scholarly journals Preparing the Welfare State: American Unemployment Reform in the Early Twentieth Century

2006 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 239-256
Author(s):  
Udo Sautter

Abstract Efforts have recently been made to trace the origins of some of the New Deal's programmes back to the Hoover administration. Activities to combat unemployment, however, have a prehistory beginning in the last third of the nineteenth century. Realizing that modern unemployment was an environmental rather than an individual problem, progressive reformers as well as bureaucrats endeavoured to find solutions. By the time of the entry of the United States into World War I, the major measures — counting, labour exchanges, public works, and unemployment insurance — had been devised and some testing had begun. The postwar years and the early 1920s served as a period of reflection and refinement. Rising unemployment from about 1927 on and, moreso, the onset of the Great Depression, gave opportunity to examine more thoroughly the instruments developed by then. Some fine-tuning occurred, and on his accession to the presidency F. D. Roosevelt found a ready-made instrumentarium to use.

Author(s):  
John Kenneth Galbraith ◽  
James K. Galbraith

This chapter examines the lessons of World War II with respect to money and monetary policy. World War I exposed the fragility of the monetary structure that had gold as its foundation, the great boom of the 1920s showed how futile monetary policy was as an instrument of restraint, and the Great Depression highlighted the ineffectuality of monetary policy for rescuing the country from a slump—for breaking out of the underemployment equilibrium once this had been fully and firmly established. On the part of John Maynard Keynes, the lesson was that only fiscal policy ensured not just that money was available to be borrowed but that it would be borrowed and would be spent. The chapter considers the experiences of Britain, Germany, and the United States with a lesson of World War II: that general measures for restraining demand do not prevent inflation in an economy that is operating at or near capacity.


2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Elliot Brownlee

The essay explores how ideas about social justice and economic performance shaped the debates over federal taxation in the United States since the origins of the republic. The debates were most intense during major national emergencies (the American Revolution, the Civil War, World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II), and each debate produced a new tax regime-a tax system with its own characteristic tax base, rate structure, administration apparatus, and social purpose. The criterion of "ability to pay" and a concern for economic efficiency powerfully shaped the formation of every tax regime, but "ability to pay" became the more influential of the two considerations during the national crises of the twentieth century.


1976 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Randall

The debate over the granting of petroleum concessions to foreign enterprise was one of the most significant areas of contact between the United States and Colombia after World War I. The official United States response to the plight of American interests involved in the development of the Barco concession exemplifies the nature of United States Latin American policy in the transition from the Coolidge to the Hoover administration. State Department actions in the Barco instance underline the growing awareness in American circles of the need to fashion a policy which would protect American enterprise as well as the principle of foreign investment against nationalist sentiment in Latin America.


1981 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 165
Author(s):  
Arthur S. Link ◽  
Paul L. Murphy

1965 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wesley Phillips Newton

In Latin America, international rivalry over aviation followed World War I. In its early form, it consisted of a commercial scramble among several Western European nations and the United States to sell airplanes and aviation products and to establish airlines in Latin America. Somewhat later, expanding European aviation activities posed an implicit threat to the Panama Canal.Before World War I, certain aerophiles had sought to advance the airplane as the panacea for the transportation problem in Latin America. The aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont of Brazil and the Aero Club of America, an influential private United States association, were in the van. In 1916, efforts by these enthusiasts led to the formation of the Pan American Aviation Federation, which they envisioned as the means of promoting and publicizing aviation throughout the Western Hemisphere.


2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 677-690 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mischa Honeck

If World War I has interested historians of the United States considerably less than other major wars, it is also true that children rank among the most neglected actors in the literature that exists on the topic. This essay challenges this limited understanding of the roles children and adolescents played in this transformative period by highlighting their importance in three different realms. It shows how childhood emerged as a contested resource in prewar debates over militarist versus pacifist education; examines the affective power of images of children—American as well as foreign—in U.S. wartime propaganda; and maps various social arenas in which the young engaged with the war on their own account. While constructions of childhood and youth as universally valid physical and developmental categories gained greater currency in the early twentieth century, investigations of young people in wartime reveal how much the realities of childhood and youth differed according to gender, class, race, region, and age.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document