The New York Times Editorial Staff - Social Welfare

Impoverished children sleeping in the streets of New York, 1890.

public institutions that collaborated extensively with state and local governments to provide aid. However, a growing population and high immigration, coupled with high social inequality, soon left private charity unable to address the needs of the modern city. Most of Americas urban population lived in overpriced and overcrowded tenement houses. The conditions of these tenements were exposed by social reformers, who with private organizations advocated for public intervention on behalf of the poor.

In the first decades of the 20th century, European nations had arguably surpassed the United States in the scope of their public social welfare programs. Social insurance, a broad term that encompassed pensions for the aged, workers compensation and financial support for the unemployed, became the guiding concept for a welfare state jointly funded by labor unions, employers and governments. The United States was characteristically reluctant to pursue these, trusting in its economic prosperity to address lingering issues.

The Great Depression forced the United States to adapt. Overwhelmed by the sudden explosion of unemployment, then President Herbert Hoovers response was primarily to increase emergency relief and provide support for flagging industries. When these efforts failed to improve the situation, the public elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt with a mandate for strong federal action. In Roosevelts New Deal, America had become a modern welfare state, establishing strict labor laws and a national pension program called Social Security.

By the end of the Depression and World War II, most elected officials of both major parties held to a broad consensus around the governments role in social welfare. Protections and benefits expanded, culminating in President Lyndon Johnsons Great Society programs, which enacted programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps.

The Great Society was especially timely given increasing awareness of rural poverty in the United States. Often neglected in favor of more visible urban poverty, hunger in rural areas proved to be more difficult to solve, becoming a controversial civil rights issue due to the disproportionate impact on black farmers. And yet, lingering criticisms of American welfare would soon translate into broad changes to the existing system.

By the late 1970s, the broad bipartisan support for public welfare had collapsed, and welfare programs faced decades of cuts. Since then, in the United States and in the world, state support for welfare programs has decreased. However, as automation promises to change how people work, the debates over welfare have returned in earnest.

Universal health care, a perennial question in American politics, has returned to public debate. Universal basic income, a proposed system of no-strings-attached cash assistance to all citizens, has changed from a speculative fantasy to a serious policy proposal. These ideas, like the once-unthinkable ideas of workers compensation and social insurance, suggest that as the economy evolves, our idea of how to care for our citizens will evolve as well.

In the mid to late 19th century, charity was guided by traditional values that sought to discourage pauperism." Growing urban poverty, especially in immigrant communities, was addressed primarily by local almshouses and the activities of charitable societies. Federal support for the poor appeared in the form of cash assistance to Civil War veterans and their widows, after the war had concluded.

BY THE NEW YORK TIMES | MAY 20, 1853

so much has been said about the hard treatment of emigrants by runners, agents, &c., that we doubt not there prevails very extensively an impression that the protection we afford to the sick and destitute who come to us from abroad is very much like the protection that wolves give to lambs. But if we have studied our institutions aright, this impression is so far from correct that, in our opinion, the State may well be proud of her treatment of this class. Exceptions there are, we know gross infractions of the golden rule, and equally obvious violations of our laws, which deserve our heartiest reprobation. But let us see how the sick emigrant is treated.