Robyn Muncy
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691122731
- eISBN:
- 9781400852413
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691122731.001.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, American Politics
Josephine Roche (1886–1976) was a progressive activist, New Deal policymaker, and businesswoman. As a pro-labor and feminist member of Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration, she shaped the founding ...
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Josephine Roche (1886–1976) was a progressive activist, New Deal policymaker, and businesswoman. As a pro-labor and feminist member of Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration, she shaped the founding legislation of the U.S. welfare state and generated the national conversation about health care policy that Americans are still having today. This book offers Roche's persistent progressivism as evidence for surprising continuities among the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society. The book explains that Roche became the second-highest-ranking woman in the New Deal government after running a Colorado coal company in partnership with coal miners themselves. Once in office, Roche developed a national health plan that was stymied by World War II but enacted piecemeal during the postwar period, culminating in Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s. By then, Roche directed the United Mine Workers of America Welfare and Retirement Fund, an initiative aimed at bolstering the labor movement, advancing managed health care, and reorganizing medicine to facilitate national health insurance, one of Roche's unrealized dreams. This book uses Roche's dramatic life story as a unique vantage point from which to examine the challenges that women have faced in public life and to reassess the meaning and trajectory of progressive reform.Less
Josephine Roche (1886–1976) was a progressive activist, New Deal policymaker, and businesswoman. As a pro-labor and feminist member of Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration, she shaped the founding legislation of the U.S. welfare state and generated the national conversation about health care policy that Americans are still having today. This book offers Roche's persistent progressivism as evidence for surprising continuities among the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society. The book explains that Roche became the second-highest-ranking woman in the New Deal government after running a Colorado coal company in partnership with coal miners themselves. Once in office, Roche developed a national health plan that was stymied by World War II but enacted piecemeal during the postwar period, culminating in Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s. By then, Roche directed the United Mine Workers of America Welfare and Retirement Fund, an initiative aimed at bolstering the labor movement, advancing managed health care, and reorganizing medicine to facilitate national health insurance, one of Roche's unrealized dreams. This book uses Roche's dramatic life story as a unique vantage point from which to examine the challenges that women have faced in public life and to reassess the meaning and trajectory of progressive reform.
Julilly Kohler-Hausmann
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780691174525
- eISBN:
- 9781400885183
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691174525.003.0008
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
This concluding chapter discusses how chronicling the recent history of the U.S. welfare state presents different challenges. Instead of making visible the towering institutions in plain sight, ...
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This concluding chapter discusses how chronicling the recent history of the U.S. welfare state presents different challenges. Instead of making visible the towering institutions in plain sight, scholars have the challenge of keeping the light on something that much political rhetoric insists has already retreated or will soon retreat into irrelevance. The chapter highlights those sections of the safety net that have attenuated to mere gossamer threads and bring into view the robust state supports obscured by claims of their recipients' deservingness and independence. This is critical because social welfare programs continue to figure prominently in low-income communities. Welfare programs have become more privatized, shifted strategies, and redirected resources but have not abdicated responsibility for social regulation.Less
This concluding chapter discusses how chronicling the recent history of the U.S. welfare state presents different challenges. Instead of making visible the towering institutions in plain sight, scholars have the challenge of keeping the light on something that much political rhetoric insists has already retreated or will soon retreat into irrelevance. The chapter highlights those sections of the safety net that have attenuated to mere gossamer threads and bring into view the robust state supports obscured by claims of their recipients' deservingness and independence. This is critical because social welfare programs continue to figure prominently in low-income communities. Welfare programs have become more privatized, shifted strategies, and redirected resources but have not abdicated responsibility for social regulation.
Julilly Kohler-Hausmann
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780691174525
- eISBN:
- 9781400885183
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691174525.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
In 1970s America, politicians began “getting tough” on drugs, crime, and welfare. These campaigns helped expand the nation's penal system, discredit welfare programs, and cast blame for the era's ...
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In 1970s America, politicians began “getting tough” on drugs, crime, and welfare. These campaigns helped expand the nation's penal system, discredit welfare programs, and cast blame for the era's social upheaval on racialized deviants that the state was not accountable to serve or represent. This book sheds light on how this unprecedented growth of the penal system and the evisceration of the nation's welfare programs developed hand in hand. The book shows that these historical events were animated by struggles over how to interpret and respond to the inequality and disorder that crested during this period. When social movements and the slowing economy destabilized the U.S. welfare state, politicians reacted by repudiating the commitment to individual rehabilitation that had governed penal and social programs for decades. In its place, they championed strategies of punishment, surveillance, and containment. The architects of these tough strategies insisted they were necessary, given the failure of liberal social programs and the supposed pathological culture within poor African American and Latino communities. This book rejects this explanation and describes how the spectacle of enacting punitive policies convinced many Americans that social investment was counterproductive and the “underclass” could be managed only through coercion and force. Spanning diverse institutions and weaving together the perspectives of opponents, supporters, and targets of punitive policies, the book offers new interpretations of dramatic transformations in the modern American state.Less
In 1970s America, politicians began “getting tough” on drugs, crime, and welfare. These campaigns helped expand the nation's penal system, discredit welfare programs, and cast blame for the era's social upheaval on racialized deviants that the state was not accountable to serve or represent. This book sheds light on how this unprecedented growth of the penal system and the evisceration of the nation's welfare programs developed hand in hand. The book shows that these historical events were animated by struggles over how to interpret and respond to the inequality and disorder that crested during this period. When social movements and the slowing economy destabilized the U.S. welfare state, politicians reacted by repudiating the commitment to individual rehabilitation that had governed penal and social programs for decades. In its place, they championed strategies of punishment, surveillance, and containment. The architects of these tough strategies insisted they were necessary, given the failure of liberal social programs and the supposed pathological culture within poor African American and Latino communities. This book rejects this explanation and describes how the spectacle of enacting punitive policies convinced many Americans that social investment was counterproductive and the “underclass” could be managed only through coercion and force. Spanning diverse institutions and weaving together the perspectives of opponents, supporters, and targets of punitive policies, the book offers new interpretations of dramatic transformations in the modern American state.
