Social Rights and Citizenship During World War II

martin h. geyer

During World War II neither Germany nor the United States is known to have significantly expanded or reshaped its system of social provisions in a “progressive” way.

1 Peter Flora and Arnold J. Heidenheimer, “The Historical Core and Changing Boundaries of the Welfare State,” in Peter Flora and Arnold J. Heidenheimer, eds., The Development of the Welfare State in Europe and America (New Brunswick, N.J., 1982), 12; see also Ewin Amenta and Theda Skocpol, “Redefining the New Deal:World War II and the Development of Social Provision in the United States,” in Margaret Weir, Ann Shola Orloff, and Theda Skocpol, eds., The Politics of Social Policy in the United States (Princeton, N.J., 1988), 82.

2 Amenta and Skocpol, “Redefining the New Deal,” 119, 121-2.

3 For a good survey of the debates concerning the Beveridge report, see John Hills et al., Beveridge and Social Security:An International Retrospective (Oxford, 1994). milestone in this respect, as can the lecture given by sociologist T. H. Mar­shall on “Citizenship and Social Class” two years later. Marshall provided the conceptual and terminological framework to describe the evolution of modern democratic societies in terms of civil, political, and social rights.^[360]

As this chapter shows, these debates cannot be understood merely by focusing on national policy making or by viewing the domestic experi­ence of war as the sole catalyst for possible changes, as is so often the case in historical research on this topic. In order to understand the dynam­ics of the discourse on rights and the debate on the emerging post-World War II order, it is necessary to keep in mind the ideological battle that had been fought between the Allies and Nazi Germany. In 1940-1 Nazi propaganda for Germany’s “New Economic Order” in Europe, promising full employment, posed a challenge and set the agenda for reform-minded groups in both Great Britain and the United States. It was in this context of confrontation between democracy and dictatorship, freedom and oppression, humanity and inhumanity, modernity and backwardness that the old discourse on social rights was given a new direction, a new impetus, a new language. The language of the “rights of class,” which had strongly imbued the debates of the interwar period in Britain and Germany,^[361] was supplanted by the language of the “rights of citizenship.” The importance of Great Britain’s contribution to this development, the Beveridge report, is undeniable. However, the American contribution cannot be ignored. Despite the comparatively weak foundations of its social institutions, the United States not only was a hotbed of new and in many respects innovative ideas regarding the establishment, extension, and management of the modern welfare state, but American reformers were also the pioneers of the language of economic and social rights, which became a crucial factor in legitimizing welfare states during the postwar period.

a “new economic order” in europe:

the german propaganda offensive

The beginning of World War II in Europe marked a major turning point in the debates on social policies and social planning all over the world. This was not caused solely by the nationalist environment, the appeal to national solidarity in wartime that creates ideal conditions for such ini­tiatives.^[362] The war also influenced the nature of the debates because in late summer 1940 the German propaganda machine drafted plans for a new economic and social world. These plans were the handiwork of Reich Economic Minister Walther Funk.^[363] Of interest in this context is not so much the concept of how the new European economic order was to be organized around a politically and economically hegemonic Germany and its reichsmark; of greater importance are the promises of a rapidly rising standard of living, of social welfare, and, in particular, of full employment not only in Germany but throughout the new Grosswirtschaftsraum (greater economic sphere).

In 1940-1 Germany was on the ideological offensive both at home and abroad. After years of preaching the gospel of the scarcity of con­sumer goods, of low wages, and of drastically reduced social benefits, the hour of the German Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront or DAF) seemed to have arrived. Time and again its leaders argued that military strength and military preparedness would form the basis for a new social order, that in fact the politics of scarcity would make possible a greatly expanded and altogether new system of social provisions grounded in an economy with full employment. Funk’s economic propaganda argued that the “New Order” was not to be established by forcing other nations into a uniform mold but rather by collaborating with them, each according to its eco­nomic capabilities, in a system that allowed freedom for development along lines natural to them.^[364] The Central Office for International Social Engineering (Zentralamt fur internationale Sozialgestaltung) and the pub­lication Neue Internationale Rundschau der Arbeit (New International Review of Labor) propagated a new German model in which the Zen- tralamt was conceived as the alternative to the International Labor Office (ILO), which Germany had left in 1934.

As has been noted in recent years, the plans of the DAF share some similarities with social plans that sprang up soon afterward in other Western countries. Ley has even been called a “German Beveridge,”^{[366] [367]} although this comparison is more provocative than substantive. The DAF proposed a blueprint for a specific German welfare state that was to recast on almost all levels the established system of social provisions. Most important are the underlying efforts, first, to redefine citizenship on the basis of the ideology of the Volksgemeinschaft (the community of the people) and, second, to establish the system of social entitlements not within a framework of rights but within one of duty and obligation.

The ideology of the Volksgemeinschaft, the basis of which was the concept of the racial equality of all Germans, had a strong egalitarian foundation.¹¹ It explains the strong emphasis on setting up an inclusion- ary system of social welfare.

The original plans of the DAF in 1939 proposed flat-rate pensions for all citizens, which indeed would have realized most purely the concept of equal citizenship. The final drafts provided for a uniform minimum level of benefits for all, thus guaranteeing a minimum national standard of living for every German. On top of this national minimum was to be placed a system of graduated pensions that would allow the individual to maintain his or her standard of living. This was meant to accommodate such groups as white-collar workers, civil servants, and miners who enjoyed relatively good benefits in the existing system.

The DAF’s plan was to break the “individualistic construction” of the existing social insurance system, which was based on the idea of individ­ual contributions. The earlier contributions were to become part of the general tax system. Because these taxes were by far not high enough to finance the new system, they were to be supplemented by other public revenue. Thus, pensions became closely intertwined with the finances of the utopia of an expansionist state; at the same time this construction fun­damentally redefined the nature of these entitlements. Edwin Witte, who drafted the American Social Security Act and who had strong affinities with the traditional German insurance principle, noted in 1943 that, in the DAF’s scheme, benefits were based on “need” rather than “rights” with a concept “very different from social security as known elsewhere in the world.”¹² This is indeed true: The individual was to receive benefits not in terms of acquired rights (resulting from contributions) but as a result of citizenship based on the concept of duty and obligation to the Volks- gemeinschaft.

12 Edwin E.Witte, “Postwar Social Security” (1943), in Robert J. Lampert, ed., Social Security Per­spectives: Essays by Edwin E. Witte (Madison,Wis., 1962), 22.

13 Within the current system of insurance these exclusionary practices were far more difficult. Whereas welfare and health policies became easily submerged in the regime’s racist policies after 1933, the denial of rights was far more difficult in the existing old age and disability pension system. This can be seen with respect to the hair-raising efforts to fit the laws guaranteeing rights to the reality of people being shipped to concentration camps in the East. Despite numerous efforts to solve the issue, a formal denial of rights for Jews who had been forced to leave Germany came only in 1942—3. Petra Kirchberger, “Die Stellung der Juden in der deutschen Rentenver-

Conspicuously absent from the German plans were provisions for unemployment. This is not surprising because economic policies of the 1930s, particularly the efforts at rearmament, had eliminated unemploy­ment. The fact that Germany had supposedly found the key to full employment was one of the core arguments of the propaganda. In fact, labor shortages emerged as one of the main threats to economic expan­sion, rearmament, and then, after 1939, waging the war. Economic expan­sion became a matter of Arbeitseinsatz, the management of labor, which had become the essential task of employment offices. More than anything else, the National Socialist language of labor management and labor ide­ology revolved around the issue of the “right to work” as guaranteed by the regime. “Work is not only a right that the worker can claim, work is at the same time a duty. It is through work that the individual serves the nation,” ran the typical argument.¹⁴ Ideologically, the social programs of the DAF were geared to this obligation to work. The duty to work implied the entitlement to benefits, benefits derived not from “liberal” principles inherent in insurance but from the membership and work of the individual in and for the Volksgemeinsckaft.

This language of work and the emphasis put on the right to work was in juxtaposition to the language of social and political rights of the Weimar Republic. The Weimar Republic had been conceived not only as a Reckststaat (a state based on the rule of law) but also as a Sozialstaat.¹⁵ The entitlements to work and to an adequate level of subsistence were as much a part of this as the guarantee of a comprehensive system of social insurance, the protection of the labor force, and the creation of a comprehensive labor law. Yet, to what avail was all this talk of rights, Nazi propaganda questioned time and again. The propaganda regularly attacked the class base of Weimar’s social policies, arguing that the Weimar Repub­lic had not kept its promises and had cheated its people, just as all the “plutocratic governments” of Great Britain and the United States failed to fulfill their social promises because they never could or would resolve

sicherung,” in Gotz Aly et al., Gibt es eine Okonomie der Endlosung? Beitrage zur Nationalsozialis- tiscken Gesundkeits- und Sozialpolitik, vol. 5 of Sozialpolitik und Judenvernicktung (Berlin, 1983), 11—32; Christoph Sachsse and Florian Tennstedt, Gesckickte der Armenfursorge im Nationalsozialis- mus, vol. 3: Der Woklfakrtsstaat im Nationalsozialismus (Stuttgart, 1992); Norbert Frei, ed., Medizin und Gesundkeitspolitik in der NS-Zeit (Munich, 1991).

14 “Arbeit als nationale Pflicht,” Monatskeftefur NS-Sozialpolitik 6 (1939): 101. For the ideology of work, see Martin H. Geyer, “Soziale Sicherheit und wirtschaftlicher Fortschritt: Uberlegungen zum Verhaltnis von Arbeitsideologie und Sozialpolitik im �?Dritten Reich,’ ” Gesckickte und Gesellsckaft 15 (1989):382-406.

15 Gerhard A. Ritter, Der Sozialstaat: Entstekung und Entwicklung im internationalen Vergleick (Munich, 1989), 112-29.

the fundamental issue of unemployment. One of the central promises featured in German propaganda during 1940-1 was full employment in occupied countries.

a new bill of rights for the united states?

The outside world took the German unemployment propaganda offen­sive very seriously. Asked by the English Ministry of Information to furnish material to counter the German proposals for a new order, econ­omist John Maynard Keynes concluded somewhat ironically that “about three-quarters of the passage quoted from the German broadcasts would be quite excellent if the name of Great Britain were substituted for Germany or the Axis, as the case may be.” As he perceptively argued, the German objective was “to appeal to the wide circles and powerful inter­ests in each country which are inclined in present circumstances to value social security higher than political independence.” Counter-propaganda had to appeal not to “revolutionary sentiment in Europe” but “to the craving for social and personal security.”^[368] In internal debates of the ILO, which had been exiled from Switzerland and had moved to Canada, the same point was made particularly with respect to German propaganda aimed at South America:

The Nazis speak a language that the Latin-Americans understand, and it is essen­tial with them to talk in ideological terms. The statements concerning the World Order which Hitler hopes to provide, particularly for the workers, have an enormous influence in South-America, especially in those countries which were first conquered by one nation or another and then achieved freedom by war only to find that they have been reconquered by economic imperialism. They look with great interest at the promise of a new economic and social order, and neither the United States nor Great Britain has answered their need in this direction.^[369]

Another ILO member remarked that German propaganda had brought about a clear shift in emphasis not only within the ILO “but in govern­ments themselves, since social policy, instead of being limited to certain departments, has become more pronouncedly part of high policy.”^[370]

The challenge posed by the German propaganda offensive necessitated a response. It had taken centuries to secure “precious rights and liberties,” wrote British Foreign Minister Viscount Edward Halifax in December 1941 in a draft in which he developed British war aims; now these rights and liberties were being threatened by “Vandal Germany.” Part of the catalog of classic individual rights was the “right to live without fear, either of injustice or of want”; Great Britain was fighting for “social principles” that included “the direction of national effort and resources to the abo­lition of unemployment and the creation of social security.”^[371] The main points of Halifax’s draft could also be found a short while later in Pres­ident Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Four Liberties,” which he expounded in his State of the Union Message in January 1941. In it Roosevelt invoked “the essential human freedoms,” namely, the freedom of speech and expression, the freedom of religion, the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear.^[372] In the Atlantic Charter of August 1941 these liber­ties and rights were confirmed by both Roosevelt and British Prime Min­ister Winston Churchill as the part of the Allied war aims.^[373] With regard to point five of the Atlantic Charter - “the securing for all improved labor standards, economic advancement and social security” - it was empha­sized in a memorandum from the Division of Special Research on the Atlantic Charter that “it must stand comparison with the social reform programs of the Fascist nations, particularly that of Germany.... The Germans are deliberately attempting to purchase the political submission of these people [in occupied territories] to an authoritarian regime and to German domination by the promises of apparently equal and complete economic and social well-being for every individual from the cradle to the grave.”^[374]

The formulation of the Four Liberties and the Atlantic Charter had a considerable impact on the course of postwar social planning in the United States and Great Britain. The term planning euphoria best expresses the atmosphere. Public, semipublic, and private institutions on the national and international levels addressed the vastly diverse aspects of the postwar order and developed complex networks in which social reformers, econ­omists, members of the labor movement, and the government elite co­operated. Reformers basically agreed on two points: First, every effort had to be made to prevent the recurrence of the mistakes of the last postwar period. If Hitler’s Germany propagated a German deal for Europe, the world at large needed a New Deal. Second, planning for the postwar order was to be placed within a framework of “liberties” and “rights.”

Particularly in the United States, reformers in 1940-1 made great efforts to broaden the concept of social and economic rights. A good example in this respect are the various proposals by the National Resources Planning Board (NRPB). In November 1940 Roosevelt instructed this nonadministrative agency, which was part of the Executive Office and chaired by the president’s uncle, Frederic A. Delano, to for­mulate economic and social policies for the postwar period. Because Washington had caught “planning fever,” the NRPB was also assigned the task of “correlating proposals” put forth by different agencies and private citizens for the president’s consideration.^[375] The NRPB worked with con­siderable speed, and soon the fruits of its labor were evident. The Com­mittee on Long-Range Work and Relief Policies, formed by the NRPB in 1939, prepared an extensive study on Security, Work, and Relief Policies that was ready for submission by the end of 1941.^[376] A series of reports and memos issued by the NRPB dealt with the possibility of creating the institutional framework and policies that were to make full employment possible after the war.^[377] One of the “masterminds” of the NRPB was Harvard economist William Hansen, an outspoken Keynesian. Hansen also worked for the private Council on Foreign Relations, which had received instructions similar to those given the NRPB to commence planning.^[378] In the spring of 1941 the NRPB presented to the president a catalog of “ten promises of American life,” ranging from adequate food and medical care to advancement awarded on the basis of merit and efforts to uphold the freedoms of speech and religion.^[379] A couple of months later these lib­erties were explicitly referred to as “rights,” in tune with the language of the Atlantic Charter. At the time, the president was apparently consider­ing proposing a new bill of rights in a speech he planned to give on December 15, the 150th anniversary of the Bill of Rights. The president went through material for such a speech in June with members of the NRPB, who prepared several revised drafts in the following months. In these drafts it was argued that the “old freedoms” had to be expanded by “new freedoms,” that the nation’s objectives had to be restated in “modern terms.” The formulation of new rights had to take into account “the industrial revolution, the rapid settlement of the continent, the develop­ment of technology, the acceleration of transportation and communica­tion, the growth of modern capitalism, and the rise of the national state with its economic programs.”^[380] In what reads somewhat like a rather hap­hazard list of issues and is composed in language devoid of constitutional reasoning, nine rights were enumerated. As can be seen in the following, these were formulated in terms of individual rights (as opposed to col­lective rights for social groups, such as the unions):

1. The right to work, usefully and creatively through the productive years;

2. The right to fair play, adequate to command the necessities and amenities of life in exchange for work, ideas, thrift, and other socially valuable service;

3. The right to adequate food, clothing, shelter, and medical care;

4. The right to security, with freedom from fear of old age, want, dependency, sickness, irresponsible private power, arbitrary public authority, and unregu­lated monopolies;

5. The right to live in a system of free enterprise, free from compulsory labor, irre­sponsible private power, arbitrary public authority, and unregulated monopolies;

6. The right to come and to speak or to be silent, free from the spying of secret political police;

7. The right to equality before the law, with equal access to justice in fact;

8. The right to education, for work, for citizenship, and for personal growth and happiness; and

9. The right to rest, recreation, and adventure, the opportunity to enjoy life and take part in an advancing civilization.^[381]

This new bill of rights was to be seen as part of the general planning for peace in the postwar period, the authors of the NRPB argued. Imper­ative to such peace was, “on the economic side, full employment; for the individual his bill of rights; and for the world, law and order.”^[382] The experi­ence of the war would demonstrate what the country might be like with full employment: increasing prosperity for everyone, an increase of national wealth, higher national production and income, and a better stan­dard of living. This enumerated list was to apply not just to the citizens of the United States but to those of all countries, despite the fact that programs, procedures, and practices might differ. The same was true with regard to the politics of prosperity: “The rise of living standards all over the world under real freedom will usher in a golden era of international trade and prosperity, as well as peace.”^[383] Economic and social reform was part and parcel of a broader “liberal internationalist” program.^[384]

Roosevelt gave his speech on December 15, but there was no mention of a new bill of rights.^[385] Less than a month later he sent to Congress the NRPB’s “Second Yearly Report” for 1942, which contained the afore­mentioned references to a new bill of rights.^[386] However, the president’s message accompanying the NRPB’s report was radically altered in Roosevelt’s office. The passages referring to the “Four Freedoms” and a new bill of rights had been neutralized, making it clear that this report represented the opinions of the NRPB and not of the president.^[387] It took another two years until Roosevelt, in preparation for his fourth­term election campaign, publicly took up the topic of a second bill of rights.^[388] The NRPB did not fare much better with its subcommittee’s report on Security, Work, and Relief Policies. Although completed by the end of 1941, it remained known only to Washington insiders until its publi­cation in March 1943.^[389]

rights, citizenship, and social security

As the social scientists close to the NRPB were concentrating on plans to secure full employment after the war, the members of the Social Secu­rity Board (SSB) were making great efforts to expand the provisions of the Social Security Act of 1935. This important piece of legislation had established a system of federal contributory old-age pensions and state- organized unemployment insurance that defined benefits in terms of enti­tlements, that is, on the basis of rights to benefits. This differed from the old-age and unemployment assistance programs that granted benefits on the basis of need. From the very beginning, social security was contested for a variety of reasons. Many reformers rejected the construction of the social security system on the “pure” principles of insurance with its “equity obsession” that linked the level of benefits to individual contri­butions.^[390] Through the war years there was a strong movement calling for tax-financed pensions for senior citizens. Every American was to qualify for a pension on the basis of citizenship; benefits were to be much higher than the pitifully small pensions of the Social Security Act, which started its first old-age pension payments in 1940.^[391] Defenders of the Social Secu­rity Act vehemently defended the distinction between insurance and assis­tance, that is, entitlements derived from individual rights as opposed to entitlements provided for the poor on the basis of a needs test. Propa­ganda for the Social Security Act fit well into the country’s culture of conceptualizing rights as fundamentally individual and not as “collective” or “social.” As Roosevelt declared in 1934, these entitlements applied “to every individual and every family willing to work.” His argument that “we put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal and political right to collect their pensions and their unemploy­ment benefits” would often be reiterated.⁴⁰

From the very beginning the advocates of Social Security had consid­ered the Social Security Act only a first step toward a more compre­hensive system.⁴¹ The ink had hardly dried on Roosevelt’s signature on the Social Security Act when plans for extending it began to circulate,⁴² including a move to restore provisions of the original act that had been rejected by Congress.The war fueled such initiatives, and when Roosevelt in the spring of 1941 told the chairman of the SSB, Arthur Altmeyer, that he wanted a “comprehensive new social security program,” the prospect of far-reaching reform seemed to materialize. Although the president apparently said that he would support the chairman in anything he recommended, Roosevelt specifically asked Altmeyer to: extend coverage of the social security system by including farm laborers and “domestics”; provide cash compensation for both temporary and permanent disability; grant federal aid to low income states for the purpose of funding assis­tance programs; and set up a federal system of unemployment compen­sation without merit rating. However, Altmeyer was not to touch medical care in order to “avoid a row with the doctors.”⁴³ With the exception of the latter, these points reflected the long-standing program of the SSB, and a few months later the SSB did develop the outlines of an expanded social security program. On the basis of these recommendations, the first Wagner-Murray-Dingell Bill was introduced in Congress in June 1943, with little success.⁴⁴ During the debates, important blueprints for a future

40 Rosenman, ed., FDR Papers, vol. 1935, 291; Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Coming of the New

Deal (Boston, 1959), 308; see also Jerry R. Cates, Insuring Inequality: Administrative Leadership in Social Security, 1935—54 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1983), chap. 4.

41 Skocpol and Ickenberry,“Political Formation,” 131.

42 Confidential memorandum, Nov. 9, 1936, B-1, B-11, in State Historical Society, Madison,Wis., Witte papers, box 33. For the strategy of incremental changes, see also Martha Derthick, Policy­making for Social Security (Washington, D.C., 1979), 23—7, 195—8.

43 Note by E.Witte, Apr. 21, 1941: Dr. Altmeyer on his conference with the president on Social Security Act amendments, Apr. 18, 1941, in State Historical Society, Madison Wis., Witte papers, box 213. In his own account from the 1960s Altmeyer mentions, incorrectly, that he was given instructions only in October. See Altmeyer, Formative Years, 130. He actually met and discussed the matter with Roosevelt during the months from spring to fall; the results were several revised proposals. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, OF box 1710, 2. One may only speculate on Roosevelt’s intentions to have different plans set up. To keep up the latent rivalry between the NRPB and the SSB may have been one reason; furthermore, those in Congress favoring action along the lines of publicly financed citizens’ pensions made a strong showing particularly in 1941; see Cates, Insuring Inequality, 61—70; see also John Corson, “A Comparative Chart of Bills Introduced in the 77th Congress to Establish Federal Flat Pension Systems,” July 1941, in National Archives, Washington, D.C., Record Group (hereafter RG) 47, correspondence of the executive director, 1941-8, 011.1 box 7.

44 The files of the SSB testify to the close collaboration between the sponsors of the bill and the SSB; see also Spritzer, Senator James E. Murray, 125-6; Derthick, Policymaking, 114; Social social security system emerged, some aspects of which were realized after the war. If one looks at the way social security, citizenship, and rights were conceptualized, one can sense how opposition would develop, for these plans implied far-reaching changes indeed.

First, the bill proposed to universalize membership by including not only agricultural workers, public employees, and civil servants, but also the self-employed, a demand dating back to the drafting of the Social Security Act. The bill provided an alternative to the various standing propositions for citizen’s pensions, the call for which was particularly strong in Congress in 1941.⁴⁵

Second, the aim of the bill was to establish “a practical social security program that would afford a minimum basic security upon which the people of this country could build a more complete security through their own individual efforts.”⁴⁶ The situations covered were to be greatly expanded, disability insurance was added, and health insurance was also in the package.⁴⁷ In addition, the public assistance programs were to be extended, covering all needy people who were not eligible for other assistance.

Third, efforts were made to centralize the various institutions of the social security system. This boiled down to a matter of reorganizing the entire system. In 1935 Congress had discarded the original idea that a single social insurance board would administer unemployment, old-age insurance, and other social programs, whereas unemployment insurance and the various assistance programs for the elderly were to remain within the purview of the states, which adamantly defended their rights against any intrusion by the federal government. The result was a great variety

Security Board, Extension and Expansion of the Social Security Act: A Report of the Social Security Board to the President and to the Congress of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1941); Eighth Annual Report (1943) of the Social Security Board (Washington, D.C., 1944), 31—45; and summary of the proposed amendments to the Social Security Act, the Wagner-Murray-Dingell Bill, National Archives, Washington, D.C., RG 47, correspondence of the executive director, 1941—8, 011.1, box 9.

45 See Corson, “Comparative Chart.”

46 Social Security Board, Extension and Expansion of the Social Security Act, 2.

47 The Committee for Economic Security (CES) had already considered health insurance a vital part of social security. However, when faced with the opposition of the American Medical Asso­ciation and others, Roosevelt thought it politically “unwise to throw health insurance into the hopper while the rest of the program was still before Congress” (Edwin E. Witte, The Develop­ment of the Social Security Act [Madison,Wis., 1970], 188). Instead, Roosevelt appointed a com­mission to study the health care problem, which released its report in 1938. On the basis of these findings and recommendations, Senator Robert Wagner (D-N.Y.) drafted a bill in close cooper­ation with the SSB that embodied the commission’s call for vastly expanded federal activity in the public health fields, including an increase in maternal and child care services, insurance against loss of wages during illness, and a plan for public health insurance. Faced with opposition in Congress and the public, Roosevelt did not hesitate to withdraw support for the health care bill at the end of 1939; see Spritzer, Senator James E. Murray, 123—5.

of schemes and the refusal of some states to implement the programs fully. Although neither the SSB nor the Wagner-Murray-Dingell Bill proposed uniform national standards of assistance benefits, the 1943 bill clearly aimed to extend federal supervision and control. In 1941 there existed only the plan to federalize the system of unemployment insurance and to combine it with Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance in order “to form a single Federal System of Social Insurance.”The decision to nation­alize the employment service, made on the heels of the attack on Pearl Harbor, is very important in this respect.⁴⁸ This move was to be the proverbial tip of the iceberg. The idea was to create an all-encompassing federal system of social security, set up through a centrally organized network of federal, state, and local offices that would not only adminis­ter the vastly extended insurance schemes (including health insurance) but would also be financed by a single contribution.

These plans were far-reaching, indeed. They not only would have strengthened the power of the federal government, they would also have redefined citizenship in terms of social rights. For example, the SSB was well aware that the “Negro workers” would have been “the main group of beneficiaries of the strengthened and extended program.”⁴⁹ A system of federally guaranteed entitlements was to be extended to agricultural workers and sharecroppers at a time when many of them were excluded from the political process. The federal Social Security Administration would have gained a strong foothold in the states. This explains why the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People strongly favored the proposed extension of social insurance and assistance. South­ern senators, however, feared that an extension of social security “might serve as an entering wedge for federal interference with the handling of the Negro question in the South.”⁵⁰

the impact of the beveridge report

By the time the United States entered the war against Japan and Germany, American reformers had every reason to be optimistic. The United States

48 Altmeyer, Formative Years, 130—1.

49 Untitled memorandum,Aug. 19, 1942, National Archives,Washington, D.C., RG 47, correspon­dence of the executive director, 1941—8, 011, box 2; see also Dona Cooper Hamilton and Charles V. Hamilton, The Dual Agenda: Race and Social Welfare of Civil Rights Organizations (New York, 1997), chap. 4.

50 Witte, Development of the Social Security Act, 143—4. For the importance of the issue of race, see Hamilton and Hamilton, Dual Agenda, chap. 4; and Jill Quadagno, “From Old-Age Assistance to Supplemental Security Income:The Political Economy of Relief in the South, 1935—1972,” in Weir, Orloff, and Skocpol, eds., Politics of Social Policy, 237—9.

had become a remarkable storehouse for blueprints and ideas not only for expanding social security but also for macroeconomic management of the economy. In the summer of 1942 The Economist published a report on the “revolutionary” policies that were emerging in the United States to redefine democracy in terms of the twentieth-century situation “and to expand its meaning in the economic and social sphere.”^[392] The key to all this, according to the magazine, was expanding markets and “mass con­sumption great enough to use mass production.” In the words of Under­secretary of State Sumner Welles, the key to expanding markets was “a frontier of limitless expanse.” The ambassador to England and former chairman of the SSB, John Winant, was quoted as saying that to do all this was not complicated: “When war is done, the drive for tanks must become a drive for houses............................................. The drive for manpower in war must

become a drive for employment to make freedom from want a living reality.” The Economist contrasted the enthusiasm of Americans in their efforts to build a new world order with the utter lack of vision among the English.^[393]

However, the international public did not become enthusiastic about the postwar plans of the United States - mostly because they were hidden away in file cabinets and were known only to insiders - but rather about those of Great Britain.When Sir William Beveridge, a noted Liberal politi­cian and expert in the field of social politics, published the results of the inquiry by the Inter-Departmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services, it created a sensation. Within days this highly technical book full of figures and complicated cross-references became a best-seller and set the agenda for contemporary debates on social policies at home and abroad. Social Insurance and Allied Services sold 500,000 copies in Great Britain and about 50,000 copies in the United States.^[394]

For reformers in the United States the Beveridge report was heaven sent. It demonstrated that public support could be won for postwar plan­ning. Equally important, the report could easily be adjusted to fit condi­tions in the United States. American reformers were cheered by the report’s support of universal membership, its call for broad health cover­age, its idea of creating social protection from the “cradle to the grave” - a phrase actually coined by Roosevelt in the 1930s and often attributed to Beveridge, although he did not use it - and last but not least the use of the term social security, which had originated in the United States in the 1930s.^[395]

In light of earlier debates over creating a new world order, it does not come as a surprise that the publication of the Beveridge report played an important role in Allied war propaganda. In summer 1941 Arthur Green­wood, the minister of reconstruction who appointed the Beveridge com­mittee that year, was still looking for someone who could corroborate his public statement that Great Britain was the “one country in the world which had advanced its social services.”^[396] Now, Beveridge had pointed the way to fulfill Britain’s resolve to carry out the Atlantic Charter objec­tive of establishing both freedom from want and social security: “Recon­struction has taken on a new meaning and we have gained a new weapon in political warfare,” Ambassador John G. Winant cabled to England.^[397] Within days of the report’s publication Germany reacted, first in its radio reports abroad and shortly afterward at home, to counteract the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reports. The BBC had seized the “pro­paganda initiative in offering the plan as an implementation of a portion of the Atlantic Charter,” noted the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service: “The Axis sees at stake the security of their self-appointed positions as the only young and progressive nations in Europe.”^[398] The Germans attacked the “plutocratic fraud on the English people” and the plan’s “social backwardness” because of its reliance on contributions and thus “outdated” principles of contributory insurance. At the same time, how­ever, arguments could be heard that some of the DAF’s own ideas had been copied, at least in part.^[399]

The British set the agenda, indeed. In Germany, Robert Ley had every reason to be upset. Nearly a year before the appearance of the Beveridge report, in January 1942, Hitler had ordered a stop to all debates on postwar planning.^[400] From the very beginning the DAF’s plans had caused vicious, disruptive, and almost uncontrollable party infighting and com­petition among the DAF, the ministries of economics, labor, and finance, and representatives of industry and physicians. The plans were put on hold until after the war to prevent further conflict. Although Ley refused to give in easily, by the time the Beveridge report was published it had become obvious that he no longer influenced social insurance policy, which had developed along much the same lines as the existing system. With its equivalence of contributions and benefits, this system appeared to many within the party as the far more efficient way to increase labor productivity than did the Labor Front’s pension plan.^[401] Ironically, Beveridge appears to have been a hero for these reformers, many of whom were ardent Nazis. They referred to the English reformer when they demanded that benefits be increased, that the different branches of social insurance be consolidated, and that the system of contributions be sim­plified. These issues were still being fought over as the war entered its final days: “The English government and the leading groups have realized the decisive importance of social security and, as a major element of this social security, social insurance for the well-being of the people,” wrote a leading official in the German Labor Ministry in September 1944. He had proposed the preceding year that leaflets be dropped over England to inform English miners how well their German counterparts fared with the new miners’ insurance.^[402] It is noteworthy that in the wake of the pub­lication of the Beveridge report this party careerist had already assimi­lated the term soziale Sicherheit (“social security”), which had not been in common usage in the German language.^[403]

In the United States the Beveridge report promised to break the dead­lock gripping social policy in 1942. Liberal reformers and members of the labor movement had hoped that the president would “seize upon the Beveridge report as an occasion to dramatize the immediate need for sweeping congressional action.”^[404] However, Roosevelt remained reluctant; he even refused to send a special message on social security to Congress in December 1942, which he had originally told Altmeyer he would do. In March 1943 the president submitted to Congress the NRPB’s report on Security, Work, and Relief Policies and shortly thereafter the report of the SSB. Among reformers the NRPB report was heralded as the American Beveridge plan, as a “Charter for America” (New Republic) or as “A New Bill of Rights” (Nation).^[405] When Beveridge planned to mount a lecture tour of the United States and Canada in April 1943 Altmeyer urged him to postpone the trip until May because he wanted to arrange to have Beveridge testify at congressional hearings.^[406] Beveridge did end up coming in May but never had the chance to testify.

British fears that they might get “out-Beveridged” by the Americans were unfounded.^[407] The NRPB report did not attract widespread atten­tion. Its academic length, its focus on historical description, and its empha­sis on full employment and public works at a time of labor scarcity made it an odd and in many respects inadequate proposal indeed.^[408] Undoubt­edly, Southern and conservative representatives and senators did not appre­ciate the way it expanded the role of the federal government and infringed on states’ rights. The report developed an egalitarian concept of citizenship even further than did the plans of the SSB: Taxes were to secure adequate benefits, and every citizen was to enjoy the right to a “minimum standard of security” guaranteed by strong federal control over the states’ assistance programs.^[409] In 1942 Congress reacted in its own way by stopping the appropriation of funds for the NRPB.^[410]

The failure of these initiatives cannot be attributed solely to an elec­torate dulled by issues of social postwar planning or to an increasingly reluc­tant and conservative Congress that was eager to roll back New Deal legislation.^[411] Equally important is the fact that the president did not commit himself to the issues but rather continued to make lukewarm allusions to what possibly would, could, and should be done. After the expectations of the reformers had been raised by Roosevelt in 1940-1, they were disappointed to discover that neither support nor outright endorse­ment was forthcoming from the White House. In going through the pres­idential files one can get the impression that the planning that Roosevelt had initiated in 1941 primarily served the purpose of preparing for entry into the war and the public’s reaction to it. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, fighting the war took precedence over any other matter. This was once again evident when the Wagner-Murray-Dingell Bill was intro­duced in Congress. Roosevelt’s 1944 economic address on the new bill of rights tacitly supported the principle behind Wagner-Murray-Dingell by calling for the right to protection against the fear of illness, accident, and old age for every citizen, but that was as far as his support went.^[412] In 1943 Roosevelt instead popularized the more specific issue of benefits for vet­erans. The Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944 created a miniature American welfare state for a traditionally privileged societal group, namely, veterans:The new bill of rights turned into the “G.I. Bill of Rights,” as the American Legion called the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act.^[413]

making the world safe for social

and economic security

Even though legislative efforts to push forward programs of social reform stalled in 1942-3, there was little sign of defeatism among social and eco­nomic reformers. Nowhere did the war bring about immediate changes; plans were to be realized after the war. With the publication of the Beveridge report the issue of social reform developed a dynamic of its own. Beveridge became the idol and figurehead of an emerging inter­nationalization of liberal reformers.

After touring the United States in 1943, Sir William and Lady Bev­eridge also visited Canada, where the ILO organized the Pan-American Conference on Social Security in which experts from eight different countries participated. As so many times on his tour, Beveridge was praised as a champion of British social reform and also - in the words of Ian Mackenzie, the Canadian minister of pension and national health - as someone who had made an impact on the “consciousness of the whole world” with his report and one who had “stimulated the interest of gov­ernments and of peoples in the question of social security to a degree without parallel in the past.”^[414] The ILO called this meeting at this time to obtain ideas for the drafting of an “International Charter of Social Security,” to be ratified by an official international conference of the ILO. Social security was to have a “place in the world order.” Mackenzie quoted Altmeyer, who a few days earlier had said at the American Labor Conference on International Affairs in New York that social security was the “embodiment of the chief moral concept which distinguishes the United Nations from the Axis powers - namely, the belief in the innate dignity and worth of the common man.”^[415] Social security was to be an altar in the church of democracy, with an international social charter spreading the gospel of social and economic security to the world.

The idea of an international charter on social security had various origins. Since 1940 the United States had been attempting to improve cooperation between itself and the other states in the western hemisphere in the field of social policy, not least in order to prevent the “Nazifica­tion” of Latin America. Winant and Altmeyer organized the Inter­American Committee to Promote Social Security, which aimed at furthering social reforms in those countries.^[416] In Santiago, Chile, in September 1942, statutes were adopted for such an organization and a framework set up with Altmeyer serving as chairman. The aim was to make the Americas safe for social security, ironically in a way very similar to plans that were already drawn up yet far from being implemented in the United States itself.

Members of the SSB cooperated closely with the ILO on this as well as on other issues.^[417] During the war the ILO pushed strongly for an International Labor Charter that would also define the organization’s role in the postwar period. A resolution of the International Labor Confer­ence of NewYork in September 1941 endorsed the Atlantic Charter.⁷⁷ The Twenty-Sixth Conference of the International Labor Organization, held in Philadelphia from April 20 to May 12, 1944, passed the “Decla­ration Concerning the Aims and Purpose of the ILO,” also known as the “Declaration of Philadelphia.”⁷⁸ With this document the conference affirmed that “all human beings, irrespective of race, creed or sex, have the right to pursue both their material well-being and their spiritual development in conditions of freedom and dignity, of economic security and equal opportunity.” Poverty constituted a “danger to prosperity every­where”; hence, each country was to fight a “war against want.” The con­ference recognized the “solemn obligation” of the ILO to advance programs among the nations of the world to achieve “full employment and the raising of standards of living”; a “minimum living wage to all employed and in need of such protection”; the “extension of social secu­rity measures to provide a basic income to all in need of such protection and comprehensive medical care”; “adequate protection for the life and health of workers of all occupations”; provisions for child welfare and maternity protection; the provision of adequate nutrition, housing, and facilities for recreation and culture; and the assurance of equal education and vocational opportunity. All these points, accompanied by the objec­tive to “expand production and consumption and to avoid severe eco­nomic fluctuations,” picked up on the themes propagated by liberal American social reformers. Between 1925 and 1937 the ILO adopted many conventions and recommendations on social security problems, but not until the Philadelphia Conference did it promulgate an all-inclusive social and economic security program. It built on the foundations laid by the Beveridge report, the National Resources Planning Board Report, and the Wagner-Murray-Dingell Bill. The language of social security and rights had been elevated to the lofty heights of internationalism. Reform­ers enthusiastically seized on aspects of this domestic American and, after 1943-4, international debate on rights - not because they believed some-

the essay by Oswald Stein, chief of the Social Insurance Section of the ILO, “Building Social Security,” International Labour Review 24 (1941): 247-74.

77 “Social Objective,” 22-3.

78 Records of Proceedings of the 26th Session of the International Labour Conference (Philadelphia, 1944). The different resolutions pertaining to social and economic policies that were earnestly contested cannot be dealt with here. For the conference, the ILO had prepared Social Security: Principles and Problems, pt. 1: Principles; pt. 2: Problems Arising out of the War: Recommendations to the United Nations for Present and Postwar Social Policy (Montreal, 1944). thing radically new was being propagated but because these rights were easily compatible with earlier demands of the European labor movement.

Making the world safe for social and economic security was not a way of diverting attention from the domestic issues of the United States. Social reformers reasoned just the other way around: The international rights discourse was a means to press for reforms at home. When the delegates of the Philadelphia Labor Conference visited the White House shortly after the end of the conference, Roosevelt linked the American Bill of Rights and the “right of all human beings to material well-being and spiritual development” affirmed by the conference. This fit well into his domestic re-election campaign in 1944. However, it is indicative of Roosevelt’s feelings on the issue that, when addressing the delegates at this meeting, he most likely left out the passage of the speech stating that if the aims of the ILO did not become “the aim of national poli­cies, then it won’t become the aim of international policies.”^[418]

conclusion

By 1944 plans for setting up new, or reforming existing, national systems of social security were mushrooming, and a new international rights dis­course was fully entrenched.^[419] By itself this rights discourse does not say much about the outcome of national efforts to advance the welfare state. The struggles in the United States over the expansion of social security, the first round of which was fought during the Truman administration, testify to this.^[420] The debates over inclusion in the Charter of the United Nations of clauses pertaining to social rights, and subsequent debates over the content of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, undoubtedly enhanced the awareness of the connection between modern citizenship and social and economic rights. The United States played a considerable role in these debates.^[421] The discussions during the war paved the way for the path traveled soon afterward, however differently, by most countries. Universal membership was a way to circumvent policies that were essentially class based; a growing number of economists thought the economy was to some degree “manageable” by way of fiscal policies;^[422] economic growth promised to break what had appeared to be the iron fetters of scarcity, slow economic growth, and unemployment; and, last but not least, there emerged a broad consensus that political citizenship was to be complemented by social citizenship, that indeed social rights complemented the system of civil and political rights, as T. H. Marshall later argued in his grand teleology of modernization in Western nations.^[423] Compared with European models of the British or Scandinavian welfare states, or the German model of the Sozialstaat, the politics of social policy in the United States undoubtedly established the weakest connection between social and political rights.Yet, one must be aware that during the war reformers in the United States had pioneered a language of economic and social rights. Inherent in it was not only a plea for a better world but also for a different United States of America.