Memo to America, Re: Welfare in the Olden Days
Gabriel Loiacono One evening, chatting with friends from church, one asked me what kind of history I focused on. I told him: the history of welfare in early America. He said: what welfare in early America? "The drunkard's progress, or the direct road to poverty, wretchedness & ruin," 1826. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. I find myself having a conversation like that one more and more these days. Whether on the left or the right politically, high school grads or Ph.D.s, most Americans I talk to assume that welfare is a creation of the twentieth century: midwifed by Franklin D. Roosevelt or Lyndon B. Johnson. Those hearty, independent minutemen of the Revolutionary period, they assume, either made the poor find work or relied only on churches for charity. Occasionally, this assumption is voiced explicitly in national, political discourse. For example, in a famous September 12, 2011 Republican Presidential Primary debate, Representative R...