Social Insurance in the Gilded Age & Progressive Era-- Review of Theda Skocpol book Protecting Soldiers and Mothers

It is a truism of the history of the American welfare state to observe–either defensively or smugly, depending upon one’s politics–that the development of the American variety of welfare state came much later in the U. S. than in Europe. Later and more meagerly to boot. If we look at the major varieties of contemporary social welfare provision–Social Security, government sponsored health care, generalized old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, etc.–the observation is true enough. But Theda Skocpol, in her massive rethinking of this truism, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, convincingly overturns this earlier orthodoxy. Skocpol shows that upon closer examination, in at least two major categories of social welfare provision–programs for soldiers and their dependents and programs for mothers and dependent children–the U.S. had much more extensive programs, much earlier, and with more generous provisions than either the smug or the defensive have previously recognized. Not only was a prototypical welfare state in place immediately after the close of the Civil War, but it contained features so unique that Skocpol claims we can identify two welfare states: one Paternalist and one Maternalist in basic structure.

Skocpol is a political scientist rather a historian. Her approach to the subject thus has the earmarks of her profession. Her sources are often treatises in political science rather than works of history, and she expends a good deal of her effort on constructing models of political dynamics as frameworks for her analysis. These models will likely have relatively little appeal to historians, but she adds significantly to the descriptive historical scholarship in the course of this work.

Prior Historiography-

Skocpol sees prior scholarship on the American welfare state as based on an “evolutionary assumption” that the course of such developments in Western Europe is the presumed model for national social provision. Explanations of why America lagged behind Europe then tend to take one of two tracks. One track seeks to explain the absence of major public welfare-state programs prior to the Social Security Act by pointing to various differences between the American and the European experiences in the form of missing factors in the American political system or culture. The other track points to those factors present in American society which served as obstacles to this evolution. Both tracks share the largely unquestioned assumption that there was in fact little or not national social provision prior to the Social Security Act, and that this is something anomalous which needs explaining.

Writing in 1992, Skocpol identifies four prior phases of the historiography along these two tracks. One school, prominent in the period of the 1930s to 1960s, saw the rise of social welfare states as being a more or less inevitable consequence of industrialization. According to this view, the move from rural to urban settings, the disappearance of the extended family, the shift to wage-dependency, the new phenomenon of industrial unemployment, increased life-spans, all combined to render traditional strategies for providing economic security increasingly unworkable. This breakdown in the viability of more traditional approaches led to demands for social provision, and hence, social welfare states. This view explains fairly well the arrival of an American welfare state, but does not do such a good job explaining the delay in its arrival. After all, industrialization was at full steam already in the Gilded Age, and yet we do not (apparently) see an American welfare state until the New Deal.

A competing historiography, developed during the same period, emphasized various presumed values prominent in American culture that served as obstacles to the development of an American welfare state. In particular, this school pointed to the tradition of classic Lockean political liberalism which made Americans distrust government and glorify ideals of individualism. Turning to government would then be antithetical to these traditional values and this antipathy explains why social welfare programs were apparently late in arriving in America– although this school has more trouble explaining why they arrived at all, since these traditional values were thought to still be active at the time of the New Deal (and on into the present day perhaps).

Starting with scholars writing in the early 1970s, two critiques developed of these traditional accounts. Looking again at the values explanation, scholars pointed out that the values which drove American ideology were by no means so one-dimensional. At the same time that Lockean liberalism was present, so too were competing communalist values, such as those arising from Christian religious traditions, e.g., the Social Gospel movement. In this same vein, the tradition of “republican civic virtue,” which grew out of the Revolutionary War, likewise moderated pure liberalism.

The second set of critiques emphasized the importance of political actors in both bringing about and delaying the American welfare state. This critique emerged from labor historians, who tended to emphasize the role of various labor-connected reform and social justice crusades as crucial political forces bringing about American programs of social provision. It also appeared as part of various analyses focused on the supposed political hegemony of business interests and was part of various types of economic class-based narratives. Often these business-oriented accounts pointed to a presumed “welfare capitalism” as a major driver in the shaping of welfare state policy.

The most recent development in the historiography was the appearance of “feminist” accounts, which Skocpol finds to be mostly wide of the mark. Although there is an important gender component to the story, it is not to be found in the early work of such historians as Alice Kessler-Harris or Mimi Abromovitz, who tend to see the gender issue in terms of various stratagems for male-domination of women through the proxy of social welfare programs. The problem with such analyses, according to Skocpol, is that they fail to recognize the role women and women’s organizations played in producing much of the early American social welfare state. In this respect, Skocpol’s take on the role of gender is closer to that of Kathryn Kish Sklar in her history of the role of Florence Kelley in the creation of the American Consumers Federation (and, I would add, the later work of Kriste Lindenmeyer in her account of the creation of the U. S. Children’s Bureau. [1]

But just as there are problems with the standard explanations, there are problems with these newer accounts as well. The core problem with all of them is they falsely assume that there was no social welfare state in America prior to the New Deal, and so they all are seeking to one degree or another to explain a phantom problem. Skocpol looked at state and national social programs from the 1870s through the 1920s and found that there were significant forms of national social provision prior to the New Deal, and these early programs contained unique features which shed a new light on the origins of the American welfare state.

Civil War Pensions-

In 1889 the President of Harvard University, Charles Eliot, surprised his fellow Bostonians by announcing that he was switching his life-long party affiliation from Republican to Democrat. He told the Bay State Club of Boston in a speech that one of the main reasons he was doing so was as a protest against the extravagances of the Civil War Pension system under Republican administrations. In this regard, he was making common cause with such stalwarts of Democratic protest as New York City-based Puck magazine, which had been crusading against pension excesses for years (see figure 1).

That the Civil War Pension system had become a political target of Mugwumps like Eliot revealed, Skocpol says, that it had become a significant social welfare system–the kind of substantial system which generates political controversy.

The system of Civil War pensions began almost as soon as the War, with the first pension program enacted in February 1862. This law was designed to pay (fairly generous) pensions to Union soldiers disabled in the conflict. [2]These pensions were scaled by military rank. By 1864 the first of many adjustments was enacted, paying differential rates based on the type of disability, with certain injuries (e.g., loss of both hands) receiving higher compensation. Under the 1862 law, widows and orphans and other dependents of deceased soldiers collected the pension that the solider would have collected had he been disabled rather than killed. Thus, right at the outset we have a federal pension system paying disability and survivors benefits. Before the War, there were about 10,000 military pension recipients costing the federal treasury about $1 million a year. By the end of the War the number of pensioners exceeded 126,000 and the annual cost was $15 million. By the mid-1870s the pension growth curve had peaked–or so it seemed for a time. Subsequent legislation, most importantly the Dependent Pension Act of 1890, considerably liberalized the system. The 1890 law broke the connection between the pensioners’ disability and a war-related injury; any disabled veteran became eligible, whatever the cause of his disability. As a matter of practice, this meant that the Civil War Pension system had become a de facto old-age retirement program, because if the veteran was too old to work this was treated as functionally equivalent to being disabled. In 1906 this de facto practice was codified into law.

By1910 about 28% of all men age 65 and older in the country were receiving Civil War pensions–making the pension system in effect a national retirement program for at least one major cohort of citizens. Over 300,000 widows, orphans and other dependents were also on the pension rolls at that point. The result of all of this was that by 1910 over 90% of all living veterans were pension recipients. In its peak cost-year of 1894 the Civil War pension system accounted for 37% of all federal expenditures (the Social Security program, by contrast, has never exceeded about 25% of federal expenditures). [3]

The result of all of this was that by the late 19^th century America had in place a de facto national welfare state, for a significant segment of the population. A number of factors contributed to this: competitive party politics (with Republicans using generous pensions as a party selling point); pressure from interest groups like the Grand Army of the Republic; pensions became a vehicle for Congressional patronage; and the fact of unplanned federal surpluses due to continued high tariffs during the 1880s provided a ready source of funds for repeated program liberalizations.

What was unique about this first national system of social provision was that it was restricted to a narrowly defined group of especially worthy citizens, who were rewarded for their worthiness with exceptionally generous benefits. The European approach had been the opposite: to pay relatively modest benefits to the widest possible class of citizens, often based on neediness rather than worthiness. This is also one key reason, according to Skocpol, that this early precedent failed to become the model for a generally applied welfare state as part of the reforms of the Progressive Era. The story of the failure of generalized “workmen’s insurance” in the Progressive Era also involved conflicts between organized labor (who generally opposed government action) and the male experts in the field who were advocating just such government-sponsored social provision. This failure was not repeated, however, in the domain of programs for women and children.

The Maternalist Welfare State-

In the European model, the welfare state was a paternalist system designed, as Skocpol put it, “to keep respectable working-class families headed by male breadwinners away from the indignities of poor relief.” [4] It was this paternalist model that the Progressive Era reformers tried and failed to follow in converting the Civil War Pension system into a generalized American welfare state. But there was another model, uniquely American, which Skocpol calls the Maternalist Welfare State, and this alternative was surprisingly successful.

Laws limiting hours of work or regulating working conditions for health and safety failed to be won by male workers, but by 1921 there were 41 states which had enacted special laws placing limits on the hours which women could be required to work. Many states also prohibited requiring women to work at night, and laws regulating health and safety conditions for women workers were becoming commonplace during the Progressive Era. Before the Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional in 1923, minimum wage laws for women had been enacted in 15 states and the District of Columbia (but nowhere for male workers). In 1920, female workers got their own permanent Women’s Bureau in the federal government, to supplement the generic Department of Labor which was supposed to protect the interests of both male and female workers. Even organized labor cooperated with women’s organizations (such as the Consumers League and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union) to support these labor reforms for women (but not for men).

The reasons for the success of the maternalist approach to labor reform fall into two categories: unintended consequences of the place women occupied in the American polity, and a widely accepted belief that women–as the mothers of the nation and the repositories of republican civic virtue–were, like veterans, an especially worthy class of citizens.

The special effectiveness of women was ironically due in part to their disenfranchisement from the political system. This meant that their group efforts–in women civic clubs especially–were more civic-minded and less burdened by political patronage and party conflicts. At the same time, women in America were encouraged to extend their role of guardians of the household into certain marginal parts of the larger household of the community, in causes essentially related to social welfare. The rise of educational opportunities for women and the appearance of a new class of motivated female professionals in the Progressive Era, also gave women reformers a boost in effectiveness at a crucial moment. And women, because of their general absence from the wage-earning workforce, were not involved in union-connected disputes.

The attitude that women embodied a special worthiness can be most clearly seen in the example of labor laws. For years men had worked to get the 8-hour day or similar reforms, only to be resisted at every turn by business and rebuffed in no uncertain terms by the courts. In a 1905 Supreme Court case (Lochner v. New York), involving male workers, the Court said: “Statutes of the nature of that under review, limiting the hours in which grown and intelligent men may labor to earn their living, are mere meddlesome interferences with the rights of the individual.” [5] Barely three years later in the landmark case (Muller v. Oregon) the Court upheld laws limiting working hours for women, arguing: “the physical well-being of woman becomes an object of public interest and care in order to preserve the strength and vigor of the race . . . Differentiated by these matters from the other sex, she is properly placed in a class by herself, and legislation designed for her protection may be sustained, even when like legislation is not necessary for men and could not be sustained.” [6] While this type of reasoning may be seen as patronizing to modern eyes, it was in fact a key factor in the success of the “maternalist welfare state.”

The other major building-block of the maternalist welfare state was the widespread adoption of state-supported Mothers’ Pensions. These were pension benefits paid to poor mothers with young children in their care. The idea was to support single mothers when a wage-earning father was not present in the household. Their purpose was to keep the family intact; the assumption being that a child living with its mother would inevitably be better off than one in a private or governmental institution. Following a 1909 White House conference on the Care of Dependent Children, 20 state legislatures enacted such pension programs between 1911 and 1913. By 1920, an additional 20 states had mothers’ pensions.

Although they met with some opposition (particularly from private charities who were desirous of protecting their turf) mothers’ pensions proved remarkably successful. Social reformers in the social insurance tradition were split over mothers’ pensions, some viewing them as akin to the poor relief they were working to eradicate. Some prominent professional women in the settlement house and social work professions supported the pensions, but they were not a major force in the campaign for mothers’ pensions. Labor unions found a way to see these type of pensions as non-threatening and so became supporters.

A 1931 study by the federal Children’s Bureau–itself a Progressive Era maternalist reform–found that in 1921 there were about 46,000 families receiving mothers’ pensions, and this number had more than doubled, to 94,000 families, by the time of the study. The success of mothers’ pensions was constrained, however, by it state and local basis. This meant that there was a lack of uniform national standards and in some states payments were exceedingly meager. Some states also placed onerous and intrusive conditions on recipient of the benefits.

The rise of mothers’ pensions was a marked contrast to the failures of most paternalist programs during the same period. Although mothers’ pensions shared many of the same features as old-age pensions for retired male workers, old-age pensions proved less successful. The difference which tipped the balance, according to Skocpol, was the role of middle-class women’s clubs (such as the General Federation of Women’s Clubs) who worked tirelessly for mothers’ pensions. These middle-class women saw the needy mothers and their children as part of a female solidarity and viewed mothers’ pensions as “honoring motherhood.”

The last building block in the successful pre-New Deal maternalist welfare state was the U.S. Children’s’ Bureau, established in 1912, and the passage of the first national legislation for the health care of women and children–the Sheppard-Towner Act. The Children’s Bureau was to be the federal agency responsible for all federal government programs involving the welfare of children, and it was staffed almost exclusively by women. The Sheppard-Towner Act was the first major federal health care program, its mission being to provide public-health information and services to the nation’s women and children. During the first seven years of Sheppard-Towner, the Bureau distributed over 22 million informational pamphlets, held over 185,000 health conferences, established nearly 3,000 pre-natal care centers and sent health care workers on more than 3 million home visits.

Although here again women played the leading roles in the creation of the Children’s Bureau and the passage of Sheppard-Towner, there were some interesting differences from the crusade for mothers’ pensions. Mothers’ pensions were supported by the professional women social workers and settlement house pioneers, but it was the middle-class married women’s clubs who were the real drivers. With the Children’s Bureau and Sheppard-Towner the roles were reversed, with such pioneers of the settlement house movement as Lillian Wald, Florence Kelley, Julia Lathrop and Grace Abbott playing the key roles.

But this building block too was eased into place by some of same paternalistic attitudes toward women which eased the passage of mothers’ pensions and women-centered labor laws. As Skocpol explains it: “the new government functions were normatively justified as a universalization of mother love.” [7]

Subsequent Historiography: That Ancient Glass

Recorded history fails to record who first observed that a glass half-full can also be described as half-empty, depending, it seems, on the personality of the onlooker, or perhaps his/her philosophy, ideology, or other agenda. Actually, it is probably an observation made by the first humans, long before quotes began being recorded, since it is in some way fundamental to the human experience.

In any case, as soon as Skocpol's book was published, the empty-glass crowd began to object. On mothers' pensions one prominent critic is Linda Gordon, whose own work is reviewed elsewhere on this site. In her history of welfare for women, Gordon finds the shortcomings of mothers' pensions to be almost more noteworthy than their achievements. She notes that they were actually paid to relatively few recipients (about 46,000 women by 1919), the payments were low, and there were numerous onerous restrictions on eligibility. Her assessment of mothers' pensions as welfare state precedents is decidedly sour: "......... [8] On Civil War pensions, Bruce Jansson's take is fairly typical: "Skocpol overreaches, however, when she argues that these pensions constituted major involvement in social policy by the federal government. Although the pensions may have absorbed one-fourth or more of the federal budget, the federal budget itself was so meager that . . . One-fourth of a such a small federal budget is not very much spending."[9]

Even if we grant the pessimist view of mothers' and Civil War pensions, I would still argue that they were important precedents for later New Deal developments. A precedent is made when a conceptual barrier is broken, when something new appears on the horizon. It is nice I suppose if precedents announce themselves loudly by elephant-sized footsteps in the sand. But even a pint-sized innovation can be an innovation. Civil War pensions are enormously significant and important as a conceptual breakthrough because they establish for the first time in American history the proposition that the federal government has a responsibility to provide directly in the form of monetary payments for the economic security of a broad class of American citizens, when faced with what Franklin Roosevelt would later call "the hazards and vicissitudes of life." Mothers pensions likewise establish the same proposition, although limited only to the state level of governance. It is certainly an interesting discussion to speculate why these conceptual precedents did not immediately lead to a full-blown New Deal type system of social provision, prior to the New Deal itself. But it was not because they were small and their payments pittances. It is because--to give a very short answer to what requires a much longer discussion--the resistance to this idea of governmental responsibility was so powerful in America that despite these early harbingers, it would take the trauma of the Great Depression to overcome the traditional resistances in American society to this breakthrough idea. [10]

So it seems that we are faced with a familiar situation. Theda Skocpol has excitedly announced: "Look, I've found a new glass, and it's half-full!" To which Gordon and Jansson rejoin: "That new glass you found, why it's half-empty!" Yes and yes. But new glasses, even ones only half full, are important discoveries.

Skocpol’s Narrative-

To summarize this massive and complex study of the origins of the modern American welfare state, we can state Skocpol’s central argument in a set of seven theses:

1) The story of modern social provision in the U.S. did not begin with the Social Security Act of 1935;
2) Between the 1870s and the 1920s America had a well-developed, generous, and complex welfare state focused on soldiers and mothers (and their children);
3) This should be seen as the first phase of the American welfare state;
4) The program for Civil War veterans and their dependents was a paternalist social welfare system for a particularly “worthy” class of individuals but it could not be successfully translated into a broad-based welfare state;
5) The programs for women and children were of a different type than the Civil War pension system and can properly be called a maternalist welfare system, in which women played the central role in both the creation and many aspects of the administration, and which was based on moral precepts about the special “worthiness” of women in their role as the mothers of the nation;
6) Ultimately, neither approach proved enduring and both were superceded by the contributory social insurance model of the Social Security Act of 1935;
7) Despite their replacement by the social insurance model, both of these early forms of social provision should be viewed as positive contributions to the development of the uniquely American version of the modern welfare state.

[1] Cf. Sklar, Kathryn Kish, “Explaining the Power of Women’s Political Culture in the Creation of the American Welfare State,” in Koven, Seth and Michel, Sonya, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States, New York, Routledge, 1993. Also, Lindenmeyer, Kriste, A Right to Childhood: The U.S. Children’s Bureau and Child Welfare, 1912-46, Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1997.

[2] Confederate soldiers were never granted these federal pensions, and even some pensioned veterans from earlier wars who fought for the Confederacy had their pensions voided. Most states in the former Confederacy did eventually enact state pensions for Confederate veterans, but these tended to be much less generous than the federal program. As of this writing, there is still one living widow of a Confederate veteran who is receiving a state Civil War pension.

[3] In fiscal year 2002 the $452 billion in outlays for Social Security benefits (not including Medicare) was 22% of total federal expenditures. Cf. Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2004, Washington, Government Printing Office, 2003. Table S-2, Budget Summary by Category, pg. 312.

[4] Skocpol, op. cit, pg. 314.

[5] Skocpol, op. cit., pg. 370.

[6] Cf. Fink, Leon, ed., Major Problems in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, Boston, Houghton-Mifflin, 2001, pg. 388.

[7] Skocpol, pg. 522.

[8] Gordon, Linda, Pitted But Not Entitled, New York, Free Press, 1994, pg. 49.

[9] Jansson, Bruce S., The Reluctant Welfare State, 4th Edition, Wadsworth, 2001, pgs. 116-117.

[10] These traditional resistances include such American characteristics as our well-known antipathy to government, at all levels; the associated resistance to taxation in virtually any form; the mythical ideal of rugged individualism; the also quite mythical belief in the efficacy and fairness of the "free market;" and the very structure of federalism which tends to mitigate against federal action in favor (in theory) of action at the state level. All of these traits and features of the American political system have for generations retarded the progress toward the development of an American Welfare State.