Social Welfare History in the United States: From the New Deal to the Present

2019 ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-301 ◽  
Author(s):  
JONATHAN A. COWDEN

Many scholars and pundits believe that the 1964 presidential election between Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson disrupted the New Deal order and ushered in a sixth party system anchored in part by race issues. But, curiously, the conventional wisdom has not fared well empirically. In this article, I employ disaggregated survey data and novel methodological tools to identify temporal patterns in the relationships between partisanship, New Deal issues and race issues. My conclusions are as follows: (1) the association between race issues and partisanship has switched signs in the South; (2) a racial axis of cleavage has opened up outside the South; (3) the New Deal issue axis has grown in the South; and (4) New Deal issues continue to cleave partisans outside the South.


2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-281
Author(s):  
Sylvia Dümmer Scheel

El artículo analiza la diplomacia pública del gobierno de Lázaro Cárdenas centrándose en su opción por publicitar la pobreza nacional en el extranjero, especialmente en Estados Unidos. Se plantea que se trató de una estrategia inédita, que accedió a poner en riesgo el “prestigio nacional” con el fin de justificar ante la opinión pública estadounidense la necesidad de implementar las reformas contenidas en el Plan Sexenal. Aprovechando la inusual empatía hacia los pobres en tiempos del New Deal, se construyó una imagen específica de pobreza que fuera higiénica y redimible. Ésta, sin embargo, no generó consenso entre los mexicanos. This article analyzes the public diplomacy of the government of Lázaro Cárdenas, focusing on the administration’s decision to publicize the nation’s poverty internationally, especially in the United States. This study suggests that this was an unprecedented strategy, putting “national prestige” at risk in order to explain the importance of implementing the reforms contained in the Six Year Plan, in the face of public opinion in the United States. Taking advantage of the increased empathy felt towards the poor during the New Deal, a specific image of hygienic and redeemable poverty was constructed. However, this strategy did not generate agreement among Mexicans.


2011 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Didier

ArgumentWhen the New Deal administration attained power in the United States, it was confronted with two different problems that could be linked to one another. On the one hand, there was a huge problem of unemployment, affecting everybody including the white-collar workers. And, on the other hand, the administration suffered from a very serious lack of data to illuminate its politics. One idea that came out of this situation was to use the abundant unemployed white-collar workers as enumerators of statistical studies. This paper describes this experiment, shows how it paradoxically affected the professionalization of statistics, and explains why it did not affect expert democracy despite its Deweysian participationist aspect.


2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 401-421 ◽  
Author(s):  
JONATHAN BELL

ABSTRACTThis article argues that those termed ‘liberals’ in the United States had the opportunity in the late 1940s to use overseas case studies to reshape the ramshackle political agenda of the New Deal along more specifically social democratic lines, but that they found it impossible to match interest in the wider world with a concrete programme to overcome tension between left-wing politics and the emerging anti-totalitarianism of the Cold War. The American right, by contrast, conducted a highly organized publicity drive to provide new meaning for their anti-statist ideology in a post-New Deal, post-isolationist United States by using perceived failures of welfare states overseas as domestic propaganda. The examples of Labour Britain after 1945 and Labour New Zealand both provided important case studies for American liberals and conservatives, but in the Cold War it was the American right who would benefit most from an ideologically driven repackaging of overseas social policy for an American audience.


Social Text ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-38
Author(s):  
Cotten Seiler

This article explores the nineteenth-century conceptualization of racialized whiteness that foregrounded empathy as whites’ signal evolutionary achievement and the font of their potential. Neo-Lamarckian evolutionary science in the United States articulated whiteness as an acquired disposition to care, as both noun and verb. This deep context helps us account for the rise of a statist, ameliorative new liberalism at the turn of the century and the building of a midcentury apparatus of “white care”: a surround of institutions and infrastructure dedicated to the education, health, security, mobility, and comfort of the white citizenry. The care-oriented liberalism emplaced by the New Deal was rooted in a biopolitical imperative to “make live” the valorized white portion of the population.


2012 ◽  
Vol 102 (1) ◽  
pp. 524-555 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gauti B Eggertsson

Can government policies that increase the monopoly power of firms and the militancy of unions increase output? This paper shows that the answer is yes under certain “emergency” conditions. These emergency conditions—zero interest rates and deflation—were satisfied during the Great Depression in the United States. The New Deal, which facilitated monopolies and union militancy, was therefore expansionary in the model presented. This conclusion is contrary to a large previous literature. The main reason for this divergence is that this paper incorporates rigid prices and the zero bound on the short-term interest rate. JEL: E23, E32, E52, E62, J51, N12, N42


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