TY - BOOK AU - Amenta,Edwin TI - Bold Relief: Institutional Politics and the Origins of Modern American Social Policy T2 - Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparative Perspectives SN - 9780691227481 AV - HN57 PY - 2022///] CY - Princeton, NJ : PB - Princeton University Press, KW - Public welfare KW - United States KW - History KW - POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Economy KW - bisacsh KW - African Americans KW - Agricultural Adjustment Administration KW - American Labor party KW - American Legion KW - American Liberty League (ALL) KW - American Medical Association (AMA) KW - Beveridge, William KW - Board of Trade, Britain KW - Burnham, Walter Dean KW - California KW - Civil War pensions KW - Cold War KW - Common Sense KW - Department of Labor KW - Downey, Sheridan KW - Emergency Powers Act (1944) KW - End Poverty in California (EPIC) KW - Great Depression KW - House of Representatives KW - Jowitt, Sir William KW - Keynesianism KW - Massachusetts KW - Ministry of Labour, Britain KW - National Civic Federation KW - Ohio KW - Republican party KW - Rockefeller Foundation KW - antidiscrimination policies KW - business organizations KW - campaign finance KW - coalitions KW - corporatism KW - deficit spending KW - democracy KW - disability insurance KW - economic and modernization theories KW - elections KW - federalism KW - form of programs KW - health policy KW - institutional and statist theories KW - left-center parties KW - liberalism KW - logrolling KW - need-based programs KW - old-age pensions KW - outdoor relief KW - patronage KW - policy experts KW - progressivism KW - public works KW - recession N1 - Frontmatter --; CONTENTS --; ILLUSTRATIONS --; TABLES AND FIGURES --; PREFACE --; INTRODUCTION Paradoxes of American Social Policy --; CHAPTER ONE An Institutional Politics Theory of Social Policy --; CHAPTER TWO An Indifferent Commitment to Modern Social Policy, 1880-1934 --; CHAPTER THREE America's First Welfare Reform, 1935-1936 --; CHAPTER FOUR Consolidating the Work and Relief Policy, 1937-1939 --; CHAPTER FIVE Some Little New Deals Are Littler than Others --; CHAPTER SIX Redefining the New Deal, 1940-1950 --; CHAPTER SEVEN A Welfare State for Britain --; CONCLUSION --; AFTERWORD --; NOTES --; INITIALS OF ORGANIZATIONS AND PROGRAMS --; INDEX; restricted access N2 - According to conventional wisdom, American social policy has always been exceptional--exceptionally stingy and backwards. But Edwin Amenta reminds us here that sixty years ago the United States led the world in spending on social provision. He combines history and political theory to account for this surprising fact--and to explain why the country's leading role was short-lived. The orthodox view is that American social policy began in the 1930s as a two-track system of miserly "welfare" for the unemployed and generous "social security" for the elderly. However, Amenta shows that the New Deal was in fact a bold program of relief, committed to providing jobs and income support for the unemployed. Social security was, by comparison, a policy afterthought. By the late 1930s, he shows, the U.S. pledged more of its gross national product to relief programs than did any other major industrial country. Amenta develops and uses an institutional politics theory to explain how social policy expansion was driven by northern Democrats, state-based reformers, and political outsiders. And he shows that retrenchment in the 1940s was led by politicians from areas where beneficiaries of relief were barred from voting. He also considers why some programs were nationalized, why some states had far-reaching "little New Deals," and why Britain--otherwise so similar to the United States--adopted more generous social programs. Bold Relief will transform our understanding of the roots of American social policy and of the institutional and political dynamics that will shape its future UR - https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691227481?locatt=mode:legacy UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780691227481 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9780691227481/original ER -