Cheering for a Team No Longer on the Field: Rhetoric and Reality in American Welfare History
In an article in this journal in June 1998, William S. Kern argued that the welfare "reform" act of 1996, formally the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act, was in essence a return to the political economy of Poor Law Reform Act in Great Britain in 1834. Professor Kern asserted that an understanding of both acts means an understanding of the attitudes toward poverty of classical economists, particularly Thomas Malthus. 1 Certainly that article is correct as far as it goes. I would argue that a longer view gives a more differentiated, more optimistic-Kern might say a naively optimistic---conclusion. As the millennium turned, we were all inundated with summations ofthis or that, lists of the "greatest" or the "most influential," or whatever. We can now also look back to see developments of the welfare state in the United States during the entire century. Is the era of big government really over? What we find, in fact, is that in spite of a drumbeat of rejection, the United States is, to a considerable degree, a welfare state, not so terribly different from those of Europe. Moreover, a welfare ideology is so deeply woven into the institutional, economic, intellectual, and political fabric of the United States that even the most individualistically minded cannot extract it, and American individualism, while still strong in some areas, is in relation to social welfare far more potent rhetorically than it is in fact. Damning the welfare state is a staple in American politics, from Barry Goldwater in 1960 to talk radio every day. And we are not talking about fringe figures on the extremes of American politics, but a portion of the mainstream, representing many groups and not only within one political party. The question is whether they are representing anything more than nostalgia, whether they are cheering for a team that is not even on the field any more. Perhaps the very vehemence of the rhetoric is evidence that it is conscious of its own futility. American rhetoric and reality at the beginning of the twentieth century-and before-was, as Kern implied, established by the English Poor Law Report of 1834. The "principles of' 34" asserted that poor relief in general was a bad thing, for if people found that they could live without working they would do so and would be "pau-