Chapter 2
Reconceptualizing the Evolution of the American Welfare State

Bruce Jansson

As you read this chapter, ask yourself if you think it is important to understand history, not just to know some dates or be familiar with certain key persons. Some might say that history repeats itself and, therefore, we should be knowledgeable of the past. Mark Twain, however, allegedly said, "History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme."

Introduction

The American welfare state has become a pivotal feature of American civilization. Spending on human resources consumed 69 percent of the federal budget in 2010, not including spending by states and local government and not including tax expenditures such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (U.S. Office of Management and Budget, 2012). It includes thousands of pages of regulations that govern the implementation of its many programs and that protect the public's safety from environmental, housing, drug-related, and other hazards. It employs tens of thousands of persons.

Yet analyzing the welfare state's history poses daunting challenges for scholars. This article provides a survey of its development while posing questions for further research in its concluding section. It suggests that historians and social-policy theorists need to reconceptualize the evolution of the American welfare state by moving in new directions.

Some Daunting Challenges Facing Historians of the American Welfare State

Before it is even possible to analyze the evolution of the American welfare state, key conceptual issues must be addressed. We discuss six of these challenges as follows.

Expanding the Welfare State's Parameters

Some scholars have defined the welfare state in relatively narrow terms as consisting primarily of those programs that focus on traditional social work concerns, such as mental health, welfare, maternal health, and child welfare programs (Axinn & Levin, 1982; Leiby, 1978; Trattner, 1979). I call these "the traditional histories" in subsequent discussion, which I contrast with my own history of the American welfare state (Jansson, 1988, 2005).

This relatively narrow definition risks ignoring considerable portions of the welfare state if we define it as including a wide range of policies that are relevant to the social, psychological, and economic well-being of citizens. Not only do these policies span a wide range of substantive issues, but they also include tax policies that shape the distribution of wealth in the United States, budget policies that determine what policies receive priority, policies geared toward preventive as well as curative goals, policies at all levels of government, and policies that shape interactions between public and private sectors.

The welfare state's substantive programs include a wide range of programs that address social and economic problems and needs of citizens, such as (a) institutions that house persons with specific kinds of social problems or criminal offenses, including persons with mental problems, children who are orphaned or who are deemed to have been neglected or abused, and prisons; (b) means-tested safety-net programs for the poor (Food Stamps, Medicaid, Supplementary Security Income or SSI, Section 8 housing vouchers and subsidies); (c) universal social programs (Medicare, Social Security, and Unemployment Insurance); (d) regulations (food, drug, housing protections; civil rights laws for persons of color, women, mentally ill persons, persons with disabilities, the elderly, LGBT persons, and others); (e) protections for persons in specific organizations (such as work-safety conditions for workers, safety and medical care for persons in mental institutions, nursing homes, and convalescent homes, and safety and care for children in childcare and in their homes); (f) opportunity-enhancing programs (such as operations of educational programs and student scholarships, job-training programs, the junior-college system, land distribution, and economic-development programs); (g) social and medical services (such as mental-health, social-service, and medical services); (h) preventive services (such as public-health, early-detection, outreach, sex-education, and preschool programs); (i) cultural and recreational programs that include libraries, internet-access programs, public entertainment through Public Television, and the public national, state, and county parks; and (j) family supplementing programs that include childcare, foster care, and adoption programs.

These programs also include community-building programs, such as creation of specific development zones where businesses receive tax concessions to locate in them. They include local zoning and land-use policies that influence where homeless persons can live and where halfway homes can be located. They include criminal law, which determines, for example, what drugs are criminalized and the penalties criminals will suffer. They include civil law, which determines, for example, grounds for divorce and the obligations of divorced persons to each other and to their children. They include a large body of legal rules by local, state, and federal courts that shape the procedures and regulations of the American welfare state.

The American welfare state requires resources to operate its many programs, so funding sources must be considered as part of the welfare state, including (a) government spending (authorizations and appropriations of federal, state, and local governments); (b) government tax expenditures (organizations' and persons' tax deductions, exclusions, deferrals, or tax credits when filing their tax forms with federal and state governments with respect to mortgage interest deductions, corporate funding of employees' health insurance, funds placed in pension accounts by citizens, and citizens' charitable contributions); (c) tax credits (childcare tax credits and the Earned Income Tax Credit); (d) payroll taxes principally for Social Security, Medicare, and Unemployment Insurance; (e) consumer payments (such as out-of-pocket costs by enrollees in Medicare and Medicaid); and (f) private philanthropy, which includes a network of foundations and private donors that gave resources to an array of health and welfare institutions in 2007.

Traditional histories of the American welfare state emphasize curative programs that were established to help persons suffering from family, mental, income, health, and other problems, placing less emphasis on preventive preschool, education, and public health programs. In some eras, such as the 19th century, Americans pioneered land distribution and public education initiatives that were intended to promote opportunities for a wide range of Americans. Histories should not only chronicle these programs but also ask why they have failed to promote greater equality during specific eras-and why they were more effective in other eras, such as during the four decades after 1930 when social and economic inequality decreased as compared to prior and subsequent periods.

Traditional histories focused on relationships of the welfare state with a relatively small number of vulnerable populations-such as women, persons of color, or welfare recipients. Yet many vulnerable populations have emerged during the American historical experience, and each of them is inextricably linked to the regulations and programs of the American welfare state. I proposed five (often overlapping) groups that include at least 14 vulnerable populations: (a) economic vulnerable populations (such as poor persons); (b) racial vulnerable populations (such as African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans); (c) sociological vulnerable populations that have been placed in restrictive roles (such as women and the elderly); (d) nonconformist populations that are widely viewed as violating social norms (such as persons on welfare, gay men and lesbian women, persons who have been incarcerated, mentally ill persons, and persons with physical disabilities); and (e) model vulnerable populations (such as Jewish Americans and members of some white ethnic groups) (Jansson, 2005). To these groups might be added immigrants in specific eras, because members of different waves of immigrants have experienced-and continue to confront-profound prejudice, such as Irish Americans in the 19th century, Eastern Europeans and Italians from the Civil War to 1920, and Latinos in the contemporary period.

When discussing vulnerable populations, however, it is important not to ignore social class. Members of different waves of immigration, for example, were not only members of specific ethnic or racial groups, but often were relatively poor. European historians place far more emphasis on social class than do American historians and social scientists, who should devote more attention to disentangling the separate and combined influence of race and class in creating and sustaining such social problems as poverty, poor health, and mental illness (Kawachi, Daniels, & Robinson, 2005).

The American welfare state is possibly the most complex one in the world. Unlike ones that are primarily funded and directly by a central government, the American welfare state is shaped by the intersection of different levels of government and funding streams; courts; and not-for-profit, for-profit, and public entities. If we examine contemporary health policy in any major city, all of these factors determine the kinds...