>Paula Rabinowitz (University of Minnesota), Domesticating Art in
>the Age of the Trademark
Rabinowitz has done a lot of good work on left-wing women & art. There are better examples of her work (_Labor & Desire: Women's Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America_, Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1991; _They Must Be Represented: the Politics of Documentary_, London: Verso, 1994; _Writing Red: an Anthology of American Women Writers, 1930-1940_, eds. Charlotte Nekola & Paula Rabinowitz, with foreword by Toni Morrison, New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1987), but the following article on the rhetoric of Film Noir, social welfare, & national defense (published in the sadly infamous Social Text) is on the Project Muse, so here goes:
***** Social Text 18.1 (2000) 135-141
What Film Noir Can Teach Us about "Welfare as We Know It"
Paula Rabinowitz
In 1996, when President Clinton promised to "end welfare as we know it," he indulged in his now legendary parsing of the English language. He was not going to end welfare tout court, just welfare as we know it. But no one questioned whether we as a nation actually did know it, either experientially or theoretically. Certainly speculation ran to what the new configuration would look like; but little attention was paid to its history. What is the welfare we know? The Social Security Act of 1935, the 1944 GI Bill of Rights, the Interstate Highway Act of 1956, all of which have been enormously successful in alleviating poverty through pensions, education, health insurance, and subsidies for construction and jobs, most of which have benefited white male workers and their families? No. Welfare is a program that enables welfare queens to drive Cadillacs, as Ronald Reagan once asserted. A devious tool pathologizing the black family, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan once implied. The root cause of the "culture of poverty," which could not be alleviated even when Lyndon Johnson declared a "war on poverty." 1 In short, under the reign of Cadillac queens lodged in a sick and impoverished family and culture, welfare, as we know, is about greedy, slothful women and their delinquent, possibly illegitimate, children.
Welfare, as we know it now, is feminized, localized in decaying urban housing projects or in shabby trailer parks, hardly visible in the expansive American university system, the ten-lane highways crisscrossing the continent, or the tree-lined suburbs ringing our cities. These strategic investments were made to help the millions of returning World War II veterans reenter civilian life--a process understood to be fraught with the enormous "problems of homecoming" that required the same massive federal intervention as had the Depression to stave off the potential chaos, violence, and dangers facing the men, their families, and the nation. 2 The 1940s problem of homecoming, like that of 1930s unemployment, was debated endlessly among "experts," and in the pages of such diverse publications as the Readers' Digest and the New Yorker. It thus became the subtext of much postwar popular culture.
For instance, like many films noirs of the mid-1940s, The Blue Dahlia focuses on the strains three World War II veterans face as they reenter civilian life. Set in Los Angeles, as so many noirs were, the film contrasts the bright exteriors of sunny southern California with the gloomy reality of shell shock, unemployment, war wounds, and psychic estrangement GIs faced on homecoming. Buzz (William Bendix) suffers whenever he hears "monkey music"; the hot jazz screaming from radios, jukeboxes, and nightclubs vibrates the steel plate in his head, leading him to violence and amnesia. Johnny (Alan Ladd) confronts his two-timing party-girl wife who has taken up with a Hollywood club owner only to be accused of her murder when she is found dead. The men react violently to the incursion of black America (in the form of its music) into the all-white bars and homes of L.A. and the parallel excursion of married women into the workforce and onto the dance floors that occurred while they were away at war. Through their own detective work Buzz, Johnny, and their buddy George are eventually cleared of the crime (and Johnny gets a new girl [Veronica Lake]), setting up the possibility of a smooth future. But the scenario of adultery, murder, amnesia, and bar brawls conveyed a distinctive uneasiness about these "heroes." 3
The plight of the returning GI had been seen as a "problem" years before war's end. Scores of local newspapers featured articles with headlines such as "Vets Seen as Big Problem," as the pages of social work journals and social psychology studies within the Research Branch, Information and Education Division, United States Army, and other federal agencies fretted about the massive influx of young men into an America now booming with war production but only recently mired in economic depression. 4 These GIs had left a far different America--one reeling from a decade of economic depression, which forced the first unified federal welfare programs to secure Social Security and unemployment insurance as well as provide "relief" for poor unemployed urban families and displaced rural farmers. During the 1930s, welfare was understood as a response to a crisis--as a defense against social disarray, anarchy, and fascism; as relief from privation. By the time the United States entered World War II, welfare was understood as national defense.
During the Depression years of the 1930s, the discourse of welfare stressed images of relief and recovery. The domestic crisis was understood as temporary but massive, and only federal intervention could provide the necessary aid to those in need. However, the language of aid, relief, and recovery made the welfare recipient seem a foreigner in her own land--a refugee, a disaster victim--and the sheer magnitude of the crisis required military-style intervention. 5
As the crisis in Europe and Asia made U.S. military involvement seem only a matter of time, the discourse around welfare shifted considerably. Welfare became an aspect of national defense and security. The forces of fascism would best be staved off through social security, unemployment insurance, and, most important, full employment, especially for youth, whose delinquency was increasingly seen as incipient fascist behavior. The communist-oriented Social Work Today reported on the Annals of American Association of Political and Social Sciences special issue titled "Prospects for Youth," favorably quoting Aubry Williams's comment that "government responsibility for youth has as its primary basis the fundamental democratic principle of equal opportunity for all." 6 At least among left-wing social workers and political scientists, government welfare programs were indispensable for assuring a democratic nation. Only guaranteed work could eliminate the disparities in income that spelled the end of freedom. In this era of the Hitler-Stalin pact, left-wing social workers also characterized welfare as "the first line of national defense" against Roosevelt's stepped-up war production and growing militarized economy. 7 Gwen Barclay called for "welfare, not warfare," and Henry Doliner proposed full employment in response to "war hysteria." 8 However, after the Communist Party USA had shifted its line about the war with Germany's invasion of the USSR, a new department was added to the journal called "Social Work and Defense," with headlines declaring social work "a defense industry." 9
Once the United States entered the war, this left-wing discourse became more widespread; not only did communists insist that welfare was necessary to the defense of democracy but the armed forces did too. Welfare served the national defense by ensuring a supply of well-nourished and healthy young men; by aiding in the mobilization of all citizens into war work, whether as soldiers or civilians; and by providing child care to working mothers, housing to relocated defense industry workers, and education and recreation for young people who were the nation's future soldiers and workers.
What we learn from this discourse on welfare is how much its effectiveness was lodged in its association with defense, with the idea that welfare would "give soldiers something to fight for as well as with." 10 The shift from defense to war, according to the November 1940 executive order authorizing the Office of Defense Health and Welfare Service, meant that the "obligation to provide the basic social services in wartime rests with the Government." Federal responsibility for "family security" was part of the "defense activities" of the Federal Security Agency. Welfare demanded national mobilization and mobilization required national welfare: first to defend the nation, then to win the war. As a social worker in Caroline Slade's 1943 novel Lilly Crackell remarks, "Roosevelt said a while ago that undernourishment was one factor in the cause of illiteracy, and when he discovered that over four hundred thousand men have been refused by our Army for being illiterate, poor feeding comes out into the light and becomes a national issue." 11
In addition, with the rise of welfare during the 1930s and 1940s, the threat of delinquency--black and Chicano urban men in zoot suits and sexual promiscuity by white women--emerged as a national concern for welfare workers and civic leaders. War and economic depression, it was felt, had unhinged American morality, and the cachet of a uniform--whether of a "cult" member's zoot suit, 12 or of the armed forces' draftees and enlisted men--meant young women were swooning: "Juvenile delinquency is on the up-and-up and Children's courts can't stop it. You can't help what war does--poor people getting a lot of money to spend and women working out instead of at home," remarked one of Slade's fictional social workers. 13 The focus on delinquency, especially new sexual mores among youth, appeared to be a return to nineteenth-century social welfare concerns. Yet, as Eliot Ness reported to the National Conference of Social Workers, the 1941 Social Protection Program to "reduce venereal disease hazards to those in the armed forces . . . and to rehabilitate women and girls . . . exposed to prostitution and promiscuity" was part of the Federal Security Agency's offer of security. 14 Slade's Lilly Crackell tracked the changing concerns of social welfare caseworkers, family and juvenile courts, charity agencies, and federal and state welfare programs, following the life of a wayward girl as she matures through successive pregnancies into the mother of four sons bound for war. The novel's end finds a group of social workers paradoxically worrying that with the booming war economy they will be the ones who end up unemployed. They worry, too, about "what the men will be like after they've seen so much blood and killing." 15
As social workers were reading Slade's withering dissection of welfare's history, they were already dealing with the next "national issue," returning veterans like George, Buzz, and Johnny. Like Hollywood, social welfare discourse avoided direct references to the massive death and destruction of the war. At most, veterans might suffer "postcombat jitters" or "battle dreams." 16 The real "Big Problem" with veterans was that they would flood the job market, sparking postwar recession. Again, a welfare program conceived as yet another essential aspect of security and freedom, the 1944 Servicemen's Readjustment Act (GI Bill of Rights), launched the most extensive health, education, housing, and jobs program in U.S. history, aiming at reintegrating men trained in armed combat into a world with little semblance to the one they had left. Social work journals, echoing national agencies, outlined the concerns as follows: guys returning who had not worked before the war, guys returning to new families and wives they barely knew, guys expected to return to their homes as dutiful sons, guys uncomfortable with civilian life. Films noirs expressed these conflicts. Local newspapers were exhorted to stop running headlines stressing the problems vets posed to the newly recovered, newly relieved economy and to start broadcasting the federal resources available to them. To further secure the peace and ensure that the vets, like those troubled by the Blue Dahlia, would become solid citizens and not aging juvenile delinquents, the Servicemen's Readjustment Act expanded the 1934 Federal Housing Authority program guaranteeing mortgage insurance and offered stipends for higher education and job training. Along with the Interstate Highway Act (1956), these social welfare programs for building a postwar middle class (by 1946 for the first time in U.S. history more than 50 percent of Americans lived in their own homes) masked massive welfare expenditures as Cold War defense spending. In short, welfare--already considered a national security issue, first to maintain democracy and freedom (not to mention capitalism) through relief, especially through Aid to Dependent Children (precursor to AFDC), then to help defend the nation, and finally to secure the peace--was not just a women's issue as Welfare Rights activists in the 1960s asserted.
Relief, Freedom, Security, Defense: the large-scale fulfillment of human needs was obviously a task for the federal government, one intimately connected to the economic and military goals of American stability and democracy. In the wake of postwar neodomesticity, what became understood as welfare returned to early-twentieth-century constructions of mothers' aid, even when Johnson launched the War on Poverty, again invoking a military metaphor to achieve the goal Vice President Henry A. Wallace outlined in 1942: "freedom from want." The language of welfare returned to dependence as AFDC, with its suggestion of weakness, both personal and political, dominated welfare debates. The feminization of welfare ensured its demise as "a national issue," to be addressed positively, and shifted its visibility from heroic efforts to preserve democracy to shameful handouts to the undeserving. As the picture of poverty appeared increasingly nonwhite, as the cities emptied of jobs, leaving drug dealing as the only laissez-faire capitalist enterprise, and as welfare became localized within deteriorating neighborhoods, national defense morphed into personal dependence. The shift indicates something of the privatization of post-Reagan America. Yet it also resurrects ideas of deviancy and delinquency, not as temporary social and economic results of altered family structures during economic depression and war, but as the inevitable result of the perennial culture of dependence fostered by "the chains of welfare," as Representative Bill Archer called it. 17 In a classic Orwellian move, freedom (from want) now became a prison.
Welfare as we know it means AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children), the incarnation of 1930s relief programs, among them ADC, itself a federally instituted program building on early-twentieth-century "mothers' pensions," which repeated late-nineteenth-century charity work by the "friendly visitor." 18 Welfare and AFDC are synonyms now, with the largest welfare programs--Social Security, unemployment insurance, workman's compensation, and veteran's benefits, renamed entitlements--disappearing through hysterical concern over the feminization of poverty, with its regressive suggestion of moral decay. Early-twentieth-century social welfare workers responded to "sex delinquency" among girls by inspecting the households of their poor mothers. In 1972 welfare rights' activist Johnnie Tillmon proclaimed "welfare is a women's issue," forcing feminism to address poverty, but also indicting a policy that cordons off poor mothers as a "cancer," as the "undeserving poor." Responding to Moynihan's characterization of the "black matriarchy," she noted that "AFDC is like a supersexist marriage. You trade in a man for the man." 19 The current attacks on welfare again castigate poor women, immigrants, and racial minorities, whose opportunities to partake of the economic boom are severely limited by lack of affordable housing, transportation, child care, education--the same issues plaguing the nation's security and defense in the 1930s and 1940s. It is as if the entire nation suffers Buzz's amnesia, as we forget the midcentury history of welfare. When these same problems threatened white men's ability to serve as breadwinners or as soldiers, they became pressing "national issues," not of dependency, but of freedom. They still are.
Paula Rabinowitz is a professor of English at the University of Minnesota and the author of They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary (Verso, 1994). She is working on a book-length manuscript titled "Black & White & Noir: Pulping Twentieth-Century American Politics," which will be published by Columbia University Press.
Notes
1. For an explanation of how Oscar Lewis's thesis about the culture of poverty contributed to the Johnson administration's Great Society see Diana Pearce, "Welfare Is Not for Women: Why the War on Poverty Cannot Conquer the Feminization of Poverty," in Women, the State, and Welfare, ed. Linda Gordon (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 265-79.
2. Louis L. Bennett, "Problems of Homecoming," Survey Midmonthly, September 1944, 246-48. Some "problems" noted by the director of the Veterans' Service Center in New York included "family difficulties," "education and jobs," "housing," and "emotional disturbance and instability."
3. Raymond Chandler's original screenplay revealed Buzz as the amnesiac murderer, but the U.S. Navy objected to this depiction of a veteran and insisted on a rewrite. See Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward, Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, 3d ed. (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook, 1992), 36-37.
4. In fact, the trumpeting of this problem became itself a problem, forcing Sallie Bright, executive secretary for the National Publicity Council for Health and Welfare Services, to exhort everyone, especially social workers and journalists, to "stop calling them problems." See Sallie Bright, "Stop Calling Them Problems," Survey Midmonthly, May 1945, 139-40.
5. War meant an improved economy, but social welfare advocates, especially those on the Left, warned against depending on a heated-up war economy and ignoring the need for a system to combat perennial unemployment. They viewed the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which had been cut back throughout the 1930s by probusiness forces in Congress, as the only solution to maintain full peacetime employment.
6. Social Work Today, January 1938, 26.
7. Editorial, Social Work Today, June-July 1940, 5-6.
8. Gwen Barclay, "Welfare, Not Warfare," and Henry Doliner, "In Response to 'War Hysteria,'" Social Work Today, October 1940, 11-12.
9. "Social Work: A Defense Industry," Social Work Today, February 1942, 30.
10. Social Work Today, January 1941, 12.
11. Caroline Slade, Lilly Crackell (New York: Vanguard, 1943), 602.
12. This is Fritz Redl's term in "Zoot Suits: An Interpretation," Survey Midmonthly, October 1943, 259.
13. Slade, Lilly Crackell, 602.
14. Eliot Ness, "Sex Delinquency as a Social Hazard," Proceedings of the National Conference of Social Workers: Selected Papers from the Seventy-first Annual Meeting (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), 279.
15. Slade, Lilly Crackell, 602.
16. See Ethel L. Ginsburg, "The Case Worker in a Veterans' Service Center," Survey Midmonthly, May 1945, 126.
17. "Study Says Welfare Changes Made the Poorest Worse Off," New York Times, 23 August 1999, A13.
18. For more on this history, see Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1992), esp. chaps. 8 and 9; Barbara J. Nelson, "The Origins of the Two-Channel Welfare State," in Women, the State, and Welfare, 123-51. For a fictional but accurate, though highly partisan, account of ADC, see Caroline Slade, The Triumph of Willie Pond (New York: Vanguard, 1940). Slade was the first head of New York's Child Welfare Bureau, who, in frustration with the limits of welfare, turned to fiction to agitate for change. For more on Slade see Paula Rabinowitz, "'Not Just the Facts, Ma'am': Detectives, Social Workers, and Child Prostitutes in Caroline Slade's Novels," Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 16 (1999): 106-19.
19. Johnnie Tillmon, "Welfare Is a Women's Issue," in America's Working Women: A Documentary History--1600 to the Present, ed. Rosalyn Baxandall, Linda Gordon, and Susan Reverby (New York: Vintage, 1976), 355-58.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/social_text/v018/18.1rabinowitz.html *****
Yoshie