Welfare State Came From Real Need
By Ralph Lynn
Dr. Ralph Lynn is a member of the Board of Contributors, 32 Central Texans who write columns regularly for the Waco Tribune-Herald. He is a retired professor of history at Baylor University. This article was in the February 27, 1996 issue of the Tribune-Herald.
Last September, Professor Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business gave a lecture at the American Enterprise Institute in which he argued that the turn of the century religious awakening "provided the intellectual foundation for the welfare state." (Wall Street Journal, January 9)
Perhaps the contribution of the religious revival either to intellectualism or to the New Deal is questionable. But it did, quite likely, stir the consciences of some leaders and awaken them to the plight of masses of people trying to make the transition from the agricultural, farm village world to urban living.
What was the real reason for the birth of the New Deal?
The key: in the agricultural, farm village world, nearly everybody had built-in social security in the form of a cow, some chickens, some pigs and a garden plot.
In the urban world, it is not only impossible, on account of crowded living conditions, but illegal, to have the traditional built-in social security.
More: in that simple agricultural world, nearly any adult could cure most ordinary ailments with either a sharp knife or calomel and castor oil.
In that vanished world, in which many "conservative" minds still live, the neighbors could, with no great sacrifice, "make a friend`s crop" for him if he fell ill in the working season.
In the farm village, the neighbors brought soup to the sick, they "sat up" with them, and they looked after the cow, the chickens, pigs and garden.
When death came, the neighbors would "lay out" the body, dig the grave, sing some songs and saw a few words.
Well, that simple, old agricultural farm village world is, like Clementine in the folk song, "lost and gone forever"–even if Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey and the freshman Republican legislators have not yet discovered that fact.
Their prescriptions for effective living in our nearly total urban society are just as obsolete as the sharp knife, calomel and castor oil of that vanished world.
Practical Responses
In sum: the New Deal and the welfare state did not depend upon the religious awakening. Except for some excesses of good intentions, they were and are practical–even unavoidable–responses to the realities of modern life.
When President Clinton and the Republican leaders say that the "era of big government is over," they are–one hopes–aware that they are only saying what they hope will win the next election.
Their task, and ours, is to manage big government so that we can retain our traditional freedoms while we learn to live as cooperative, responsible citizens in the new world in which everything but our mindset is brand new.
It seems that the archaic spirit of Milton Freidman has rubbed off on Professor Fogel. And one must wonder why far-right think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute are still operating.
Even in the heyday of communism, its agents could not sell their unrealistic dream even to oppressed African-Americans. Now, with the demise of that system, one suspects that the supporters of these think tanks are either almost pathologically paranoid or that they have found soft positions which they do not wish to abandon for the real world.
