History and development of welfare systems

Welfare History

Chapter 7 List the Specific Reforms that Roosevelt Obtained in 1935-36.

Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal took a 'Left turn' in the Second New Deal of 1935-36 after the Supreme Court had ruled several important First New Deal programs unconstitutional, particularly the National Recovery Act and Agricultural Adjustment Act. With the Social Security Act of 1935, FDR created the basis for a federal welfare state that provided old age pensions, unemployment insurance, and aid to the disabled and impoverished children. Its benefits were modest and limited at first, and Southern Senators had insisted on the exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers, who were mostly black. In addition, it was funded by regressive payroll taxes rather than general revenue, partially because FDR wished to conceal its true nature as an entitlement (Jannsson, 2008, pp. 237-38). Almost as important as this New Deal centerpiece was the Wagner Act or National Labor Relations Act, which guaranteed the right of workers to organize unions and bargain collectively with employers. Big business strongly opposed this law and fought the wave of sit down strikes that followed when the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unionized heavy industry for the first time in U.S. history. From 1935-45, union membership grew from three million to fourteen million, and organized labor became the most important component of the New Deal coalition (Jannsson, p. 242). One important feature of the Second New Deal that did not endure, however, was that Works Progress Administration (WPA) which provided federally subsidized public works jobs to the unemployed, 85% of whom had been on welfare during the depression. From 1935-40, nearly eight million unemployed received assistance through the WPA, as did college and high school students through its National Youth Administration (NYA) branch. Indeed, it was as a successful NYA administrator that the future president Lyndon Johnson first came to the attention of FDR (Jannsson, p. 245).

Chapter 8 List of the major programs of LBJ's Great Society

Lyndon Johnson had been a young protege of Franklin Roosevelt when he was in Congress during the 1930s and 1940s, and was determined that the Great Society would complete the New Deal. An accidental president, who came to power under what were widely regarded as suspicious circumstances after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Johnson nevertheless laid out an ambitious program of domestic reform which he was able to implement in 1964-65. Perhaps the most important legacy of the Great Society in social welfare was the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in 1964-65. FDR had been unwilling to make national health insurance part of the Social Security Act, while Harry Truman had been stymied in his attempt to pass it in 1946-48, while LBJ's programs came up short of the goal of universal coverage. Medicare was a purely federal program available to all those over age 65, while Medicaid was means-tested and jointly administered and funded by the state and federal governments. In practice, it benefits and eligibility varied widely and it did not even cover all the medically indigent below the poverty line (Jannsson, pp. 295-97). Johnson also passed legislation to aid minorities that FDR would not have dared to attempt for fear of alienating the Southern Dixiecrats, who had already begun to desert the Democratic Party after Truman's modest civil rights efforts in the 1940s, and then defected en masse to the Republicans in the 1960s and 1970s. Even so, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed segregation in public accommodations while the Voting Rights Act of 1965 sent federal registrars into the South for the first time since the 1870s to ensure that blacks had the right to vote (Jannsson, pp. 293-94). Johnson also passed federal aid to education that assisted poor school districts with federal money as well as providing grants and loans to higher education that dwarfed the scale of any previous federal efforts in these areas (Jannsson, p. 297).