Who Cares?: Public Ambivalence and Government Activism from the New Deal to the Second Gilded Age

by Katherine S. Newman, Elisabeth S. Jacobs

Americans like to think that they look after their own, especially in times of hardship. Particularly for the Great Depression and the Great Society eras, the collective memory is one of solidarity and compassion for the less fortunate. Who Cares? challenges this story by examining opinion polls and letters to presidents from average citizens. This evidence, some of it little known, reveals a much darker, more impatient attitude toward the poor, the unemployed, and the dispossessed during the 1930s and 1960s. Katherine Newman and Elisabeth Jacobs show that some of the social policies that Americans take for granted today suffered from declining public support just a few years after their inception. Yet Americans have been equally unenthusiastic about efforts to dismantle social programs once they are well established. Again contrary to popular belief, conservative Republicans had little public support in the 1980s and 1990s for their efforts to unravel the progressive heritage of the New Deal and the Great Society. Whether creating or rolling back such programs, leaders like Roosevelt, Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan often found themselves working against public opposition, and they left lasting legacies only by persevering despite it.

Timely and surprising, Who Cares? demonstrates not that Americans are callous but that they are frequently ambivalent about public support for the poor. It also suggests that presidential leadership requires bold action, regardless of opinion polls.

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Katherine Newman is Professor of Sociology and James Knapp Dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. Author of several books on middle class economic instability, urban poverty, and the sociology of inequality, she previously taught at the University of California (Berkeley), Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton.

Reviews

[Kusaimamekirai · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really interesting look at three eras of “welfare” in the United States (the New Deal, the Great Society, and the period between 1973 and the present) and more importantly, public opinion toward it.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there has never really been a consensus on these programs. Just as today, people of all classes would inundate the White House with letters excoriating him for rewarding laziness and assuming that the poor were cheating the system.
What is also interesting however is that Americans have been remarkably consistent in their support of programs that help the poor that are work based as well as any program that helps the elderly (Social Security and Medicaid).
The author argues that the social safety net we have today was enacted largely against the tide of public opinion but because political leaders had the courage to step out ahead of public opinion, these programs came into existence as we know them.
Interestingly also is that this book was written right at the start of the Obama presidency. The author in the postscript asks whether Obama has the courage of his convictions to protect and expand these programs or whether he will go down the road of “triangulation” of Bill Clinton.
I’ll leave it to you dear reader to decide which path was taken.

[Hubert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Katherine Newman, anthropologist, sociologist has hit another home run. This time she goes through oodles of statistics and primary evidence, letters (think discussion boards from 30 years ago) to support the case that presidential administrations always went against public opinion when developing large-scale social programs. She concludes that typically leaders chart the course in spite of public opinion, rather than in response to it, particularly during more difficult times (e.g. FDR in Great Depression).