, etc., each needed its separate system.13
On the surface his position appeared consistent not only with private
insurance principles, but also with the historic drive of welfare to
be more scientific and rational by carefully dividing dependency into
its separate categories, with specialized treatment tailored to each.
As social insurance would develop historically, however, the separation
of systems according to hazard covered would be carried to the point
that it worked against the cause of rationalization, because it produced
un-coordinated systems, begun at different times and using very different
administrative and other methods. Had Willoughby been less blinded with
private insurance principles he might have fostered at least the vision
of a more comprehensive and coordinated set of social insurance institutions.
Willoughby’s combination of private insurance concepts and fundamentalistic
self-help beliefs fostered the notion, moreover, that social insurance
was primarily a savings device. To be sure it was a mechanism to spread
risk. But he thought of it primarily in individualistic and longitudinal
terms, each man assuming the risk of the misfortune he himself might
suffer and spreading it through time. Only secondarily did he view insurance
as a genuinely social device to spread risk latitudinally, from man
to man across a large group. His concept of social insurance was, therefore,
more individualistic than truly social. He thought that the mix of latitudinal
and longitudinal varied with the different risks: sickness insurance,
for instance, was more latitudinal than old age insurance. Yet even
with sickness insurance he thought the basic problem was primarily the
need of each individual to save, and seemed scarcely to recognize the
ineffectiveness of saving for a risk that fell unevenly as did sickness.
If workmen would provide for sickness “personal savings,” he wrote,
“nothing further could be desired.” But few would do so unless "opportunities
for saving are afforded. This insurance does." When Willoughby
made the statement that insurance was an institution whose object was
“to replace relief by a system under which each makes use of a fund
that he himself has assisted to create,” his emphasis was probably more
on the self-help aspect, each man contributing to his own fund, than
on the fact that insurance was an institutionalized and systematic form
of welfare.14 Such longitudinal,
individual-saving, self-help conceptions would constantly reappear in
the discussions of social insurance up to 1935, and would thereafter
be reflected especially in arguments regarding reserve financing of
Old Age Insurance.
Though Willoughby declaimed any intention to say finally that any one
system of social insurance was superior to another, he outlined a program
for action that reflected his voluntarist, private-insurance, and self-help
orientation. The first task, he thought, was to educate, to help people
understand the technical principles of insurance and the differences
between workingmen's insurance and charity. For sickness insurance he
wanted to encourage and improve trade union sick-benefit systems, and
to develop English style “friendly societies.” Some governmental regulation
of such private institutions might be beneficial in the interests of
technical soundness. For the hazard of industrial accidents he favored
legal reform to make employers more liable, and encouragement especially
of railroad relief departments.
The case for compulsion was strongest for accident insurance, he thought,
but he advised that any movement toward compulsion should be small,
restricted to railroads as public carriers. He hoped that accident insurance
on railroads would demonstrate its value, and that manufacturers and
their organizations would voluntarily follow suit. Regarding unemployment,
he saw virtually no possibility of applying the principles of insurance.
His program was to encourage trade union out-of-work benefit funds,
taking care however to promote them as relief systems and not confuse
them with insurance. For the risks of old age and invalidity he doubted
that the time was yet ripe for much progress. In 1865, he observed,
England had set up a system whereby citizens could buy annuities and
life insurance through the government's postal savings banks, but it
had "absolutely failed to accomplish results of importance.” Willoughby
seemed naively bewildered at this failure of voluntarism, and attributed
it to Englishmen’s antipathy to government rather than to weakness of
voluntarism itself. Nevertheless he thought that some similar system
in the United States “could do no harm,” and it might provide a vehicle
for small employers to cover their employees with group insurance. “If
insurance is to become general, it must come through the employers,”
he believed. He did not explain why compulsion by employers was less
onerous than compulsion by the state.”15
Willoughby's central principle of voluntarism had little positive effect
on the public social insurance movement. The experiment that most directly
reflected his principles was, from welfare criteria of preventing and
treating dependency, a failure. In 1907 Massachusetts established a
state-administered system of voluntary life insurance and annuities
sold through savings banks, a system that the reformist Boston attorney
Louis Brandeis promoted partly as a direct alternative to compulsory
old age insurance or pensions. In practice the scheme neither attracted
enough policy holders, nor drew them from a low enough economic stratum
of society to be consequential as a force against dependency. By 1926
it had only about 50,000 policies in force, and even a strong apologist
for it made the unconscious admission that from the beginning its support
among workers came from the “best” and “more thrifty”--i.e. from
those who needed it least.16
Voluntarism had many champions as discussion of governmental social
insurance continued, but among opponents, not supporters. Few real champions
of social insurance sought to achieve their ends by trying to establish
a deliberate government policy of subsidizing and otherwise fostering
voluntary efforts. Paradoxically, however, many staunch proponents of
compulsory systems carried along a baggage of concepts that were logical
only within a voluntaristic framework--especially the idea that social
insurance had to adopt private insurance patterns of risk-grouping and
financing, and the notion that insurance was primarily a device for
each individual to spread his risk over time, savings fashion. As social
insurance moved from discussion to legislation, such concepts, which
Willoughby had helped tie to the movement, affected the new institutions
both in general framework and in technical detail.
A third writer thought more clearly in institutional terms than did
Brooks, understood better than did Willoughby the unique nature of compulsory
social insurance, and more than either made his judgments on the basis
of criteria indigenous to the ideal of maximizing welfare. Charles R.
Henderson incarnated the shift that took place between about 1885 and
1910 from welfare as an avocation of ministers and aristocratic philanthropists
to welfare as a problem for social scientists. During the 1880s he was
a minister in Detroit, worked with the local Association of Charities,
and accepted all of the central COS dogmas.17 Then
in 1892 he changed his vocation to Professor of Sociology at the University
of Chicago. Thereafter he continued his interest in welfare by serving
on the Executive Committee of the Chicago Bureau of Charities, as president
of the NCCC in 1898-1899, and as an active scholar.
As late as 1904 Henderson paid his respects to COs beliefs by editing
a book, Modern Methods of Charity, which presented the welfare
problem in industrialized countries as primarily a question of relief
technique and used COs criteria to judge whether a system were modern.18
But Henderson was a man whose outlook flexed with the times. In 1884,
for instance, he wanted all public outdoor relief “utterly abolished;”
a decade later he argued that the state was “never free from the moral
duty, in the last resort, to see that relief was given.” Personal, private
charity might be superior in “spontaneity, versatility, idealism, [and]
religious fervor," but public relief surpassed it in "completeness,
adequacy, equality of burdens, and the control of criminal tendencies
often mixed up with pauperism." So charity workers should work
to combine the two as complements. During the 1890s he studied in Germany,
and in 1901, at the age of fifty-three, was awarded a Ph.D. degree by
the University of Leipzig. At about the same time he began more radically
to change his thinking on welfare to some approach other than relief.
In 1902 the NCCC appointed him Chairman of a special Committee on Workingmen's
Insurance. He devoted several sections of his 1904 book to the subject,
and followed it with occasional articles. When in 1906 the NCCC committee
returned a report full of verbal mush, Henderson, who had spent part
of 1905 in Europe studying foreign social insurance, spoke out for the
new approach with, in his words, “the strong language of conviction."
In 1908 and again in 1911 he published Industrial Insurance in the
United States, a book which for its time was virtually definitive
and strongly in favor of the reform.19
In one sense, Henderson's language did not emphasize careful institutional
structuring as much as Willoughby's. Since one of Willoughby's main
criteria for judging a system was conformity to the technical principles
of private insurance, he wrote explicitly as an engineer of a social
institution. Henderson’s central criterion, by contrast, was adequate
welfare distributed as broadly as the need, to guarantee economic and
material well-being. Unlike Willoughby, he did not forget what welfare
institutions were supposed to institutionalize. Implicitly, his language
did reflect the search for a systematic, structured approach to welfare,
"At present both custom and law are in a chaotic condition,"
he wrote in reference to protecting workingmen against dependency. The
insurance method promised a way out of such chaos. Charity picked up
broken pieces when nothing else could be done. But something could be
done. Reformers had to find better solutions, and embody them in statute
law.20 In trying to escape chaos by creating insurance
mechanisms, constructed securely around a legal framework, Henderson
spoke the language of the institutional approach.
Henderson had clear notions about the nature of the institution for
which he was aiming. He did not confuse social insurance with individual
saving. From the beginning he spoke the genuinely social language of
“the distribution of these losses over large numbers.” “The minute a
man joins an insurance society he gains a claim on a fund which he could
not 'save' in twenty years,” he wrote in 1909. “Furthermore men are
discovering that co-operation with others opens a finer way of life
than depositing premiums to an individual account." On the other
hand, Henderson did not let his belief that social insurance was not
essentially a form of individual self-help carry him to the point where
he viewed it merely as a form of relief. At least when it was constructed
on the contributory pattern of German insurance, it carried no stigma
of charity, If employers and government helped the working class through
contributions and subsidies to social insurance, that was not charitable
relief. Rather it was a reflection of the fact that the hazards a workingman
suffered were not entirely his fault, but that industry and the total
social organization in large part had created them. Social insurance
with all relevant groups contributing was “common justice, a method
of fairly distributing the extraordinary costs of civilization.”21
Henderson had a clear idea also of which stratum of society social
insurance should be designed to serve. It was for “those who live on
small wages or salaries, and who, in a struggle to live decently and
educate their children, have difficulty in ‘making ends meet.’ These
people deserved the protection of collective institutions for security
because they were productive workers who had lost ownership and management
of the materials and tools of production, not because of “their absolute
misery.” It was “not necessary to exaggerate poverty to prove the need
of a social policy of insurance” The remedy was imperative not because
of abject poverty but because productive workers lived on a “narrow
margin between income and subsistence” and a few weeks of sickness or
other misfortune could quickly pull them below the margin.22
In his attitude toward preventionism Henderson showed a similar clarity
of goal. The idea that it was better to prevent hazards than merely
to mitigate their effects had great inherent appeal, so great that as
time passed many opponents and some advocates of social insurance became
preoccupied with it, to the great confusion of the social insurance
movement as a whole. Henderson recognized a preventionist effect. In
his 1904 book he introduced the topic of social insurance under the
heading “Preventive and Constructive.” The idea that social insurance
would prevent dependency, indeed the very threat of dependency, resulting
from industrial hazards was very central to his thought. “The aim of
social insurance,” he wrote in 1911, “is not only ‘to keep the wolf
from the door’ but to keep him so far away that he cannot destroy sleep
with his howls.” But he was very cautious with the idea of preventionism
interpreted as the most outspoken preventionists would interpret it:
to forestall the hazards before they occurred. He recognized that social
insurance might help significantly to induce changes in the conditions
that produced hazards. “The whole educational influence of the [German]
insurance system,” he declared in 1911, “is directed to diminish the
frequency of accidents and sickness, to combat preventable diseases
. . . , and to improve the conditions of the habitations of wage earners
and their families.” Yet in 1914, shortly before his death, he warned
conferees at the NCCC not to spend all of their time discussing “prevention
of accident and disease.” The “science and wit of man” could not
eliminate all “injuries, mutilation, and weakness.” Each year, “with
unerring certainty, . . . accident, sickness, invalidism, old age, unemployment
or death” would affect a certain number of people “who with their dependents
must have community assistance. Social politics, therefore, while not
neglecting prevention, must organize social insurance.”23
Henderson kept his eye on his central goal, adequate economic and material
welfare distributed as broadly as the need. That, he believed, could
be achieved only through compulsion. (He preferred the term “obligatory
insurance,” however, arguing that a law which a free people accepted
and passed as reasonable was not compulsion.) No purely voluntary device
could meet the needs of the majority of wage earners, especially those
of the unskilled, he wrote. Large industrial firms had the resources
and administrative ability to provide insurance systems for their employees
but small ones did not. In any case, left to voluntarism the “ignorant
and cruel employer” could “drag his nobler competitor to the lower level."
Trade unions had done some good, especially with sick and out-of-work
benefits, but it was unfair to place upon them burdens which business
should assume. Only one worker in ten belonged to a union, moreover,
and that worker was more inclined to view his union as a fighting organization
rather than as a vehicle for mutual aid. Fraternal societies were admirable,
but they too spread the burden of risk wrongly. Henderson did not completely
reject a role for private insurance companies. But he argued that only
compulsion could reduce agents’ fees and the expenses of collecting
premiums to the point where their insurance was acceptable. “Bare cost
of insurance is not a heavy economic burden,” he wrote in 1907; “it
is the warts which weigh most.” Given the failure of voluntary efforts,
he had little hope that even government regulation and subsidies could
make them successful. “Only obligatory insurance, upon a plan which
divides the costs as fairly as possible between wage earner, employer
and the public,” he was sure, “gives any reasonable assurance of success
in this century.”24
Henderson was free to contemplate use of compulsion because he was
not tied to the fundamentalistic slogans which a generation of Americans
reared on the dogmas of laissez faire reflexively hurled against it.
“The assertion, based on nothing, that compulsory social insurance is
'not American' is contrary to the most obvious facts of our history,"
he wrote in 1909. Americans “love to make laws, and every statute and
court ruling is compulsory.” They used compulsion for everything from
building roads to maintaining public systems of education.
Compulsory social insurance, he believed, merely provided protection
to the worker analogous to the security that property laws provided
their employers, Nor would Henderson be “hushed by the sneering epithets,
‘socialism,’ ‘sentimentalism,’ ‘paternalism,’ and . . . German ‘absolutism.’”
To him “such empty and provincial phrases” revealed an “American mind
…empty of knowledge of a world movement, …an indifference to human suffering
which did no credit to our civilization, and a contempt for social science.”
More directly they retarded the process of rationalizing the welfare
sector. “While America, proud of its inventiveness and initiative, lags
in the rear and rails at the 'effete monarchies’ of the Old World,”
he scolded, “European nations have solved the actuarial and economic
problems” of social insurance.25
Though Henderson had surely earned the right to rebuke his fellow Americans,
his own vision was not perfect. A set of institutions designed to serve
the person earning a small wage or salary would not be a complete welfare
system; Henderson argued that only in the dreams of visionaries would
social insurance eliminate all pauperism and all charity. The ease
with which Henderson accepted the idea of residual classes of dependents
to be left to outright relief was his most glaring deficiency. It meant
that he would make virtually no attempt to apply his institutional solution
to the poorest stratum of society, to those absolutely dependent upon
some form of welfare. In effect he was satisfied that the dignity and
status which a non-discretionary system of welfare afforded the dependent
person should, arbitrarily, accrue only to those who were fortunate
enough to have been economically productive. Persons and the families
of persons who because of economic dislocation, racial discrimination,
lack of training, psychological make-up, or repeated bad luck had never
become regular wage- or salary-earners he would consign to being second-class
welfare recipients. In that respect Henderson's deficiency was of the
same kind that plagued voluntary self-help institutions. To be sure,
if (as Henderson predicted) his solution would remove the threat of
dependency from more than half the nation's population,26
a half drawn wholly from low-income groups, the deficiency was certainly
far less in degree if not different in kind than that posed by voluntarism,
To be sure also, Henderson’s limitation of his solution to the potentially
self-supporting elements of the low-income population at least had the
virtue of simplifying and clarifying his goals to the point where the
engineering problems of building institutions to embody them might be
manageable. The exclusion of residual classes was a very logical corollary
of social insurance unless its designers made very deliberate efforts
by careful engineering to eliminate this weakness in the social insurance
structures. Henderson’s fault was his failure to make that effort.
There were further defects in Henderson's vision, from the point of
view of the process of institutionalization. He seemed to contemplate
(though not as explicitly as Willoughby) separate, disconnected systems
for the separate hazards of industrial accidents, sickness, old age,
disability, and death. He scarcely contemplated unemployment insurance,
which Germany did not have and England pioneered only in 1911. By 1911
even his incomplete vision had begun to blur, Admitting that “legal
compulsion seems to be remote” he suggested that states should perhaps
begin by encouraging trade union funds. In the last years before his
death in 1915 he also grew more receptive to the budding schemes of
welfare capitalists. As early as 1909, sensing the connection between
institutionalization in welfare and that in the business sector, he
wrote that “from the point of view of social insurance the tendency
to concentrate manufacturers, commerce and transportation in permanent
corporations is an advantage." The “responsible managers of large
enterprises” had to be “far-seeing men,” and their business organizations
were well adapted to “schemes which require a long view and the accumulation
of funds.” In his last book, published posthumously in 1915, he presented
welfare schemes initiated by capitalists as half-way houses to compulsory
social insurance. In the United States, “where law has not yet developed
far” toward legally obligatory systems, he explained, “there is large
room for voluntary action.”27
Nevertheless in the years 1904 to 1911 Henderson had succeeded in setting
forth some basic principles for institutions that might deal with welfare
needs more completely, certainly, and smoothly. Though his vision was
incomplete his method had the potential, as he said in 1906, of removing
from philanthropy a large burden that did not belong to it and placing
it upon industry where it belonged. Even the apparent blurring of his
vision in his late years did not reflect a total loss of faith. “Probably
we shall blunder on in the good old Anglo-Saxon way,” he predicted in
1913, “try experiments on a small scale and keep the people thinking,
until some day the clouds lift and the lawyers and judges find that
after all a measure required by the national welfare has all the time
been lurking concealed in the cryptic oracles of the fine old constitution.28
As Henderson declined, younger men took up that faith and moved the
social insurance along to actual passage of laws.
In the United States the first forms of social insurance to reach the
stage of effective legislation were workmen's compensation for industrial
accidents and pensions for mothers with dependent children. Proposals
for each began to appear in the late 1890s. In 1897 the New York legislature
passed a bill, later vetoed, to provide cash payments to certain parents;
and in 1898 the same body rejected a workmen's compensation bill modeled
on the English Act. During the first decade of the new century a half-dozen
state legislatures investigated particularly workmen's compensation,
and a few of them passed laws which proved to be either dead letters
or, in the opinion of courts, unconstitutional. In 1908 the federal
government instituted a system of workmen's compensation for its own
employees. But the first really effective, general social insurance
legislation was in 1911, with mothers’ pension laws in Missouri and
Illinois and workmen's compensation laws in ten states.29
Because the two earliest forms of social insurance were at opposite
poles of the social insurance spectrum, together they demonstrated well
the practical issues that came to the fore as the actual process of
institutionalizing welfare got under way.
In the case of workmen's compensation, it was easy to see that the
fundamental problem was one of institutional structuring, Most workmen's
accidents were dramatically related to the very visible institutional
changes that were occurring in processes of production and transportation,
It was quite obvious also that the basic difficulty was friction and
malfunctioning in legal structures already existing. Under the common
law the injured worker could establish his right to compensation only
by a damage suit wherein he proved to the court that the employer had
been at fault. A series of employers’ liability acts that states passed
beginning about 1885 extended somewhat the meaning of employers “fault,”
but did not eliminate three common-law doctrines of great disadvantage
to the workman: the principle of “assumption of risk,” whereby a court
presumed the workman who entered especially hazardous employment to
have knowingly and willingly assumed the special risk; the doctrine
of “contributory negligence,” which held that if the workman himself
were at least partly responsible for the accident, that fact greatly
reduced or even displaced the employer's liability; and the “fellow-servant
rule" which similarly diminished employers’ liability even in cases
where it was not the worker himself but a fellow-worker who was partly
or wholly negligent. A further complication was that, beginning in 1886,
insurance companies began entering the casualty field, offering policies
to employers to cover their liability. Casualty insurance grew rapidly,
and had the effect of introducing a third party between the employer
and the employee who had no direct personal or economic interest in
seeing that the employee got just compensation--whose immediate self-interest
in any given case lay quite on the opposite side. The result was a system
that placed a heavy burden of proof on workers, in a field where solid
proofs were very difficult, and that used perhaps 60% of more of the
insurance dollar for overhead expenses and legal fees. Nor were the
dollars that went to workers distributed evenly for maximum welfare.
Only about one injured worker in ten received damages, but the one who
did often found a sympathetic jury awarding him a great windfall. Damages
were usually in the form of lump-sum payments, moreover, rather than
spread evenly over the time of the recipient's need. With a system so
intimately tied up with economic and legal institutions, so obviously
inefficient, and so haphazard and roulette-like in its functioning ,
the need for rationalization and better structuring was concrete and
clear.30
The solution which reformers offered was an institutional one, embodying
an approach that Germany had pioneered in 1884, European workmen's compensation
systems varied, but the central techniques ran through them all: payment
of benefits to the workman or his survivors according to predetermined
schedules and procedures; and paying them automatically, without raising
the troublesome and costly question of who was at fault. An advocate
on the right wing of the workman’s compensation movement such as P.
Tecumseh Sherman, ex-Commissioner of Labor in New York, might argue
that compensation was simply a device governing more justly the personal
relations between master and servant, and therefore a question of private
justice rather than of the general social welfare. But most proponents
rested their case more broadly on general welfare and institutional
considerations. “The fact of the accident itself is of greater importance
to society than the cause of it," wrote David Ross, Secretary of
the Illinois Bureau of Labor in 1909, "and our plain duty in the
premises is to employ some of the time we have wasted in efforts to
locate legal responsibility in devising plans to meet such occurrence
in a manly business way.31
With the old system so obviously malfunctioning and the need for a
more structured solution set forth in practical language, it was relatively
easy for all groups involved to accept the institutional approach reformers
were offering, Charity workers became interested, conscious of the burden
industry was putting on philanthropy through industrial accidents. Although
labor spokesmen sometimes hesitated because they did not wish to forego
the opportunity to sue in the courts for larger awards, by 1909 most
would have agreed with American Federation of Labor President Samuel
Gompers' report to the AFL convention indicting the old system and calling
for uniform state workmen's compensation laws plus a federal law for
interstate commerce. Businessmen's admiration of efficiency was enough
to overcome even their antipathy for compulsion. The conservative National
Association of Manufacturers found the old system “unsatisfactory”,
wasteful, [and] slow in operation,” and recommended an automatic system
of compensation to “reduce waste, litigation and friction” and especially
to stimulate efforts to prevent accidents. By 1912 even spokesmen for
the casualty companies reluctantly endorsed the new approach if the
door were left open for them to act at carriers of the accident insurance.32
The ready recognition that workmen's compensation offered a structurally
more sound approach by no means assured, however, that the institutions
that emerged would be fully rationalized. Confusion and acrimony merely
moved to the level of the institutions technical design. The interest
groups involved differed markedly, for instance, regarding who should
bear the costs, and how large compensation should be. Spokesmen for
the National Association of Manufacturers denounced as “compulsory charity
and paternalism” resolution of the Central Labor Bodies of New York
City that demanded, a bit fantastically, that the law allow workers
to retain all of their rights to sue under common, law and still entitle
them to automatic compensation at the rate of 65% of wages (with a minimum
of $850 per year), the employer paying the entire contribution. The
manufacturers believed that employees should make “minor contributions,”
and benefits be kept limited, to prevent fraud and “contamination of
. . . qualities of thrift and self-reliance.”33 There were troublesome
questions of administrative structure. Europe offered three basically
different models: Germany's system of compulsory insurance through employer-managed
mutual fund; Norway’s system compelling employers to insure through
a state-administered fund; and England's system of merely holding the
employer responsible for compensation without specifying the type of
insurance carrier or even demanding that they insure their risk at all.
The NAM favored still another variation, compulsory insurance but free
choice of carriers.34 Debate over administrative models and other even
more technical questions provided ample opportunity for introducing
fundamentalistic arguments concerning the proper responsibilities of
government, private enterprise, and the individual. Constitutional considerations
further complicated matters, especially after New York state courts
in 1911 set aside a limited compensation law covering certain hazardous
occupations on the grounds that, by requiring employers to pay regardless
of fault, it deprived them of property without due process of law; while
in the same year courts in the State of Washington upheld a much more
radical law that applied comprehensively and allowed only state-administered
funds as insurance carriers. By 1912 the resulting confusion moved Miles
Dawson, a New York actuary and attorney who had been the moving spirit
behind the pioneer 1898 bill in New York, to Propose one uniform federal
law. Instead, however, the states passed the legislation with great
variety. The “goodly grist” of early compensation laws should have pleased
those who consider it a great advantage of our federal system that it
offers a wide field for experimental legislation,” observed Columbia
University’s Henry Seager in 1912, two years after he published his
notable book entitled Social Insurance, a Program of Social Reform.
But Seager too was apprehensive about the lack of uniformity, fearing
that it created hardship for business.35 Whether or
not it created such hardship, a confusing variety became a notorious
feature of workmen's compensation in the United States. In social insurance
legislation, experiments have had a way of hardening into permanent
institutions.
As a question of better structuring in the welfare sector, workmen’s
compensation demonstrated one type of problem. The problem for reformers
was not that of getting their contemporaries to perceive the issues
in institutional terms. It was easy to see that the problem was
inherent in the industrial system rather than in personal character
or relationships, In fact, many businessmen, insurance company spokesmen,
and lawyers who dealt with the reform scarcely understood it as a question
directly of welfare at all, to be shaped around welfare criteria. To
them it was a matter of business law and organization. With workmen's
compensation, therefore, the problem was to determine what ideas, principles,
and criteria would be institutionalized in administrative and structural
details--not the prior question of whether there would be structuring
and institutionalization at all. As the social insurance movement would
develop, the movements for health insurance, for protection in old age
and disability, and for unemployment compensation would produce different
mixtures of the prior with the secondary question, Meanwhile, polar
opposite from workmen’s compensation lay the other early form of social
insurance, mothers’ pensions.
From 1911 to 1920 thirty-nine states and two territories passed pensions
or assistance laws to give regular cash payments to mothers who had
dependent children and who, according to means tests, were needy. Only
in a most general way was the mothers’ pensions movement related to
the changing organizational patterns of industry. Its purpose was less
to apply a more institutional approach to welfare than to preserve a
very ancient institution of another kind, the family. With their slogan
“care of the needy in their own homes” charity workers had helped to
popularize a spirit of familism that began to heighten at about the
turn of the century; and according to Devine, the slogan reflected a
decline in their interest in “mechanical forms of organization in welfare.36 Consequently the mothers’ pensions movement,
unlike the discussions of workmen’s compensation, scarcely moved on
to the stage of dispute over the structural details of the new institution.
With it the implicit question was the prior one of whether the ideal
of a more automatically-functioning, institutionalized system would
be applied at all. In the end the answer was almost a “no.” Where social
workers accepted mothers’ pensions they did so because the new form
of aid brought to public welfare the personalized approach that the
COs movement had applied to private charity. The pensions remained very
closely tied to the concept of relief. As Ada Sheffield of the Massachusetts
State Board of Charities declared in 1915: “The possibility of invigorating
the outdoor relief system is the crux of the whole discussion on mothers’
pensions.37
From the middle of the nineteenth century a trend in American charity
and relief pointed logically toward some system of mothers’ pensions.
In 1853 Charles Loring Brace, a minister-philanthropist, founded the
private New York Children's Aid Society. Soon the Society was leader
of a broad effort to place dependent children in private homes rather
than put them in orphanages and other institutions of confinement. Fifteen
years later the Massachusetts State Board of Charities began a deliberate
policy of boarding children out at public expense rather than confining
them. Gradually there developed a corollary to the "placing-out"
trends: unless the parents were unable or unfit, they should be allowed
to keep their children in their own homes. With the progressive movement
of the early twentieth century the trend got new impetus from various
sources, ranging from the juvenile court movement to crusading journalists
such as Theodore Dreiser, editor of Delineator. In 1907 Dreiser
began a long series of articles on the plight of children. He went on
to sponsor a "Child Rescue League," and urged President Theodore
Roosevelt to support the reform. In 1909 his and others' efforts produced
a White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, which brought
the entire trend with its corollary; to a great crescendo. Declaring
that “home life is the finest and highest product of civilization,"
the conferees recommended that children of parents who were of "worthy
character" but suffering some “temporary misfortune, and children
of reasonably efficient and deserving mothers who are without the support
of the normal breadwinner[s]," should be kept in their own homes
with enough aid to insure that the homes be suitable places for rearing
them. The conferees recommended that the assistance be private. But
others, including Mothers’ Pensions Leagues and other civic groups,
juvenile court badges such as Ben Lindsey of Denver and Merritt Pinckney
of Chicago, and journalistic crusaders for social insurance such as
William Hard of the editorial staff of Everybody’s Magazine,
sought and eventually got the aid from public funds."
The role of social workers in the movement was ambiguous. Those based
in conservative, prestigious private agencies of the East were especially
hesitant. When State Senator John Ahearn first introduced “destitute
mothers’ bills in successive New York legislatures from 1897 to 1899,
the charity agencies of New York City organized an adamant and successful
opposition, The bills, they argued, would encourage desertions and prevarication,
make children a source of profit, revive public outdoor relief with
its bad effects on thrift and private giving, and introduce a “mechanical
and arbitrary” form of charity instead of one based on the particular
circumstances of each case. Private charity was adequate for all cases
where the need was real.39 When
the demand for mothers’ pensions became a broad movement a dozen years
later, similar arguments from the well-established, conservative agencies
were common. Yet even opponents helped the movement along, in general
by adopting the slogans of "aiding the poor in their homes"
and "adequacy of material relief,” and more specifically by fostering
the idea that fatherless families were a class apart, deserving of special
treatment. “The poverty of widows left with young children,'' declared
Almy of the Buffalo COs in 1899, was a kind of “heroic poverty” which
deserved "liberal and continuous outdoor relief," If private
agencies opposed public relief, they had to be sure that their aid to
widows was ample. In direct response to the Ahearn bills, the New York
COs added a permanent Committee on Dependent Children whose expressed
purpose was "to prevent the necessity for the breaking up of families.”
By 1909 the United Hebrew Charities of New York sponsored a special
Widowed Mothers’ Fund for the city, based on private support.40
All of the special efforts, moreover, seemed only to prepare the way
for some public system. By 1911 Homer Folks, a nationally recognized
leader and writer in the field of child saving and originally one of
the chief opponents'' of the Ahearn bills, was almost ready to step
across the line from private to public. “That the private relief societies
in New York City as a whole have failed to provide adequately for widows
with children … can hardly be questioned,” he admitted. “Personally
I have felt disposed to favor some form of public relief.” A year later
Folks gave one last call for adequate pensions from private sources;
but he declared that breaking up families was a greater evil than public
relief, and if we do not secure from private sources sufficient funds,
then, without hesitation we ought to have a system of public relief
to widows," Almy reflected the same wavering spirit. “I do not
care whether relief is a public or private function," he told NCCC
conferees in 1912, public relief might tend to pauperize, but "pauperizing
by alms is no worse than pauperizing by neglect…. I am not willing to
believe that in this day public outdoor relief cannot be successful."41
Despite his brave words, Almy wanted to delay any system of public
pensions to widows until the public was ready to pay for high-quality
administrators and adequate investigation of cases. Similarly, Folks
was favorably disposed “only and emphatically upon the condition that
it shall be radically different in spirit and method from ordinary public
outdoor relief."42 As the mothers' pensions movement
gained momentum after 1911, social workers often kept their feet on
the brake. But they did not base their hesitation on opposition to a
public form of welfare per se or to disturbing the status
quo. Rather they emphasized that they did not wish to repeat the errors
of traditional poor-law relief, with its political favoritism and lax
administration. The logic of their criticisms diverged into two differing
directions. Was the solution to substitute a more thoroughly personalized
and individualized form of welfare, or to provide something even more
systematic and institutional?
In August of 1912 the Russell Sage Foundation sent a field researcher,
Christian Carstens, to observe several early mothers' pensions systems
in operation. Soon he and Mary Richmond, director of the Foundation's
Charity organization Department, cast their influence against the new
reform. Miss Richmond was on the eve of transforming individualized
case work from a technique to a dogma; and reports from the Sage Foundation
favored her highly particularistic approach rather than, in her words,
“one remedy applied wholesale by statute.” Advocates argued that the
pensions were a matter of justice, payments for the services mothers
rendered to the community. Richmond and Cartens thought it wrong to
mix into relief the concept of payment for services rather than for
proven need, of fixed payments not adjusted to the specific “needs or
the characteristics of the individual,” and of giving money without
“taking responsibility for what happens,” They believed that justice
was served only when social workers followed the payments with personal
services to assure that the families developed careful plans for the
future and observed proper rules of health, schooling, and other training.
Carstens thought for example that such case investigation as existed
in Chicago, under the pioneer Illinois law, was almost a form of “espionage,”
since case workers did not know their families intimately enough to
provide follow-up services or even to assure that the incomes were adequate.
Nor did he and Miss Richmond think that state legislation or machinery
could assure the personalized services they sought. The state might
be useful for promoting broad preventive measures such as stricter laws
to force relatives, deserters, and illegitimate fathers to assume their
responsibilities, and to make industry provide workman's compensation
and more healthful working conditions.
But for relief work “a well localized form of organization was “absolutely
necessary.” Mothers’ pensions were faulty because they were not sufficiently
personal and particularistic.43
In contrast to Carstens and Richmond ware other social workers who
put Primary emphasis on the need for a more general, systematic, and
comprehensive approach. Some, such as a Committee of the Association
of Neighborhood Workers that settlement worker Mary Simkhovitch headed
in New York in 1913, thought that mothers' pensions did not preclude
“a comprehensive plan of public insurance,” But others, such as Max
Senior of Cincinnati's United Hebrew Charities, feared that they would
create satisfaction with “a partial remedy” when social workers should
insist on the “full program,” by which he meant “compulsory insurance
against accident, sickness, old age, and invalidity… in every state
of the union.” A most notable opponent of mothers pensions was Devine,
Secretary of the New York COs, editor of Survey, and Director
of the New York School of philanthropy. Devine had been chairman of
the committee formed to oppose the Ahearn bill in 1899, but from that
time on he had been in the forefront of efforts to provide private funds
to worthy parents whose need was additional income, and thus to prevent
any needless breaking up of families. Social workers and philanthropists
too often overlooked the close relationship between “making of the home
the protection of childhood” and insuring the income, he declared in
1907. Although in good COs language he could deplete “the permanent
establishment of some external device, some governmental mechanism,
as a substitute for individual and parental responsibility," he
did not apply such logic to true social insurance. He was an early supporter
of workmen’s compensation, and when the American Association for Labor
Legislation formed a committee in 1913 to lead the social insurance
movement, he became its chairman and supported a broad program of compulsory
state insurance against death, industrial accidents, sickness, unemployment,
and old age. 44
But mothers' pensions, Devine declared in 1913, had “no place in a
rational scheme of social legislation.” “As an advocate . . . of social
insurance, I sharply challenge the proposal for weekly or monthly payments
to mothers from public funds raised by taxation, as not in harmony with
the principles of social insurance." The reform had neither a claim
to the name of pension nor any “element of prevention or radical cure
for any recognized evil.” Instead mothers’ pensions were “merely a revamped
and in the long run unworkable form of public outdoor relief."
Therefore they constituted “an insidious attack upon the family, inimical
to the welfare of children and injurious to the character of parents."
Devine saw in them “all that is most objectionable in state Socialism,"
but not what he considered to be the socialists’ admirable ideal of
social justice. Justice, Devine thought, would come only through a form
of social insurance that established “a recognized and organic relation”
between the death or disability of a father and the support of his family.
The “honorable income” that Devine wished for the mothers was one from
a state administered fund, raised by the joint contributions of the
insured and their employers, the burden lightly felt because widely
distributed.” He recognized that his system had the inherent defect
that some families would not qualify and would have to be treated residually;
but he, like Henderson, was quite content to leave such families to
outright relief. The proper reform for treating residual cases lay in
improvement of public relief administration—“rather than in a process
of self-delusion and of solemn pretense that changing the names of things
alters their essential character.'' 45
When professional social workers gradually came to accept the new public
aid to mothers it was because they saw in it a reform of poor relief,
more than social insurance. They had little choice but to
accept. However much leaders in conservative private (or public) agencies
of the East might object, in 1911 and 1912 the movement took root in
Missouri, Illinois, and Colorado, From the Midwest and the West, which
had traditionally relied heavily on public systems of relief, it spread
nationwide, Fourteen states passed legislation in 1913, twenty-two more
by 1920, and every state except Georgia and South Carolina by 1933.
It was a time of general upgrading of public relief, as represented
especially by the concurrent trend of establishing municipal Bureaus
of Public Welfare. The administration of mothers' pensions reflected
the new trend, and gradually mollified the critics. By 1916 Almy was
ready to praise those who had directed their “energy and hard work in
making public outdoor relief efficient, rather than substituting private
work . . . . The widows' pension work is becoming public,” he added,
“and I am glad that it is so.” Five years later even Carstens admitted
that “social workers as a whole have now accepted the principle of public
aid to mothers," and praised its good effects on all public aid.
46
In actual fact, the
mothers’, assistance laws were scarcely cause for exuberance. Many of
them left counties free to choose whether or not they would participate.
Some were little more than enabling acts, giving the counties permission
to provide the pensions from their own funds, but providing no state
aid. As late as 1931 only about half of the eligible counties were providing
the pensions, and then often at niggardly levels.47
Had social workers been striving more deliberately for a fully-rationalized
set of welfare institutions rather than merely trying to upgrade administration
of public relief, they might have been more disturbed that the systems
were spotty and incomplete. But the impulse to institutionalize the
welfare sector reflected itself only slightly in the movement for mothers’
pensions.
*
*
*
*
The period from 1893
to about 1915, when a health insurance movement got underway in earnest,
was the first phase of the American campaign for social insurance. It
exposed the two major questions men would have to answer, implicitly,
if a new approach to welfare consonant with other changes in America's
social structure were to become a reality: whether men could think in
institutional rather than personal and relational terms and apply that
thinking to the problem of dependence; and if so, what basic concepts
and social goals would they structure into the institutions they were
about to create. Brooks with his fusion of moralism with the institutional
approach, Willoughby, with his concepts derived from private insurance,
saving, and self-help, and Henderson with his central concern of maximizing
welfare and his understanding of the logic of compulsory insurance together
illustrated the range of issues involved in answering the two questions.
Early struggles for workmen's compensation and mothers' pensions further
demonstrated that range, since the protagonists saw the one quite clearly
as a problem of an industrial society's institutional structures while
they conceived of the other almost entirely in traditional terms as
a matter of public relief. Despite variety and profound disagreements,
however, before 1915 social insurance advocates and other discussants
did not divide themselves into clearly defined camps and schools of
thought to the degree that they did thereafter. From the acceleration
of the health insurance movement in 1915 until the Social Security Act
of 1935 the protagonists perpetuated and amplified the issues, but they
did so more and more within separate circles of discussion, divided
by differing professional interests and social ideas.
Notes, Ch. 2
1
John Graham Brooks, Compulsory Insurances in Germany:
Including an Appendix Relating to Compulsory Insurance in Other Countries
in Europe (Fourth Special Report of the Commissioner of Labor, Prepared
under the Direction of Commissioner of Labor Carroll D. Wright, revised
edition; Washington, 1895). See especially Brooks, “The Future Problem
of Charity and the Unemployed,” The Annals of the American Academy
of Political and Social Science, 5 (July, 1894, 1-27; Brooks, “Report
on German Workingmen's Insurance," Proceedings of the National
Conference of Charities and Corrections (hereafter cited as NCCC
Proceedings (1905), 452-57; and Brooks, “Necessity for Social
Insurance," The Annals of the American Academy of Political
and Social Science, 38 (July, 1911), 85-89.
2
Brooks, Compulsory Insurance in Germany, 285-92.
3
Ibid., 288, 286.
4
Brooks, “On Humanizing Insurance," in Industrial Insurance:
The Existing Need of Providing Aid for Injured Workingmen and Their
Dependent Families--A Review of Methods (Chicago? 1907?), 28; Brooks,
“Report on German Workingmen's Insurance," 453.
5
Brooks, Compulsory Insurance in Germany, 288-93, 286.
6
Ibid., 286, 293; Brooks, “Report on German Workingmen's Insurance,"
453-54;Brooks, “Necessity for Social Insurance.”
7
William Willoughby, Workingmen's Insurance (New York, 1898).
8
Ibid., 4.
9
Ibid., 341-42.
10
Ibid., iv, 348-51, 284-311, 345-48, 358-60.
11
Ibid., 314, 311, 312, 353, 339-41.
12
Ibid ., 15. For an enlightening, concise discussion of the essential
differences between private and compulsory insurance, see W. Rulon Williamson's
paper in Social Insurance Legislation (New York, 1935; American
Management Association insurance series pamphlet no.21), 1-22.
13
Willoughby, Workingmen's Insurance, 15-21.
14
Ibid., 3, 15-16, 13-4.
15
Ibid:, 358-59, 350, 344, 361, 375-78, 260-64, 360, 347.
16
Louis D. Brandeis, “Massachusetts's Substitute for Old Age Pensions,”
The Independent, 65 (July 16, 1908), 125-28; Alice H. Grady,
“Insurance Through the Savings Bank,” The Survey, 55 (Feb. 15,
1926), 559.
17
Charles R. Henderson, “Cooperation of the Churches,” NCCC
Proceedings (1884), 80-83.
18
Charles R. Henderson, Modern Methods of Charity: An Account
of the Systems of Relief, Public and Private, in the Principal Countries
Having Modern Methods (New York, 1904).
19
Henderson, “Public Relief and Private Charity,” The Charities Review,
3 (Mar., 1894), 231; Henderson, Modern Methods of Charity, 69-75,
507-08. See especially Henderson, “Workingmen's Accident Insurance,"
Charities and The Commons, 17 (1906-1907), 823-25; and Henderson,
“The Logic of Social Insurance,” The Annals of the American Academy
of Political and Social Science, 33 (Mar., 1909), 265-77. “Report
of the Special Committee [on Workingmen's Insurance]," NCCC
Proceedings (1906), 452-57, discussion on 598-99; Henderson, Industrial
Insurance in the United States (second edition; Chicago, 1911).
20
Henderson, Modern Methods of Charity, 507; Henderson, NCCC
Proceedings (1906), 599.
21
Henderson, Modern Methods, 507,72; Henderson, “The Logic
of Social Insurance,” 269; Henderson, Industrial Insurance, 7.
22
Henderson, Industrial Insurance, 43-47, 41.
23
Henderson, Modern Methods, 69; Henderson, Industrial
Insurance, 44, 9-10; Henderson, "The Right of the Worker to
Social Protection," NCCC Proceedings (1914), 357.
24
Henderson, Industrial Insurance, 81-82, 10, 90; Henderson,
Modern Methods, 69; Henderson, “Workingmen's Accident Insurance,”
824.
25
Henderson, "The Logic of Social Insurance" (cited note
19), 271, 265; Henderson, Industrial Insurance, 44.
26 Henderson,
Modern Methods, 73; Henderson, Industrial Insurance, 43.
27 Henderson,
Industrial Insurance, 111; Henderson, “The Logic of Social Insurance”
(cited note 19), 269; Henderson, Citizens in Industry (New York
and London, 1915), Ch. 1.
28
Henderson, /in NCCC Proceedings (1906), 596-600; Henderson,
“Insurance Against Unemployment,” The American Labor Legislation
Review, 3 (June, 1913), 182.
29
Homer Folks, “Proposed Legislation Concerning Children in New York,”
The Charities Review, 6 (July-Aug., 1897), 493-500; Clarence
W. Hobbs, Workmen’s Compensation Insurance: Including Employers'
Liability Insurance (New York, 1939), 86-89, 95;Abraham Epstein,
Insecurity, A Challenge to America (third edition; New York,
1936), 628.
30
Theodore E. Gaty, Evolution and Revolutions of Liability Insurance
(New York, 1912), 3; John Mitchell, “Burden of Industrial Accidents,”
The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science,
38 (July, 1911), 81; Mitchell, The Wage Earner and His Problems (Washington,
1913), 51-53; see also Crystal Eastman, Work Accidents and The Law
(New York, 1910); The Annals of the American Academy of Political
and Social Science, 38 (July, 1911).
31
P. Tecumseh Sherman, “A Compensation Law and Private Justice,”
The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science,
38 (July, 1911), 151-58; David Ross, “Employers’ Liability Laws,” American
Federationist, 16 (Nov., 1909), 953.
32
See, for instance, Clarence H. Mark, “Why Workingman's Insurance Is
Needed," in Industrial Insurance (pamplet, Chicago Daily
News, 1909), 6; and remarks of Charles R. Henderson, NCCC Proceedings
(1906), 598. Samuel Gompers, “Report to American Federation of Labor
Convention, 1909,” in Hayes Robbin, ed.; Labor and the Employer (New
York, 1920), 135-36; Ferdinand C. Schwedtman and James A. Emery, Accident
Prevention and Relief (New York, 1911), xiii-xiv. For insurance
companies' position see, for instnace, Frank E. Law, Workmen's Compensation
for Accidents (New York, 1912); and Edson S. Lott, Workmen's
Compensation Laws as Distinguished From Employers' Liability Laws,
(New York, 1912) .
33
National Association of Manufacturers, Preliminary Report of the
Committee on Industrial Indemnity Insurance (New York, 1910), 17;
Schwedtman and Emery, Accident Prevention and Relief, 263-65.
34
For discussion of the merits and demerits of the different carriers
see especially "After the Common Law What? A Symposium," The
Survey, 28 (May 4, 1912), 239-49. For a strong indictment of the
state fund plan, see especially Sherman, Invasion of the Insurance
Field By the State (New York? 1913); for a defense see Hamilton
Higday, “The Washington Workmen's Compensation Act and its Critics,”
The Survey, 30 (June 21, 1913), 393-98. Schwedtman, Cooperation
or --What? (New York? 1912), 6-7.
35
Hobbs, Workmen's Compensation Insurance, 91; Irwin Yellowitz,
Labor and the Progressive Movement in New York State (Ithica,
1965), 107-08; Miles M. Dawson, “The System Best Adapted to the United
States,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science, 38 (July, 1911), 175-83; Henry R. Seager, “Introductory
Address,” The American Labor Legislation Review, 2 (Feb., 1912),
11-12.
36
David I. Green, “Treatment of Needy Families in Their Homes by Public
Agencies,” NCCC Proceedings (1903) 291-97; “Care of Needy Families
in Their Homes,” Charities, 8 (Nov. 2, 1901) 353-54.
37
Ada Eliot Sheffield, “The Influence of Mothers' Aid Upon Family Life,”
The Survey, 34 (July 24, 1915), 378.
38 Henry W.
Thurston, “Dependent Children,” in Edwin R. A. Seligman and Alvin Johnson,
ed;, Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York, 1930), III,
398-403; Ada J. Davis, "The Evolution of the Institution of Mothers'
Pensions in the United States," The American Journal of Sociology,
35 (Jan., 1930), 573-87; Roy Lubove, The Struggle for Social Security,
1900-1935 (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 96-101; Robert Hebbard, “Charitable
Relief and Congestion," The Survey, 25 (Mar. 25, 1911),
1060-61; For text of the 1909 White House Conference conclusions see
U. S. Children's Bureau, Foster-Home Care for Dependent Children
(Bureau publication no. 136; Washington, 1924), 195-200; or White
House Conference on Child Health and Protection, Dependent and Neglected
Children (New York, 1933), IV, C-1, 59. For an excellent illustration
giving the flavor of the journalistic promotion of mothers' pensions,
see Frederic C. and Marie Jenny Howe, “Pensioning the Widow and the
Fatherless,” Good Housekeeping, 57 (Sept., 1913), 282-91.
39
Edward T. Devine, et al., “Brief in Opposition
to Senator Ahern's Destitute Mothers' Bill," Charities,
2 (Apr. 8, 1899), 2-3.
40
Frederick Almy, “The Relation Between Private and Public Outdoor
Relief--II,” The Charities Review, 9 (Apr., 1899), 69; “Dependent
Children in New York City,” Charities, 7 (Nov. 2, 1901), 368-74;
editorial, Charities, 2 (Mar. 25, 1899), 8; Belle Israels, “Widowed
Mothers,” The Survey, 22 (Sept. 4, 1909), 741-42.
41
Homer Folks, “Charitable Relief and Congestion,” The Survey,
25 (Mar. 25, 1911), 1060; Folks, “Discussion,” NCCC Proceedings (1912),
487; Almy, “Public Pensions to Widow; Experiences and Observations Which
Lead Me to Oppose Such a Law,” NCCC Proceedings (1912), 481-85.
42
Almy, “Public Pensions to Widows,” 482, 485; Folks, “Charitable Relief
and Congestion,” 1060.
43
Mary E. Richmond, “Motherhood and Pensions,” The Survey, 29 (Mar.
1,1913), 774-80; C. C. Carstens, “Public Pensions to Widows with Children,”
The Survey, 29 (Jan. 4, 1913), 459-66; Richmond, “ ‘Pensions’
and the Social Worker,” The Survey, 29 (Feb. 15, 1913), 665-66;
John M. Glenn, Lilian Brandt, and F. Emerson Andrews, Russell Sage
Foundation, 1907-1946 (New York, 1947), I, 130. For critique of
Carstens' objections by a journalist who promoted mothers' pensions
see William Hard, “The Moral Necessity of 'State Funds to Mothers,”
The Survey, 29 (Mar. 1, 1913), 769-73.
44
Mary K. Simkhovitch et al., letter to the editor,
The Survey, 29 (Mar. 15, 1913), 843; Max Senior, “Discussion,”
NCCC Proceedings (1912), 491-92; see especially Edward T. Devine,
"Relief and Care of the Poor in Their Homes," The Charities
Review, 10 (Oct., 1900), 334-45; and Devine, “The Breaking up of
Families,” The Charities Review, 10 (Dec., 1900), 461-68; Devine,
“Income and Relief Measures,” Charities and the Commons, 17 (1906-1907),
756-68; Devine, “Pensions for Mothers,” The American Labor Legislation
Review, 3 (June, 1913), 192.
45
Devine, “Pensions for Mothers,” 193, 198, 194; Devine, The Normal
Life (New York, 1915), 188-89.
46
Epstein, Insecurity, a Challenge to America, 628-30. For
the close relation between the mothers' pensions and BPW movements,
see Lubove, The Struggle for Social Security, ch. 5; and Gertrude
Vaile, letter to Mary E. Richmond ca. February, 1915, in Ralph
and Muriel Pumphrey, The Heritage of American Social Work: Readings
in Its Philosophical and Institutional Development (New York, 1961),
335 –39. Almy, “The Relationships of Public and Private Charities,"
NCCC Proceedings (1916), 305; C. C. Carstens, “Discussion,” Proceedings
of the National Conference of Social Work (1921), 240-41.
47
Epstein, Insecurity, a Challenge to America, 629-35.
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