The Welfare State in America after the Great Depression and World War II

Résumé du document

The U.S. government's response to the Great Depression and World War II represented a compromise between those who hoped to expand the powers of the state and American citizens' traditional distrust of the government. Evaluate the evidence for this statement.

“Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.” Those are the words the revolutionary Thomas Paine published in his book Common Sense, in January 1776, a few months before the American insurgents proclaimed independence from the British Crown. The sentence was to become a fundamental principle in U.S. political thought for centuries, as an illustration of how peculiar the relationship between the American people and their government would be. This idea that the “government is best which governs least” – a phrase often attributed to Adams, Jefferson or Paine – shows quite well American citizens' traditional distrust of the government, a legacy from the founding fathers. Yet, major twentieth-century crises such as the Great Depression and World War Two would question that original conception of the government in the United States, at least to a certain degree. To what extent did the U.S. government's response to the Great Depression and World War II represent a compromise between those who hoped to expand the powers of the state and American citizens' traditional distrust of the government?

Extraits

[...] How do these new responsibilities represent an expansion of the powers of the state, and to what extent? The First New Deal promotes the belief that government could be trusted with broad-ranging powers to regulate the economy in the national interest”[2]. The state begins to intervene in new economic fields: it implements a bank reform, a farm and railroad relief system, it provides more jobs to those in need, and votes laws to curve speculation[3]. The National Recovery Act even sets codes for prices and wages, as in Stalin's U.S.S.R., illustrating a real expansion of the main powers of the state. [...]

[...] Even if the government conduct of business could give us the maximum of efficiency instead of least efficiency, it would be purchased at the cost of freedom”[14]. This common fear that the government would become master of people's souls and thoughts was based on everyday life facts, including the growing role of the state propaganda to control citizens' thoughts. The reality of the propaganda during World War II appears, among others, in the 1943 musical “This is the designed to boost morale within the U.S. population[15]. A compromise, which is really what the U.S. government's response to the Great Depression and World War II represents. [...]

[...] Even after the end of the war, the hard sufferings endured by the American people lead president Truman to implement new welfare reforms, such as the extension of social security and a legislation to guarantee minimum wages and full employment. Those reforms represent another expansion of the powers of the state, due to World War II[8]. However, it is worth noticing that neither the Great Depression nor World War II put an end to American citizens' traditional distrust of the government. The action of the government for those in need and therefore the subsequent expansion of the powers of the state remains quite limited. For instance, large groups of people are excluded from social security benefits (e.g. [...]

[...] Their power is such that Roosevelt eventually decides to move to the left, with the Second New Deal (1935). This new policy includes, among others, a tax on wealth (with the Wealth Tax Act of 1935, on inheritance and annual incomes higher than $50,000) and a social security system. The Social Security Act, a cornerstone for the Welfare State, implements old age pensions and unemployment insurances[17]. All those measures widen the traditional role of the state and contribute to expand its powers like never before. [...]

[...] In a nation-wide radio address, Jouett Shouse, president of this association, criticizes the way the Roosevelt administration has expanded its powers to the detriment of civil liberties: New Deal has built up a huge bureaucracy who has shown no regard for the Constitutional rights and liberties of our citizens. [ ] The New Deal represents the attempt in America to set up a totalitarian government, one which recognizes no sphere of individual or business life as immune from governmental authority and which submerges the welfare of the individual to that of the government”[12]. The President's action is even called attack upon free institutions and on free men'[13]. [...]