BiblioVault - Books about Public welfare

Negotiating Relief

The Development of Social Welfare Programs in Depression-Era Michigan, 1930–1940

Susan Stein-Roggenbuck

The Ohio State University Press

In Negotiating Relief, Susan Stein-Roggenbuck examines Michigan’s implementation of the New Deal relief programs and the state’s reorganization of welfare in 1939. Local officials, social workers, and recipients were key players in the Michigan debates over how best to administer relief. The book sheds important light on the profession of social work and public welfare, and the development of nonfederal relief at the state and local levels after 1935.

Guided by fiscal localism and a firm belief in home rule, local officials fought to retain control of relief. Stein-Roggenbuck argues that while significant changes occurred in welfare policy as a result of the New Deal, many continuities remained. Among those was the responsibility of families to provide financial support. Often forgotten were those on general relief—individuals who did not fit the federal programs such as Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) and Old Age Assistance (OAA). General relief became a third track of welfare.

Drawing on newspaper records, county and city board minutes, social welfare agency records, federal records, and case file records, Negotiating Relief gives voice to the numerous groups involved in welfare debates, particularly the recipients of relief. This book adds to our understanding of the local implementation of welfare policy in both rural and urban areas.

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New Deal Modernism

American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State

Michael Szalay

Duke University Press, 2000

In New Deal Modernism Michael Szalay examines the effect that the rise of the welfare state had on American modernism during the 1930s and 1940s, and, conversely, what difference this revised modernism made to the New Deal’s famed invention of “Big Government.”
Szalay situates his study within a liberal culture bent on security, a culture galvanized by its imagined need for private and public insurance.
Taking up prominent exponents of social and economic security—such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John Maynard Keynes, and John Dewey—Szalay demonstrates how the New Deal’s revision of free-market culture required rethinking the political function of aesthetics. Focusing in particular on the modernist fascination with the relation between form and audience, Szalay offers innovative accounts of Busby Berkeley, Jack London, James M. Cain, Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, Betty Smith, and Gertrude Stein, as well as extended analyses of the works of Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Richard Wright.

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Not for Patching

A Strategic Welfare Review

Frank Field and Andrew Forsey

Haus Publishing, 2017

In his famous report of 1942, the economist and social reformer William Beveridge wrote that World War II was a “revolutionary moment in the world’s history” and so a time “for revolutions, not for patching.” The Beveridge Report outlined the welfare state that Atlee’s government would go on to implement after 1946, instituting, for the first time, a national system of benefits to protect all from “the cradle to the grave.” Its crowning glory was the National Health Service, established in 1948, which provided free medical care for all at the point of delivery. Since then, the welfare system has been patched, beset by muddled thinking and short-termism. The British government spends more than £171 billion every year on welfare—and yet, since the Beveridge Report, there has been no strategic review of the system, compared to other areas of government and public policy, which have been subject to frequent strategic reviews. Reform of the welfare system need not mean dismantlement, Frank Field and Andrew Forsey argue here, but serious questions nonetheless must be asked about how the welfare state as we understand it can remain sustainable as the twenty-first century progresses.

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