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  • State Building As Sandwich Making
  • W. Elliot Brownlee (bio)
Edward D. Berkowitz. Mr. Social Security: The Life of Wilbur J. Cohen. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995. xx + 396 pp. Notes and index. $34.95.
Sheryl R. Tynes. Turning Points in Social Security: From “Cruel Hoax” to “Sacred Entitlement.” Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. viii + 253 pp. Figures, tables, bibliography, and index. $39.50.

Wilbur Cohen (1913–1987) is a courageous choice for a biographer. Cohen was a career bureaucrat who adopted a professional style, as Edward D. Berkowitz describes it, of “determined drabness” (p. 264). Cohen deliberately shaped his bureaucratic life to be free of high political drama. His personal life, too, was free of colorful detail. He was only occasionally subject to political attacks, and there never was any hint of personal impropriety or corruption.

Wilbur Cohen is also a difficult choice. To understand him and his career, the biographer has to have the perseverance and patience—almost as much as Cohen himself displayed—to track his subject through the complex, intricate webs of federal bureaucratic politics and the Sisyphean tasks, which extended over more than three decades, of drafting and redrafting memos, speeches, and legislative bills for superiors and political clients.

We are very much in Edward Berkowitz’s debt for his biography of Wilbur Cohen. Berkowitz has provided us with a fine perspective on the making of the welfare state in the twentieth century, and with the best biography we have had of a major architect of social insurance. Historians who wish to generalize about the effects and fate of New Deal liberalism need to reckon with Cohen’s career, and with Berkowitz’s book.

Cohen’s career in government is especially important to understand because it stretches from the Progressive Era through the Great Society. Cohen’s career, as Berkowitz makes clear, demonstrates the powerful lines of continuity within the development of national social insurance between those two periods.

The continuity was at once intellectual and political. The principles of social insurance pioneered by the Progressives—contributory benefits and universality of protection—had a decisive influence on the development of [End Page 469] social insurance at least through the Great Society. These ideas were influential because of the work of Wilbur Cohen and the other members of what he came to call the social security “apparatus,” a network of experts and lobbyists that extended from the Social Security Administration (SSA) into the national labor unions and the universities. Berkowitz meticulously traces the development and power of this group, including the work of Elizabeth Wickenden, Nelson Cruickshank, and Robert Ball. He details their commitment to the same kind of brokering between conservatives and liberals that had characterized the politics of the prior generation of social insurance reformers—the Wisconsin Progressives who had left their distinctive mark on the 1935 legislation.

Cohen first encountered progressive principles as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, where his tutors were the labor and institutional economists John R. Commons, Selig Perlman, and Edwin Witte. Arthur Altmeyer, a student of Commons, was the architect of Wisconsin’s workers’ and unemployment compensation. In 1934, when Altmeyer, as assistant secretary of labor, called on Witte to become the executive director of the Committee on Economic Security, Witte, in turn, hired Cohen to assist the actuaries, lawyers, and social insurance specialists who would work with the committee.

Within the intellectual and political framework created by Altmeyer and Witte, Cohen flourished as a social insurance technician and as a legislative tactician. He quickly made the transition from research assistant to legislative analyst, witnessed the passage of the Social Security Act of 1935, and became a technical adviser for the new Social Security Board. After the passage of the 1939 Social Security amendments, Cohen became Altmeyer’s principal assistant and the chief legislative liaison of the Board. At the time of Harry Truman’s reelection in 1948, Cohen was in a position to have a major impact on legislation.

During the 1950 social security amendments, which marked the victory of social insurance over welfare as a means of assisting the elderly, Cohen demonstrated that he was the most effective expert on Altmeyer’s staff. He represented...

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