Who Killed Civil Society? by Howard A. Husock

Author:Howard A. Husock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2019-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

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WILBUR COHEN AND THE SCALING OF THE SOCIAL SERVICE STATE

The growth of the American social service state, the federal government’s approach to improving the lives of the poor by funding agencies and hiring agents to implement programs, occurred slowly and incrementally. Public assistance to single parents and related programs for children were only small parts of the Social Security Act, which at its inception was essentially unemployment compensation and old-age assistance. But the die had been cast. The federal government, not the settlement house or the local charity organization society, would be the locus not just of a financial safety net but of “social services” generally.

Few public officials did more to steer the expansion of the social service state than Wilbur Cohen, the consummate federal bureaucrat. The son of an immigrant grocer in Milwaukee, he began his career in 1934 as what his biographer Edward Berkowitz calls “little more than an errand boy” for the Committee on Economic Security, which developed the details of the 1935 Social Security Act. He then proceeded to shape and promote legislation behind the scenes, guided by his own strong views. By 1968, Cohen was at the pinnacle of Washington as secretary of health, education, and welfare in the waning days of the Lyndon Johnson administration, and known by the nickname “Mr. Social Security.”

Cohen served in the federal government for most of his professional career. His life offers a prism through which to view an era of optimism about the capacity of government to satisfy material want and draw the poor into the socioeconomic mainstream. Cohen’s ideas about poverty and government led most notably to the 1962 Public Welfare Amendments to the Social Security Act, which would become the foundation for million-dollar programs that turned into multibillion-dollar programs; and those ideas long outlasted his own confidence in them.

Wilbur Cohen’s legacy, even more than Grace Abbott’s, is based on public policy for the poor, not personal involvement with them. Berkowitz describes both Cohen and his mentor at the Social Security Board, Arthur Altmeyer, as representing “a new breed of reformer” in the history of social policy:

The comparison with other self-conscious crusaders for social justice, such as Jane Addams and the residents of Chicago’s Hull House in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is instructive…. Jane Addams represented a voluntary tradition of social action, in which few residents of Hull House were paid for their labor, but Altmeyer and Cohen depended on their salaries to make ends meet. Social reform was for them a living as much as it was a calling.1

Nor was that their only difference from earlier generations of social reformers. Altmeyer and Cohen were not social workers, nor were they akin to the “friendly visitors” of the past. Instead, they “managed large systems of social welfare that paid benefits as a matter of entitlement.” They didn’t view social problems at the level of families or communities, but rather in terms of the whole economy.2

Cohen, moreover, saw poverty as something to be left behind—though

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