Between 1900 and 1930, social scientists attempted to refashion social ethics by conducting extensive social research. Some of them collaborated with Herbert Hoover before and after he became president. In the 1920s, they accepted positions on Herbert Hoover's various commissions. The work they did on these commissions made them a forum for manifesting their interest in modernizing social ethics. At one and the same time, they were in a position to define both social ethics and the purpose of the social sciences. Throughout this dissertation, I explore the cases of three social scientists involved with Hoover's commissions: the economist Wesley Clair Mitchell, the political scientist Charles Edward Merriam, and the industrial researcher and social worker Mary van Kleeck. Wesley Clair Mitchell addressed issues of American consumption and economic behaviour. Charles Edward Merriam analyzed the political behaviour of American citizens. Mary van Kleeck surveyed labour relations between American workers and employers. In this dissertation, I have employed methods developed by intellectual historians, focussing on the published and unpublished papers that these social experts and Herbert Hoover himself produced. This collaboration between Hoover and some of the most prominent social scientists of the day explains the ambitious project they undertook, that of adjusting social ethics to the modern living conditions they had discovered while carrying out their social research. In so doing, they sought to adapt the traditional code of conduct of most Americans to the new circumstances that prevailed in the first decades of the twentieth century.

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In 1962 Congress enacted legislation which made social services an important instrument of public welfare reform. The law represented the culmination of a half-century effort on the part of public welfare officials to secure recognition for public social services as a distinctive yet integral feature of progressive social welfare policy in the United States. This dissertation traces the evolution of this effort from its origins in the Progressive period to the passage of the Public Welfare Amendments of 1962.The Progressive ideal of social welfare focused on building an institution of public welfare which would satisfy the economic, social, and psychological needs of all citizens. Public welfare officials viewed social services as playing a key role in the realization of this goal. The paper examines how social services became a means of protecting and expanding the functions of public welfare.The history of public social services has been marked by controversy. Throughout most of the twentieth century, the institution of public welfare has been subjected to periodic assaults by the taxpaying public. The stigma associated with welfare has caused many professional social workers to oppose the idea of incorporating social services into public welfare. The response of public welfare officials to these sources of conflict is a major topic which the paper explores.The context for and the ramifications of the dispute between professional social workers and public welfare officials over the propriety of public social services are discussed in the first three chapters of the paper. The last three chapters recount the political strategies used by public welfare officials to gain acceptance of their plan for integrating social services with public welfare policy. / Department of Sociology

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The ongoing debate over welfare in the United States is rooted in the long-standing tension between the nation’s commitment to providing for its most vulnerable and a deep-seated belief that such support can corrupt its recipients. Social Security has struck this balance and appeals to the masses with its pay-as-you-go system and universally distributed benefits. Yet, the solvency of Social Security is threatening the program that has attempted to guard against old age and disability for the last eighty years. This paper examines how the perception of poverty in the United States is a hindrance when tackling social welfare policies. Further, the failure of the Supreme Court to recognize economic security as a fundamental constitutional right and a lack of public support to contribute funds are added challenges in the implementation of social insurance and public assistance programs. The most promising solution to restore the short and long-term solvency of Social Security ultimately involves relaxing immigration laws to highly skilled workers and raising the retirement age for the rising generation.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / A sizeable body of research has attempted to examine the interaction between government spending and private giving known as the crowd-out effect. Most researchers reported that increases of government spending cause decreases of philanthropic giving to different types of nonprofits. However, few studies have attempted to indicate the interaction between government welfare expenditures and private giving to human service organizations even though human service organizations are the most sensitive to the changes of government spending. Additionally, the estimated crowd-out effects with a simple crowd-out model have been criticized for potential endogeneity bias. This paper investigates the total effect of federal government welfare spending on state government expenditures and philanthropic giving to human service organizations (known as joint crowd-out). I used the 2005 wave of the Center on Philanthropy Panel Study (COPPS) to estimate the effect of federal human service grants on state government spending on, and donations to human services. From these reduced-form estimates I infer the levels of simple and joint crowd-out. I found that indicate federal spending on public welfare crowds out private giving to human service organizations while holding control variables constant in the donations equation. However, federal government spending on public welfare crowds in state government spending on public welfare.