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| Author’s introduction: Beginning in the Spring of 1998, I attempted to secure a contract for my latest book project concerning U.S. social policy. What I envisioned writing was a broad historical and conceptual synthesis that would appeal to a wide range of scholars in the social sciences, their advanced undergraduate and graduate students, and hopefully to policy makers as well; indeed, it was the potential to conduct interdisciplinary research that led me to law school almost three decades ago. What I received instead was a protracted and painful lesson, or perhaps set of lessons, concerning academic life and the publishing business. As a small service to my fellow legal scholars, I will be posting the "highlights" of this lesson to The Green Bag web site. The best means I can think of conveying this information is simply to reproduce the essential correspondence between myself, two editors, and a handful of outside reviewers. Out of deference to the traditional length limitations of this e-journal, and to convey some sense of the time delays I experienced as the author, I will release this correspondence in a series of six weekly installments. This week’s entry presents my initial cover letter and book prospectus; next week, the first reactions and reviews.
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| May 20,
1998
Editor Dear Sir/Madam: I am writing to solicit your interest in a planned book manuscript titled, "The American? Welfare? State: Federalism and Citizenship in U.S. Social Policy." Enclosed you will find a brief prospectus and table of contents describing the book I have in mind, as well as my vita. This book will serve the dual purpose of introducing students to important milestones in social policy and providing a conceptual framework that provides general coherence to developments over the last century. As the preliminary title of the book indicates, I am most interested in highlighting two fundamental debates: 1) which level of government — state or national — should be responsible for social welfare (i.e., to the extent that states are important, whether it makes sense to think of a single American welfare state); and 2) which citizens should be legally classified as beneficiaries. These themes were certainly central to the 1996 welfare reform bill, and I will show that they have been so throughout history. You can reach me at the above address or by email (noclew@unova.edu). Please be aware that I have sent a comparable package of materials to a select number of commercial and university presses, and that I would be pleased to work with any of them. Thank you in advance for giving this proposal careful consideration. Sincerely, Norman O. Clewson Enclosures
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| ** BOOK PROSPECTUS ** The American? Welfare? State: by Norman O. Clewson (May 1998) Few subjects elicit as much scholarly interest or public passion as social policy. The fall of the Clinton health plan and the passage of welfare reform stand as the defining legislative battles of the 1990s; proposals to privatize Social Security and Medicare are shaping up as major debates for the start of the next century. That social programs should attract so much attention is not surprising considering they benefit tens of millions of citizens, and virtually everyone rightly anticipates receiving benefits at some point in their lives. Taken together, they are the single largest component of public spending in the United States. Looking backwards, we can see that United States history during the 20th century is filled with battles large and small over social policy. Even those small battles, though, often had significant implications for the future. This book charts the history of those battles, starting at the state level during the Progressive era and moving forward to the 1990s. Although considerable attention is paid to the 1930s and 1960s, the two "big bangs" in which most of today’s programs were created, periods of quiet expansion and not-so-quiet attempts at retrenchments are also analyzed. This is much more than the story of pivotal presidents like FDR and LBJ; it is also the story of economic modernization in the South, sometimes rapid sometimes gradual shifts in party control of Congress, the rise of interest groups like the AARP, change and continuity in public opinion, judicial activism, and the media. Central to this story, however, are two themes that run through the history of U.S. social policy. The first is federalism, and in particular debates over how much authority should be vested in Washington versus the states. The second theme is citizenship, primarily which groups of individuals (e.g., the elderly, the poor, the sick) have legitimate claims on the public purse. In a very real sense, this book unites two of the central questions in American politics: "who governs?" and "who gets what from government?" Thus, this book will appeal to a wide range of readers. It can serve as a core text in undergraduate or graduate courses in social policy, public policy, or American political development. Written in the author’s own acclaimed prose, the book will also appeal to a non-academic audience wanting to make sense of some of today’s most pressing questions, issues, and controversies. Norman Clewson is A. H. Robins Professor of Law and Social Policy at the University of Northern Virginia. He has published two books about U.S. social policy, More Welfare, More State (1990) and The Needy and the Greedy (1995), as well as articles in the M.I.T. Law Review and the Journal of Law, Policy, Politics, Society, and Culture. Introduction/acknowledgments Chapter 1. Federalism and Citizenship: a conceptual map Chapter 2. States and Citizens in the Progressive Era Chapter 3. The First "Big Bang," the Second New Deal Chapter 4. Expanding Citizenship, 1935-75 Chapter 5. Nationalizing the Welfare State, 1935-90 Chapter 6. Politics of Devolution and Retrenchment in the 1990s Conclusion
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| To: Norman Clewson (noclew@unova.edu) Dear Professor Clewson: Thank you for sending us a prospectus for your book on the history of welfare. We may have an interest in sending it out for review, but need to know first how your book would differ from others already on the market. Thank you. Demi Witt
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| To: Demi Witt (demi.witt@capitolpress.org) Subject: Re- competing books Date: Thu 18 Jun 1998 4:33:11 pm EST From: Norman Clewson <noclew@unova.edu> Dear Ms. Witt: In response to your earlier email message, I would like to distinguish my book from several others currently on the market. Compared to Michael Katz’s In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, I plan to say almost nothing about developments in the 19th century and much more about middle-class entitlements in the 20th century. I also have the advantage of writing almost 15 years after Katz, so I can discuss more recent developments. Likewise, James Patterson’s America’s Struggle Against Poverty 1900-1994 has little to say about programs that are not targeted at the poor, which account for about three-quarters of the American welfare state. The closer competitors are books by Edward Berkowitz and Theda Skocpol. Berkowitz (America’s Welfare State: From Roosevelt to Reagan, 1991) does a very good job charting milestones for Social Security, AFDC, and health care, but says little about other important social programs like unemployment insurance and Food Stamps. Moreover, he deliberately avoids offering any general explanation of or framework for social policy making, and his narrative ends in the late 1980s. Skocpol (Social Policy in the United States, 1995), on the other hand, is more interested in explaining select features of the American welfare state than in providing a comprehensive narrative. For someone interested in contemporary debates, she devotes too much time to events prior to the New Deal and not enough on the 1960s and 1970s. Students, in my experience, find some of the theoretical debates engaged in to be too academic. I hope this is helpful. Thank you for showing an interest in my book prospectus.
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August 28, 1998 Professor Norman Clewson Dear Professor Clewson: I am enclosing reports from two external reviewers concerning your book prospectus, The American Welfare State: Out of the Past Comes the Future. I’m afraid that neither review is sufficiently positive for us to move forward with this project. Best wishes in finding a suitable publisher. Sincerely yours, Demi Witt Enclosures |
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| Reviewer A
The American? Welfare? State, for Capitol Press August 1998 * One can only infer so much from a two-page prospectus and outline, so my comments should be taken with more than the customary grain of salt. The project has a number of things going for it, namely a clear set of themes and a novel periodization scheme, one that breaks away (albeit not completely) from the traditional focus on the 1930s and 1960s as the two "big bangs" of welfare state formation. Nevertheless, I have my doubts (starting with the title, which is so clever that it’s cryptic and distracting). * The theme of "citizenship" seems to me rightly chosen but potentially underdeveloped. From the outline, it appears to refer principally to eligibility criteria — who’s covered, and how that coverage varies — and to benefits. This is a good first step, for many accounts focus far too much on policy debates in Washington and too little on the tangible impact of policies on individuals. Nevertheless, I feel that is misleading to portray the recipients of means-tested programs as second-class citizens compared to recipients of social insurance. For one, individuals can often receive more than one means-tested benefit so that, for instance, much trumpeted cuts in AFDC are actually offset by less noted increases in Food Stamps and in the cash value of Medicaid. The author may face a significant empirical challenge in documenting changes to the status of groups of citizens, rather than changes to individual social programs. Moreover, citizens are defined not just by what they get from government but what they give, and the tax/financing structure of social programs isn’t mentioned here at all. If the poor effectively receive more than they pay in taxes, doesn’t that make them in some real sense a privileged class of citizens? A final note: I’m not sure that the recent welfare reform bill signals a reduction in citizenship for the poor. The initial results suggest that many families once on AFDC have been pushed into the paid labor force where their take-home pay and freedom from intrusive social service bureaucrats is greater. To me, that sounds like an expansion in citizenship. In short, I think there’s a large normative dimension to citizenship that the author will have to enunciate and make explicit to readers. * In any truly comprehensive history of the American welfare state, I would expect some discussion of the government’s role as employer, from the public works projects of the early New Deal to the vast network of contemporary contractors who provide health care, job training, and a host of other social services financed by the government. By the same token, retirement and health benefits for government employees (civilian and military) currently cost more than the vast majority of means-tested programs, and serve more people. The author might read Michael Brown and Steve Erie’s analysis of the employment effects of the Great Society (Public Policy, Summer 1981), which they claim surpassed the income transfer effects by helping to create a black middle class. For a more recent and provocative treatment, see Theda Skocpol’s claim that defense contracts and highways bills serve as the modern equivalent of the Works Progress Administration, except that the beneficiaries aren’t poor, they’re middle class and often well-educated (ch. 7, Social Policy in the United States). * Doing justice to both of these topics would prompt a much longer book. It would have less focus and less market appeal. My main advice is that the author narrow his field of vision to a specific social program (modeled after Martha Derthick’s Policymaking for Social Security) or a comparison between two or three programs, and abandon all pretense of analyzing the entire American welfare state.
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B
The American? Welfare? State, for Capitol Press July 1998 I would not buy it for a buck, I would not read it in the john, Seriously, this project seems deeply flawed on at least two counts. First, it strikes me as an opportunistic attempt to cash in on the recent wave of scholarship re- citizenship. If the subject is voting rights or immigration policy (see Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals), a larger discussion of citizenship seems quite appropriate. But in the case of social policy, the links just don‘t exist. Being a citizen means having certain rights and obligations to participate in the governing of that community; it doesn’t mean collecting an unemployment check or paying doctors to treat Medicaid patients. Am I less a citizen than my grandfather simply because he collects Social Security and his doctor bills are paid by Medicare, and I don’t? That seems like a pretty far-fetched claim. Were Southern blacks second-class citizens in the 1930s and 1940s because they received smaller relief checks than whites? No, they were second-class citizens because local elites used force and legal chicanery to keep them from voting. Second, we simply don’t need another qualitative history of U.S. social policy; Katz, Patterson, Skocpol et al. have done the job. What we do need is more sophisticated quantitative work (i.e., multiple regression and time-series analysis). This approach would help the author identify, for example, the political and economic conditions under which a wide range of social programs grow. It would help establish patterns in eligibility criteria and benefits among the states. That could be an interesting book, especially if it moved beyond the current emphasis in the quantitative policy literature of looking at individual programs and recent periods of time. The challenge, of course, will be in assembling a large and robust data set that allows you to measure the impact of social, political, and economic forces across the 20th century. If the author is willing to take on that challenge, great, but that represents a much different book than the one outlines here.
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September 14, 1998 Professor Norman Clewson Dear Professor Clewson: I am writing to offer feedback on your book prospectus, The American? Welfare? State: Federalism and Citizenship in U.S. Social Policy. I would have written sooner but one of the initial reviewers failed to meet even an extended deadline and we had to quickly find a substitute. We sent out copies of the prospectus and outline you mailed to us, as well as the brief discussion of competing books that you later e-mailed to us, to three well-respected scholars. I think it’s fair to say that while they agreed that no one had yet produced a comprehensive history of the American welfare state, and that such a volume would indeed be useful to researchers and teachers, they differed over what changes are needed. I leave it to you to decide which of their arguments for change seem compelling. I have enclosed copies of their reports and would like you to consider submitting a revised prospectus and outline, and the sooner the better. Feel free to email me (stpeter@upress.edu) with any questions. Sincerely yours, Austin St. Peter Enclosures
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| Reviewer: 1 98.213 (The University Press) My first reaction is to note a major disjuncture between the cover letter and the outline. The cover letter promises to discuss individual politicians, political parties, interest groups, public opinion, the media — in short, the driving forces behind policy change. The outline, in contrast, appears to focus on the consequences of change for federalism and citizenship. Both are, I think, important, but it will take a heroic effort to do justice to both in a single volume. Theda Skocpol’s award-winning book, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, comes as close as any I know to achieving this objective, and she takes over 500 pages of text alone to bring the story up to 1930. Admittedly, the proposed book will not treat the 19th century as much as hers did, but even so I think you get a sense of the potential scale involved. I can imagine the author replying that he does not plan to do as much original archival research as Skocpol, and instead unite findings from the existing secondary literature. That’s fine, except that the existing literature is overflowing with competing theories: some stress economic modernization (applying both to the national and state levels), some interest group pressure, some political culture or public opinion; others stress electoral pressures, or the machinations of unelected bureaucrats and judges, or the structural features of governing institutions. One solution is to take a stand, indicating which explanations you intend to undermine and which you intend to support. Doing so would require a large leap from describing large-scale patterns, which seems to be the goal of the present project, to explaining why these patterns occur. Here I want to offer a word of caution. One common response to the proliferation of theorizing in this area is to offer complex, multi-factor explanations. I feel strongly that this is a mistake. From a teaching standpoint, this move reinforces my students’ prevailing belief that everything matters equally, all the time, everywhere. From a disciplinary standpoint, it is a strong argument for historians and journalists to take control of studying the American welfare state because sociologists, political scientists, and economists have little to add. Unless the author is prepared to assign clear weights to each factor in his model (and these can be subjective weights, like more and less important, and not numerical weights), and to offer evidence throughout the book showing why some things matter more than others, then I would encourage a simpler model with fewer factors. An equally serious problem, in my view, concerns the author’s use of the two-tiered welfare state as a framework for analysis. By now it should be fairly clear that means-tested programs can develop strong constituencies and experience substantial growth; witness the recent experience of Medicaid, the single largest means-tested program, and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). While Medicare has been targeted for cuts in the name of deficit reduction, eligibility for Medicaid has been expanded to millions of poor and near-poor children. The EITC has been the fastest growing social program during the last 15 years, and that includes Medicare and Social Security. Among the social insurance programs, I’m not sure that unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation belong in the same category as Social Security. The former programs are federal rather than national, which means that eligibility and benefits do vary by state (sometimes quite a bit). Benefits aren’t nearly as generous, and they don’t enjoy the same "third rail" reputation as Social Security. If the author can work out some better way of categorizing programs, and use those distinctions throughout the book, then he would truly make an original and important contribution to the literature. Finally, I have questions about the originality of chapter 2, which sounds like a long repeat of Skocpol’s take on this era, and of chapter 5, which seems quite close to Paul Pierson’s work on the nationalization of income transfers. That said, I agree that a comprehensive history of the American welfare state is much needed. I have taught all of the books referenced by the author and have found them lacking for many of the same reasons he describes. Given my students’ resistence to using our library’s reserve room, and given the spiraling costs (copyright, photocopying) of developing a coursepack of readings, it is important that we write more comprehensive books.
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| Reviewer 2 Manuscript: The American? Welfare? State Ever hear of tax expenditures? It’s probably asking too much for the author to have read my just published book, Buried Treasures: The Invisible Welfare State of Tax Expenditures (1997), but surely s/he’s read my preliminary findings in the Southeastern Journal of Tax Policy or the Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Conference of Denmark’s American Studies Association. By the time this proposed book sees the light of day, educated readers will be expecting to hear a lot about tax expenditures, and your prospectus and outline give no indication that you even know they exist. So what is the author missing? Only $300-400 billion in lost revenues every year. Only three of the six largest social programs in the American welfare state (i.e., tax breaks for home mortgage interest deduction, company-based pensions, and company-based health insurance). Only a history of involvement by the national government that antedates the New Deal by over 20 years. But there’s more. If you read Theda Skocpole’s article in The American Prospect (vol. 28, 1996), or Michael Bennett’s recent book, When Dreams Came True (Brassey’s 1996), you’ll see renewed interest in the GI Bill as social policy. By making it easier for WWII veterans to borrow money, the national government made higher education and home ownership available to millions; it is the single most important expansion of the American welfare state between the New Deal and the Great Society. I cannot imagine a decent history of the American welfare state without discussion of the GI Bill, as well as subsequent development of loans and loan guarantees with social welfare objectives. The more general point is this: the national government has multiple ways of extending aid to needy citizens beyond the tools of social insurance and means-tested appropriations described in the book prospectus and outline. Without discussion of these other policy tools, the author will end up perpetuating shop-worn cliches about how little and how late the American welfare state developed relative to welfare states in Europe. At bottom, what the author has in mind is a partial history of the American welfare state, one that covers well-known territory and ignores the more intriguing provinces. If s/he aims higher, thinks more broadly, s/he’ll have a good book.
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| To: Austin St. Peter stpeter@upress.edu Dear Mr. St. Peter: In the interests of time I am submitting my review by email; a hard copy should arrive by regular mail shortly. Overall, while I much admire the author’s aims and ambition, I feel the project needs work and do not recommend publication in its current form. This prospectus and outline came to me several months after I finished reading Charles Noble’s recent book, Welfare As We Knew It: A Political History of the American Welfare State (Oxford UP, 1997). I mention this partly to alert you and the author to a potential competitor on the market, and to highlight the source of some of my comments concerning this project. One of the things that I like best about Noble’s book is that he clearly defines the main function of a welfare state: "In capitalist societies, welfare states exist to protect the public from the impact of unregulated market forces." This statement leads Noble to consider not just social insurance and public assistance, but also minimum wage laws, affirmative action, and important milestones in taxation. The definition certainly has its problems: it would seem to encompass environmental regulation, food and drug purity laws, and almost every other function of government; and Noble does not fully develop the history of every major social program he identifies. Nevertheless, he does force readers to think about what principles underlie the American welfare state, and he does draw attention to government activities that have a substantial impact on citizens’ well-being but are not commonly categorized as social policy. With that as my preface, let me then encourage the author to explain why he apparently thinks that social insurance constitutes the core of the American welfare state and the Social Security Act of 1935 as its date of birth. After all, the U.S. had state and local public assistance programs dating back to colonial times. Why must the national government become involved for a welfare state to exist? Why must benefits be available to those who are not poor for a welfare state to exist? Why must governments impose payroll taxes, create trust funds, and link benefits received to taxes paid in order to create a welfare state? The answer is not obvious, which is why bright scholars like Michael Katz start the narrative much earlier and devote substantial attention to the 19th century. I can imagine several possible answers to these questions. A weak option would be to argue that by convention, scholars have made social insurance the foundation, or core, of welfare states—weak because it substitutes historical practice for rational explanation and because some scholars define the core differently or more broadly. A better option would be to discuss the principles behind social insurance, such as national solidarity or the prevention of destitution, that set it apart from previous public assistance programs. Then you could make a brief normative case why these values are important to uphold in a wealthy democracy. Alternatively, if you think that inequality and redistribution are central (see, e.g., Esping-Anderson, Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism), then you should establish that early on and proceed to discuss not just traditional cash benefits, but also the progressivity of the income and payroll tax systems. In any case, clarifying the concept of "welfare state" should be central to the introduction to the book, and I cannot recommend a contract until that is done. As a start, you might revisit chapter one by Peter Flora and Arnold Heidenheimer in their 1981 edited volume, The Development of Welfare States in Europe and America. This is one of the most intelligent attempts I know of to define the essence of the welfare state without losing sight of historical and cross-national variations. Although the authors make a case for social insurance as the core of the welfare state, they do note that nations have also relied on poor relief, protective labor legislation, education, progressive income taxation, regulations governing unionization and collective bargaining, and even laws protecting freedom of association to promote similar objectives as social insurance, and that these other mechanisms often preceded social insurance. See for yourself whether you’re satisfied with their attempts to distinguish core from boundary social programs. On a separate but related point, I note that some crucial normative issues are largely overlooked. For instance, the author plans to discuss previous studies concerning the proper division of labor between state and national governments in chapter 1, but I see little effort to judge whether the decisions made from 1935 to the present were correct. While the author may intend to return to this issue in the concluding chapter, I would strongly suggest that it be integrated throughout. Likewise, I think the author is somewhat dismissive of the benefits of dual citizenship; individuals might be advantaged if individual states could offer distinct packages of benefits to their citizens, and not have to rely entirely on the national government. The challenge then is to state which benefits of citizenship should not vary across state lines and which should. I fear that I have been a bit too critical. Let me end by stating that given the sheer size of the American welfare state, its recurring salience in political debates, and the fundamental challenges it raises concerning state-society relations, I welcome another attempt to produce a single-volume synthesis. Unless readers have a clear sense of what the welfare state is or should be, however, they won’t be very well equipped to influence policy debates in the future.
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Austin St. Peter stpeter@upress.edu Subject: The American? Welfare? State Date: Mon 21 Sep 1998 10:45:03 am EST From: Norman Clewson <noclew@unova.edu> Dear Mr. St. Peter: I received the mixed but somewhat encouraging reviews of my book proposal you sent on 14 September, as well as feedback from other colleagues, and do plan to submit a revised prospectus and outline. I confess that I was a little surprised by the readers’ comments: I worried that the market was too saturated with good books, and that mine might not be needed; instead, the reviewers believe that I have found two useful themes but need to conceptualize them more clearly, link them more carefully to individual programs, and set some clear boundaries between social policy and other types of public interventions. Given my teaching commitments and the substantive changes desired by the reviewers, I may not be able to revise until the winter break. Thank you for your interest in a challenging and ambitious project. Norman
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| To: Norman Clewson noclew@unova.edu Fine. Drop me a line in a few months to let me know where things stand.
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| To:
Austin St. Peter stpeter@upress.edu Subject: Revisions to The American? Welfare? State Date: Wed 20 Jan 1999 5:48:18 pm EST From: Norman Clewson <noclew@unova.edu> Well, spring classes started today and I have not made as much progress as I had hoped on revising my book over the holidays. I won’t bore you with the details of my newfound familiarity with the local juvenile justice system. Rest assured, however, that I remain committed to this project and to working with The University Press. Norman
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Dear Austin: After much reflection and research, I have produced a revised prospectus and outline for my book proposal, now titled "Different Needs, Different Citizens: A Concise History of U.S. Social Policy." My understanding from our phone conversation last month is that you will submit this material to two outside readers, one new and one from the last round of reviews. From my perspective, Reviewer 1 is preferable because he or she offered somewhat more detailed and useful comments. The second reviewer seemed fixated on a single point and would be my last choice. As you will see, I have been quite responsive to all three initial reviewers. Compared to the proposal I circulated last summer, the main changes include:
I think you’ll find this version a definite improvement. Please let me know when I can expect to receive further feedback about this proposal. Thank you again for your patience. Norman Clewson
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| ** BOOK PROSPECTUS ** Different Needs, Different Citizens: A Concise History of U.S. Social Policy by April 1999 At the most basic level, governments exist to help citizens achieve a better life than they could on their own. Core functions throughout American history include national defense and a legal system protecting property rights. During the 20th century, however, the U.S. government acquired a new set of responsibilities that gradually came to dominate the national budget and the domestic policy agenda; debates over health insurance and welfare reform were the defining legislative battles of the 1990s. Those responsibilities — e.g., income support for retirees and the poor, health insurance, housing, food and nutrition assistance, unemployment benefits — are commonly referred to as the government’s social policy. Governments do not extend equal help to all, however. They recognize some needs and some groups as more legitimate than others, thus creating different classes of citizens. The most important distinctions are made between those who can and cannot work for wages: individuals who can work but do not find that their access to public benefits is less and more variable than individuals who cannot work, either because of old age or permanent disability. This book thus differs from the existing literature on several counts. It will encompass a broader range of programs than any previous history of U.S. social policy, with attention to social insurance, appropriations, tax expenditures, and loans and loan guarantees. It will sustain a clear focus on a single theme, unlike many histories that bombard readers with a mountain of statistics and legislative battles. And it will challenge the prevailing distinction between inclusive social insurance and means-tested appropriations programs. Different Needs, Different Citizens can serve as a core text in undergraduate or graduate courses in social policy, public policy, or American political development. By avoiding arcane theoretical debates, the book will also appeal to a non-academic audience. Norman Clewson is A. H. Robins Professor of Law and Social Policy at the University of Northern Virginia. He has published two books about U.S. social policy, More Welfare, More State (1990) and The Needy and the Greedy (1995), as well as articles in the M.I.T. Law Review and the Journal of Law, Policy, Politics, Society, and Culture. Introduction Q: Why do we need social policy? A: Collective action problems. Core principles of social policy: equal treatment and adequacy. Social policy before 1900 characterized local variation and inadequacy of benefits. Core instruments of social policy: social insurance, public assistance, tax expenditures, loans and loan guarantees I. Origins of U.S. Social Policy, 1910-1945 Chapter 1: Citizens of the states Chapter 2: Citizens of the nation II. Years of Growth, 1935-75 Chapter 3: Quiet Expansion, 1935-60 Chapter 4: The Great Society and the Nixon Years III. Years of Conflict, 1975- Chapter 5: Politics of Retrenchment? Chapter 6: New era of limits? Conclusion
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June 16, 1999 Professor Norman Clewson Dear Norman: I sent your revised book prospectus and outline to two readers, one of whom (#1) had seen the prior version. Both are scholars I’ve worked with before and come to trust. Their comments are enclosed, and frankly they leave me as much on the fence as I was before. There are still questions about the comprehensiveness of your account, and your decision to avoid engaging in theoretical debates has led one of the reviewers to question whether the book would be appropriate for our press. I’m not equipped to render a final verdict on the issue of comprehensiveness, though I am troubled by how often it comes up. I do worry about the "fit" between your project and The University Press, which is primarily an academic press, but I could be persuaded otherwise. My suggestion is this: take a look at the reviews and think about what kind of book you’d most like to write. If you still want to do this book, then send me a written response to these reviews explaining where you feel the reviewers are mistaken; I would then take your response and the reviews to our editorial board to see if we should proceed any further. We might then pay for a final round of external reviews. If, on the other hand, you decide that you want to pursue other options, then simply tell us to drop you from our list of pending projects. Sincerely yours, Austin St. Peter Enclosures
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| Reviewer: 1 98.213 (The University Press) Revised book proposal On the positive side, I’m pleased to see that the author has rethought the old two-tiered welfare state metaphor and hit upon a reasonable alternative (uniform vs variable citizenship, depending on level of control by national govt). I can see that federalism has been dropped in favor of citizenship, which should enhance the book’s focus and reduce the potential length without hurting in any serious way the level of interest among readers. The inclusion of indirect forms of social spending (as described, e.g., in Howard, Buried Treasures, 1997) will make the project more inclusive and more cutting-edge. And the author has heeded my advice to avoid a kitchen-sink approach to explanation. That said, I’m not sure if the revision represents a step forward or a step sideways. For one thing, the author simply has to go deeper than a simple citizenship = f (labor market participation) argument. It sounds like a fairly simple liberal values claim, but it could also be symptomatic of structural biases against women and racial minorities in the labor market. There has been a substantial growth over the last decade in feminist analyses of social policy, and in the last five years or so of race and social policy. This book will have to take those literatures into account. As a related point, I can’t tell whether the author intends to discuss who and what were responsible for the patterns in citizenship he describes. I can tell you that a book about U.S. social policy without Congress or presidents or social movements or interest groups could quickly dissolve into a sterile discussion of government statistics. I think the shift from "welfare state" to "social policy" in the title, and subsequent discussion of collective action problems in chapter 1, open up a Pandora’s box of problems. The advantage of a term like "welfare state" is that it connotes public action; "social policy," in contrast, connotes collective action, be it a government, a firm, or a voluntary association like a church. A book like Sanford Jacoby’s Modern Manors (Princeton UP, 1997), for instance, describes how three major firms developed a wide range of social benefits (pensions, health care, paid vacations) for their employees during the 20th century, partly to forestall unionization and partly to foster loyalty and productivity. If somewhere around half of the population receives important social benefits from their employer, shouldn’t those be part of the history of U.S. social policy as well? Finally, if you want readers to appreciate the variety of ways in which governments make social policy, I think you may want to add a section or chapter on rules prescribing corporate conduct. These seems every bit as important as tax expenditures. Over the last decade or so, some of the key "social" benefits have been conferred via national regulation: the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Family Medical Leave Act, the Kennedy-Kassebaum bill (governing the private health insurance market), and increases in the minimum wage. The ERISA law of 1974, creating a massive set of regulations governing employers’ pension and health plans, was arguably the single most important piece of social legislation in the last 25 years. Given bipartisan acceptance of a balanced budget, and given widespread public distrust of government, it would seem reasonable to infer that this technique of social policy making would become more attractive in the future. I would make these points integral to chapters 6 and 7.
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| Reviewer #4 U.S. Social Policy, for The University Press June 1999 This wing of the public policy literature continues to baffle me. The two most important determinants of individual welfare are a nation’s economic and educational policies. The former determines the size of the national pie and the latter who gets how big a slice. Nevertheless, you almost never see these policies mentioned in studies of social policy. Instead, education policy, economic policy, and social policy are considered to be separate and distinct subfields. The same is true of this proposal (with the single notable exception of the GI Bill). The most interesting studies of social policy, in my view, blur these disciplinary lines. Regardless of whether you agree with Charles Murray’s history of U.S. social policy between 1950 and 1980, you ought to see that his linkage of education to poverty and public assistance makes great sense. At the other end of the ideological spectrum, Margaret Weir and Theda Skocpol have written intelligently about economic policy choices in the post-WWII era, and how elected officials avoided microeconomic interventions in favor of broader macroeconomic moves like tax cuts. If you go back to Flora and Heidenheimer (eds.), Development of Welfare States in Europe and America, you’ll find that two of the eleven chapters deal expressly with education. Going a step further, one might view the military (and perhaps prisons) as performing vital vocational education functions for the poor and working class. If the author really wants to hit a home run, he’ll find ways of making educational and economic policy making central to his book. There is no shame in hitting a double, though, and this book does go beyond the existing histories of U.S. social policy in a couple of ways. It does indeed include a wider range of social programs, traditionally defined, than any other book I know of. Pushing scholars and students to think more broadly about social policy is a step in the right direction. Second, the book promises to integrate developments at the national and state levels. The pattern in previous histories is to chart developments at the state level up to the New Deal and at the national level thereafter; states disappear, despite being integral to most means-tested programs. This book might well remind readers of the states’ persistent significance. Doing so will require a versatile scholar, for the state-level literature is filled with regression models designed to explain interstate variations in benefits and the national-level literature is filled with narratives of legislative battles.
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| To: Austin St. Peter
stpeter@upress.edu Austin -- I would have written sooner but we left for vacation shortly after your letter and the second round of reviews arrived at my office. I can’t say it was the most relaxing vacation I’ve ever had, for it dawned on me that I’ve worked with you for over a year on this book prospectus without having anything to show for it. That’s not entirely true: I’ve been reminded how lucky I was to get two outside readers to agree on the merits of my previous books; how easy it is for readers to criticize authors for not writing the book they would have written; and how difficult it is for ambitious projects to get off the ground. Sobering lessons all around. Austin, at this point I’m honestly not sure what to do. My "colleagues" seem to think that describing the emergence and development of social insurance, public assistance, tax expenditure, loan and loan guarantee programs isn’t enough. I would also need to explain how each of those programs was created, and later expanded or cut. Apparently I cannot write a history of U.S. social policy without also writing a history of educational, fiscal, monetary, and some regulatory policies (others have suggested that government’s role as employer is also important to include). My colleagues seem to think that I need to pay attention to developments at all levels of government. They believe that I need to identify the normative principles underpinning the welfare state, which might include adequacy, equal treatment, reducing inequality, economic growth, and any number of other values. And, being active scholars themselves and aware of the current economics of the publishing business, they must believe that I can do all this in fewer than 120,000 words. Well, I do appreciate the vote of confidence, but I’m not sure I’m up to the challenge. I have but one lifetime, and I seem to be satisfied with incremental progress in our understanding of the American welfare state, or U.S. social policy, or whatever it’s called. I think I’d better spend the rest of the summer trying to redesign my undergraduate course in social policy, which apparently has been giving students a narrow and distorted picture of what really matters. And I’ll wonder if I’ve spent the last 15 years chasing ghosts -- studying a subject with no true center or recognizable boundaries. Norman O. Clewson
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| Author’s final
thoughts
Six months later, I’m still not sure what to make of this whole exchange. The possible conclusions appear to be:
Readers are welcome to send their thoughts along to me at cdhowa@wm.edu. And thank you for reading a rather unconventional form of scholarly communication. My hope is that a fictional exchange of ideas, usually serious but sometimes not, might be more effective than a traditional literature review in conveying the difficulties of writing a useful synthesis of the American welfare state (or any other large subject, for that matter).
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