Thinking Big: Can National Values or Class Factions Explain the Development of Social Provision in the United States?: A Review Essay

Thinking big about the development of social policies in the United States has become fashionable. Until recently, occasional comprehensive histories of social provision in America focused on single periods of reform ferment, such as the Progressive Era, or the New Deal, or the Great Society. Then, James T. Patterson's 1981 book America's Struggle Against Poverty, 1900–1980, and Michael B. Katz's 1986 book In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America, provided overviews of American attitudes toward poverty and attempts to do something about it from the nineteenth century to the present. These authors were clearly perplexed by the devolution of the antipoverty efforts of the War on Poverty and the Great Society into the political stalemates of the late 1970s and the conservative backlashes of the 1980s. Their books seem to be trying to use rich descriptive overviews of the past to gain some perspective on where American “welfare reforms” might go in the future.