"Congress and the Welfare State" by James T. Patterson, in Social Science History (Summer 2000), Duke Univ. Press, Box 90660, Durham, N.C. 27708–0660.

Congress has been taking it on the chin lately from many historians and other scholars who see it as a villain in battles over the expansion of the American welfare state since the mid-1930s. Though sympathetic to their concerns, Patterson, a historian at Brown University, chides them for oversimplifying.

Congress, for the most part, hasn’t simply been on the "conservative" side, doing the bidding of corporations and other special interests, athwart the popular will, Patterson says. "On the contrary, Congress has generally approved what the majority of the American people have seemed willing to support."

Linda Gordon, a historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for instance, has blamed "powerful minorities" in Congress for "inequities" in the 1935 Social Security Act, such as the "stingy and humiliating conditions" attached to its Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) program. But in the 1930s, as in later decades, writes Patterson, most Americans instinctively distinguished between the "deserving" and the "undeserving" poor, and opposed public assistance for the latter. In 1935, backers of ADC thought that it "would help ‘deserving’ people, mainly widows and their young children." They never dreamed that the program would evolve into the chief source of government support for large numbers of unwed mothers and their children.

Likewise, the decision by Congress and President Franklin D. Roosevelt to exclude domestic and farm workers from the old age insurance program. This did affect many African Americans and other minorities. Some scholars see racism at work. But there’s no evidence "that racial considerations mattered much" in the deliberations, Patterson says. Concerns about fiscal feasibility swayed many experts and even some liberal advocates. Other nations made the same exclusion when they began their old age insurance programs.

Nor was the great power wielded by congressional committee chairmen—which has been much reduced in the House since the early 1970s—invariably used to constrain or tear down the welfare state, Patterson notes. It took a brilliant legislative maneuver by House Ways and Means Committee chairman Wilbur Mills (D-Ark.), for instance, to fashion "the compromise that led in 1965 to Medicare."

Members of Congress know, "perhaps better than scholars," says Patterson, that presidents who propose bold new social programs generally expect the proposals "to be narrowed and refined," so that the programs can be effectively implemented, with broad popular backing. Members of Congress also "often sense that dramatic efforts for ‘reform’ enjoy considerably less popular support than liberals have imagined." Budgetary considerations, including the popular desire to keep taxes down, play a very important part. Indeed, suggests Patterson, some scholars could learn a lesson or two from Congress’s realism.