| The dissertation locates the beginnings of the American welfare state in the progressive social policies of World War I. It outlines the ideology, unravels the Politics, and describes the administration of dependency draft deferment as well as War Risk Insurance, the comprehensive array of compensation, insurance, medical, rehabilitation, and dependents' benefits progressive lawmakers in Congress established for the protection of five million World War I servicemen and their families in place of the discredited military pension system of the Civil War era. In implementing these social provision during the war and the 1920s, federal administrators, servicemen, and their female dependents renegotiated the responsibility of individuals and the state for managing the social and economic consequences of dependency, disability, and death, fundamental issues in modern welfare policy and social citizenship. To resolve these issues, the federal government, both in cooperation and in conflict with the clients of War Risk Insurance, devised policies that, well before the New Deal, instituted the three principles on which the American welfare state came to rest: financial aid to mothers left without support from a male provider, federally sponsored insurance against the encumbrances of disability and old age, and vocational rehabilitation of those who have lost their capacity for waged labor.; The federal agencies created to administer dependency draft exemptions and War Risk Insurance, the dissertation argues, based their decisions about eligibility and level of benefits on quintessential progressive conceptions of dependency, productivity, embodiment, and citizenship, conceptions that in turn were rooted in ideologies of gender, class, race, and disability. As the Selective Service System, the Bureau of War Risk Insurance, and the Veterans Bureau insinuated themselves and were incorporated into the lives, relationships, and political practices of ordinary Americans, they drew on these ideologies to inscribe existing patterns of social inequality in the social policies they carried out even as they reshaped the political economy of families, dispensed large payments to beneficiaries, offered extensive social services, and inaugurated a new, potentially empowering relationship between individuals and the national state in the form of social entitlements. In turn, servicemen, veterans, and their dependents used the language of patriotic loyalty and sacrifice to posit a reciprocal conception of the obligations of citizen and state towards one another, and to derive from this conception a right to federal welfare benefits they did not always see fulfilled in the administration of War Risk Insurance. These patterns emerged with particular force in the context of the deep class divisions, strict gender hierarchy, and racial caste system of the American South, the region from which the dissertation draws its illustrations and case studies. |
