Hope for the Other America

...What sort of men and women were to be recruited as faculty...

...Our preferred substitute is segmented provision, often means-tested...

...To this day, the elderly receive their monthly checks without stigma...

...In fact, pensioners since the start of the program have received far more than the actuarial values of their own and their employers' contributions...

...Against opposition from his own experts, Roosevelt insisted that Social Security be modeled on private insurance...

...The militant opposition contended that overtly or covertly casework partisans were engaged in blaming victims for their plight...

...No less a libertarian than Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes affirmed the constitutionality of compulsory sterilization...

...Temporary disarray in the business community and pressure from populist demagogues —Huey Long, Dr...

...As in the past, prolonged unemployment and welfare dependency were properly perceived as consequences of individual deficiency, to be alleviated by the skilled intervention of specialists in social therapy, preferably clued into Freud...

...Nevertheless, until that cataclysmic event, the ethic of individual responsibility enabled employers to shift the costs of business cycle contractions and their own blunders to their employees...

...Why have the Europeans, the English excepted, and especially the Scandinavians succeeded in operating capitalist economies and returning acceptable profits to business enterprises within the context of universal social benefits, far stronger unions than ours, living standards in some cases higher than our own, and, until recent years, substantially lower rates of unemployment...

...It has usually taken the shape of attempts to distinguish between the deserving and the undeserving poor, an effort at least as old as Queen Elizabeth I's 16th-century Statute of Artificers...

...On the second question, the contest concerned appropriate affirmative action goals for women and blacks...

...But in 1935 Roosevelt rejected advice from Frances Perkins, among others, to include universal health coverage in the Social Security Act...

...The "impotent" poor were to be aided by public largesse...

...More to the point, if West Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden manage to combine social welfare and corporate efficiency, why can't we, someday, emulate their superior example...

...In short, most members of the underclass were conscripts, not volunteers...

...And because he stakes out his position openly, his prose features active verbs and personal pronouns...

...Each man was responsible for his own fate, amyth nearly as acceptable to its casualties as to its corporate beneficiaries...

...Only the blind could deny that mass unemployment derived from national and international disruptions beyond the control or influence of humble workers, or, for that matter, national leaders...

...Trained social workers should continue to engage individual clients with a view to enhancing self-regard, stimulating job training and job search, improving household management practices, and discouraging drug and alcohol abuse...

...Writing from somewhere on the rational Left, Katz makes a persuasive case for his central proposition, that the severe limits of social protection in the United States have been set by the corporations demanding autonomy in management, and for its corollary, that the labor force is tamed by the presence or imminence of unemployment and the certainty that defenses against its impact are sketchy...

...Private charity, even when publicly supplemented, was glaringly inadequate during serious recessions before the Great Depression of the 1930s...

...Today's benefits are the hard-earned fruits of many yesterdays' exertions...

...The Great Depression transformed attitudes and national policy, but, as Katz acutely demonstrates, within peculiarly American limitations...

...For me, the emotion is unusual...

...Reviewed by Robert Lekachman When I was teaching at the State University Campus at Stony Brook, Long Island, during the fervent 1960s, one of the numerous ideological quarrels that embittered faculty and students centered around the brand new School of Social Welfare, headed by an alumnus of Lyndon Johnson's not yet expired War Against Poverty...

...Until the 1930s, the dominant political and intellectual opinion held that individual misfortune derived from deficiencies of genetic endowment (a poor choice of parents) or defects of character...

...English council housing, far more popular than our own subsidized apartments, has been open to middle-class families...

...In accord with Richard Cloward and Frances Scott Piven, Katz regards social policy in general and welfare in particular as episodes in social control...

...Were not three generations of idiots enough...

...The troubles of public housing are substantially the result of limiting eligibility to low-income, frequently welfare families...

...With the worst will in the world, President Reagan has done no more than nibble at these popular universal entitlements...

...There is a large exception to this traditional distaste for universal coverage...

...During the first third of this century, while Western European countries were installing universal health protection, family allowances and subsidized housing open to middle-as well as working-class families, respectable opinion denied any Federal role in protecting the jobless, ill, disabled, or indigent elderly...

...The march of civilization substituted sterilization for flogging...

...National policy, dominated by corporate interests, redlined construction in low-income urban neighborhoods and funded urban renewal proj ects, bitterly dubbed black removal, that destroyed working-class communities...

...Social Security pensions and Medicare reimbursement flow to senior citizens aged 62 or 65...

...They tided themselves over jobless intervals by drawing upon savings, casual employment, their wives' sewing, and— at worst—small, temporary subsidies from private charities...

...Perhaps because he is a historian rather than a practitioner of one of the "hard" social sciences, Katzavoids jargon...

...If all goes properly, aged yuppies in the 21st century will in their turn receive more than they have contributed...

...The eugenics movement, citing the horrible example of the Jukes family, sponsored sterilization statutes which by 1931 had been enacted in 30 states...

...Katz retells well a familiar story...

...Social Security is an intergenerational transfer from young to old, a benign Ponzi game...

...But he does leave one important question unanswered...

...We offer free or subsidized medical care to veterans, the elderly and the very poor...

...Attempts by Richard M. Nixon and Jimmy Carter to substitute negative income taxes for the present unsatisfactory melange of differing welfare benefits and eligibility rules foundered because both Nixon's Family Assistance Plan and Carter's Program for Better Jobs and Incomes conferred benefits upon the working poor as well as the poverty population proper...

...Katz aptly describes the 1930s as the birth of our own unique semi-welfare state...

...It followed that when times were hard, laid-off workers of good character simply sought new jobs more assiduously...

...But sturdy vagabonds were to be whipped and branded, the better to hasten their pursuit of honest employment...

...Social Security has sharply diminished the incidence of poverty among the elderly, but its relative invulnerability derives most of all from middle class beneficiaries...

...Didn't they and their employers contribute to the social security trust fund for two, three, four or more decades...

...Although states and cities were grudgingly conceded the right to alleviate immediate distress, they were enj oined to spend as little as possible and inflict maximum humiliation upon the recipients of public bounty...

...Even the drunks and street criminals, Marx's lumpenprole-tariat, were sentient artifacts of social structure rather than examples of individual pathology...

...The taint of redistribution horrified Congressional patriots...

...Katz' excellent book, a performance comparable to Paul Starr's The Social Transformation of American Medicine, leaves me less pessimistic than its argument and evidence do its author...

...Traditionalists argued for traditional social work emphasis upon casework...

...At the Federal level, restrictive monetary and budgetary policies ensured unemployment rates high enough to check wage demands and exacerbate tensions between blacks and whites, men and women...

...Townsend andFa-ther Coughlin most prominent among them—led Franklin D. Roosevelt, arav-ing moderate, to sponsor the landmark Social Security Act of 1935, just as his new union constituency induced him to endorse the National Labor Relations Act and the Fair Labor Standards statute...

...The Works Progress Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the National Youth Administration, and similar job-creating efforts were grudgingly (and briefly) accepted by conservative businessmen and their political allies as much out of fear of Communists and revolution as out of compassion...

...What should its mission be...

...Recognizing no more obligation to human beings than to machines and raw materials, managers fired workers without notice or benefits in justified confidence that once sales improved, they could replace them with ease...

...The first issue was, if possible, even more inflammatory than agreement about sexual and racial entitlements...

...Michael B. Katz' concise, tightly organized and exceptionally well-written history of American social policy focuses upon precisely the struggle between these conflicting diagnoses...

...What distinguishes it from the unqualified European version is stubborn resistance to universal benefits...