A key feature of American exceptionalism has been the propensity of Americans to create voluntary organizations for dealing with local problems. Tocqueville was just one of the early European observers who marveled at this phenomenon in the 19th and early 20th centuries. By the time the New Deal began, American associations for providing mutual assistance and aiding the poor involved broad networks, engaging people from the top to the bottom of society, spontaneously formed by ordinary citizens.
These groups provided sophisticated and effective social services and social insurance of every sort, not just in rural towns or small cities but also in the largest and most impersonal of megalopolises. To get a sense of how extensive these networks were, consider this: When one small Midwestern state, Iowa, mounted a food-conservation program during World War I, it engaged the participation of 2,873 church congregations and 9,630 chapters of 31 different secular fraternal associations.
Did these networks successfully deal with all the human needs of their day? No. But that isn’t the right question. In that era, the U.S. had just a fraction of today’s national wealth. The correct question is: What if the same level of activity went into civil society’s efforts to deal with today’s needs””and financed with today’s wealth?
The advent of the New Deal and then of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society displaced many of the most ambitious voluntary efforts to deal with the needs of the poor. It was a predictable response. Why continue to contribute to a private program to feed the hungry when the government is spending billions of dollars on food stamps and nutrition programs? Why continue the mutual insurance program of your fraternal organization once Social Security is installed? Voluntary organizations continued to thrive, but most of them turned to needs less subject to crowding out by the federal government.
This was a bad trade, in my view.
The comments at the end of this WSJ article speak for themselves. If folks so pine to America into the image of Denmark……..just leave, and move to Denmark and leave the rest of us out of your utopian equation.
[blockquote]In that era, the U.S. had just a fraction of today’s national wealth. The correct question is: What if the same level of activity went into civil society’s efforts to deal with today’s needs—and financed with today’s wealth?[/blockquote]
Pending reading the article, the author seems unconscious of his biases. He equates the combined resources of individuals freely choosing to help others and group for mutual benefit in previous times with those same resources being confiscated by taxation and wealth transfer schemes to become “national wealth”, seldom benefiting whom they purport to, but entrenching and enriching liberals in power and entrenching and impoverishing the residents of the liberal plantation in poverty and dependence.
Of course the US formerly had a fraction of today’s “national wealth” – it used to let people keep more of what they had earned. The nation has no job to be paid wages and accumulate wealth, it is primarily for national defense and projects too large to be done on a local basis, such as interstate highways. It is not to be surrogate parent to feral children abandoned by their parents’ neglect or abuse, it is not to indoctrinate by control of K-12 schools and higher education and the materials that are used in them, it is not to incentive laziness and totalitarian control masquerading as social justice.
One premise of this article is that the New Deal alone undermined the network of voluntary agencies that had previously underpinned “welfare” in a US context. In fact, as Lizabeth Cohen and others have demonstrated, it merely dealt a death blow to a process that had been under way since 1919, if not earlier, and which rapidly accelerated during the early years of the Great Depression. Ironically, many of the mutual support agencies were products of ethnic enclaves which Americanization (both in its conservative and progressive iterations) sought to expunge. It is emphatically not the case that voluntarist welfare was only toppled by a federal government bent on suppressing non-governmental alternatives.
Indeed, many New Dealers had positive things to say about the LDS Church Welfare Plan (one of the few major voluntarist initiatives of the 1930s), despite the fact that there was a strongly anti-New Deal basis for its inception. New Dealers in Utah were less sympathetic, but many liberal Mormons saw no incompatibility between the Welfare Plan and Social Security, whatever the General Authorities might opine.