I always saw liberalism and conservatism as two sides of the same coin, but I also saw us on equal footing in terms of power. It wasn’t until I took a course on the history of social welfare policy in the United States that I began to really understand how conservative our country has, and has historically been, and how much conservative values have shaped our country.
The roots of our attitude toward social policy can be traced back to the Elizabethan Poor Laws of our colonial times. Colonists had no choice but for everyone to work because the very survival of the members of the colony were dependent on it. Those were harsh times, and out of that grew a rigorous work ethic as well as a tendency to stigmatize those who were not working. In general, our approach to policy has always been very residual - the government has been used only as a last resort to alleviate social ills. In the 1700s in some areas recipients of public aid were forced to wear patches on their clothing indicating that they were living off the system. Those caught idle were whipped. Our society abhorred those they perceived as lazy and decadent because not working meant certain death for our civilization. There was a gradual shift from ‘‘outdoor relief’’ (meaning cash assistance) toward institutionalization of the poor and mentally ill. A moral distinction was made between the ‘‘deserving’’ and ‘‘undeserving’’ poor which persists to this day.
In the 1850s a woman by the name of Dorothea Dix began to worry about those folks in institutions. She began conducting her own research and discovered that a huge percentage of those in almshouses were mentally ill. She published her research and argued before congress that special residential facilities be built for the mentally ill. Congress agreed to give her something like 500,000 acres of land to build institutions for the mentally ill.
But… in 1854, President Pierce vetoed the measure, stating that the federal government was not responsible for taking care of its citizens. That veto set a kind of precedent that was pretty much followed to the letter (with the exception of war veterans) until the Social Security Act in 1935. The first time the federal government actually stepped in to try to resolve a social problem was after the Civil War with the establishment of the Freedman’s Bureau to deal with the thousands of suddenly homeless slaves in the south. But that was absolutely intended to be temporary and didn’t even receive federal funding for the first year of its operation.
It wasn’t until the late 1800s-ish that people really began questioning the role that the government ought to have in addressing the impoverished and destitute, because until that point most everyone was poor. But the success of capitalism really took off and the disparity became pretty noticeable particularly in urban areas where the very wealthy tended to live alongside the very poor. Suddenly the issue of child abuse and childrens’ rights became a significant issue, because for the first time there was a large enough class of people that was comfortable enough to worry about stuff like that.
Hell, even in 1935, with the Social Security Act, FDR intended that as a temporary measure, and even then, it deliberately excluded ‘‘agricultural and domestic workers’’ in the interest of preserving the social order (read: institutional racism) of the south.
But in my opinion we have NEVER been a liberal country, with the possible exception of the Civil Rights Movement/War on Poverty in the 60s and 70s , but the backlash against that was so huge I’m not sure we will ever recover from it. That’s too bad, because our poverty rates had improved quite a bit.
So it’s interesting, because before I learned all this, I always thought the conservative claim that America has always been informed by traditional religious conservative values was completely B.S., but it’s actually true. We ARE a conservative country, one of the most conservative countries of the modern world. Our country has been full of people complaining about taxes, arguing against universal social welfare programs, trying to throw out foreigners, and praising Jesus since before it was even a country.
But there have always been a group of us compelled to consider the overall social welfare of the nation as a whole, and questioning the roots of this class stratification, and rejecting the moral stigma associated with those who are impoverished or deemed ‘‘unworthy’’ of care by society as a whole. And I would argue that our country has changed, indeed, the entire world context has changed, and it makes sense to me that we ought to consider those changes and question whether these values we have always clung to are really appropriate for our current social context.
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