Author: John William Oliver
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description

Author: William Henry Glasson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description

Author: Theda Skocpol
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674043723
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 737

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Book Description
It is a commonplace that the United States lagged behind the countries of Western Europe in developing modern social policies. But, as Theda Skocpol shows in this startlingly new historical analysis, the United States actually pioneered generous social spending for many of its elderly, disabled, and dependent citizens. During the late nineteenth century, competitive party politics in American democracy led to the rapid expansion of benefits for Union Civil War veterans and their families. Some Americans hoped to expand veterans' benefits into pensions for all of the needy elderly and social insurance for workingmen and their families. But such hopes went against the logic of political reform in the Progressive Era. Generous social spending faded along with the Civil War generation. Instead, the nation nearly became a unique maternalist welfare state as the federal government and more than forty states enacted social spending, labor regulations, and health education programs to assist American mothers and children. Remarkably, as Skocpol shows, many of these policies were enacted even before American women were granted the right to vote. Banned from electoral politics, they turned their energies to creating huge, nation-spanning federations of local women's clubs, which collaborated with reform-minded professional women to spur legislative action across the country. Blending original historical research with political analysis, Skocpol shows how governmental institutions, electoral rules, political parties, and earlier public policies combined to determine both the opportunities and the limits within which social policies were devised and changed by reformers and politically active social groups over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By examining afresh the institutional, cultural, and organizational forces that have shaped U.S. social policies in the past, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers challenges us to think in new ways about what might be possible in the American future.

Author: United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Pensions
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Military pensions
Languages : en
Pages : 20

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Book Description

Author: William Henry Glasson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Military pensions
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description

Author: James Marten
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807877689
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
After the Civil War, white Confederate and Union army veterans reentered--or struggled to reenter--the lives and communities they had left behind. In Sing Not War, James Marten explores how the nineteenth century's "Greatest Generation" attempted to blend back into society and how their experiences were treated by nonveterans. Many soldiers, Marten reveals, had a much harder time reintegrating into their communities and returning to their civilian lives than has been previously understood. Although Civil War veterans were generally well taken care of during the Gilded Age, Marten argues that veterans lost control of their legacies, becoming best remembered as others wanted to remember them--for their service in the war and their postwar political activities. Marten finds that while southern veterans were venerated for their service to the Confederacy, Union veterans often encountered resentment and even outright hostility as they aged and made greater demands on the public purse. Drawing on letters, diaries, journals, memoirs, newspapers, and other sources, Sing Not War illustrates that during the Gilded Age "veteran" conjured up several conflicting images and invoked contradicting reactions. Deeply researched and vividly narrated, Marten's book counters the romanticized vision of the lives of Civil War veterans, bringing forth new information about how white veterans were treated and how they lived out their lives.

Author: Donald Robert Shaffer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
"Shaffer chronicles the postwar transition of black veterans from the Union army, as well as their subsequent life patterns, political involvement, family and marital life, experiences with social welfare, comradeship with other veterans, and memories of the war itself. He draws on such sources as Civil War pension records to fashion a collective biography - a social history of both ordinary and notable lives - resurrecting the words and memories of many black veterans to provide an intimate view of their lives and struggles."--BOOK JACKET.

Author: Robert Louis Clark
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812237146
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
From the Wharton School, offering a comprehensive assessment of the political and financial dimensions of public-sector pensions from the colonial period until the emergence of modern retirement plans in the twentieth century.

Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Invalid Pensions
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Military pensions
Languages : en
Pages : 38

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Book Description

Author: Thomas Power Lowry
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781945687006
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
Today, politicians wage vicious war over entitlements and welfare, but there was a time when citizens expected nothing from the Federal government except mail delivery. The Civil War changed all that. Beginning with small payments to seriously wounded soldiers, the system expanded step by step until age alone could bring a pension. In 1890, 37 percent of the entire Federal budget was in direct payments to veterans or their widows. At least a million Union soldiers applied for pensions, and a huge new structure was built just to house the army of clerks and examiners who shuffled papers and verified records. (It is now the National Building Museum.) This story of the pension industry begins with the author's own great-grandfather who was a multi-millionaire, yet collected a Civil War pension. His widow was still collecting her share as Franklin D. Roosevelt began the New Deal. The whole pension system became a Perfect Storm, in which at least five factors reinforced each other. The first, of course, were the veterans themselves with their disabilities, both real and imagined. Then there was George Lemon, whose national newspaper agitated in every issue for increased benefits. Politician "Black Jack" Logan's wild-eyed oratory gave further momentum to the call for more benefits. The Republican Party rode to decades of success by promising veterans bigger checks, and finally there was the Grand Army of the Republic, the greatest lobbying group in American history. One of the strangest conflicts in veterans' industry was: Who was the oldest living Civil War veteran? In an analysis based on the original records, the author shows that almost all of them were complete frauds. The strange and often amusing tales of their self-promotions and political sponsors are little gems in our nation's story. To give visual immediacy to the words on paper, one whole chapter is devoted to photographs of the hideously wounded men who survived the war. As for the South, with the Confederacy gone, each state took its own path in providing pensions or lack thereof. An analysis of dozens of Virginia pensions tells much of suffering and local politics. Based entirely on original historical records, Was Grandpa a Freeloader? opens a light-hearted but factual vista onto a largely forgotten half-century of the story of our nation.