The Business of Benevolence: Industrial Paternalism in Progressive America (review)

Tone’s The Business of Benevolence seeks to explain the relatively primitive nature of America’s welfare state. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, European nations began developing comprehensive government systems of income support and social insurance, but the United States failed to make this kind of commitment to its citizens. Instead, many American workers relied on an extremely limited privatized social welfare system controlled by employers. According to Tone, one must look to the politics of the Progressive era to understand why the contemporary public system of social provision is so underdeveloped.

By the early twentieth century, the federal and state governments had begun to regulate workplace conditions in response to labor unrest. Not content with these early successes, reformers lobbied for even more extensive regulation and for the establishment of a comprehensive state welfare program that included pensions, health insurance, and workmen’s compensation. Alarmed at the potential for massive government intervention in the economy, an important segment of the business community turned to welfare capitalism—the voluntary provision of a wide array of benefits ranging from recreation to profit sharing and pensions—as a defensive measure to “halt the advance of the welfare state” (17).

Labor and business historians have tended to link the origins of welfarism with efforts to undercut unionism and promote worker productivity and efficiency. Without discounting the importance of these factors, Tone adds a significant political dimension to our understanding of the origins of welfare capitalism. To help swing public opinion behind private welfarism, which business viewed as critical to derailing demands for greater regulation, employers advertised their benevolent activities. Their publicity emphasized the benefits of welfare work to employees and to the public, heralding welfare work as the guarantor of labor peace and consumer satisfaction. At the same time, proponents of welfare work sought to delegitimize public social welfare, arguing that it not only created dependency but also “weakened male character and sapped the country’s political strength” (42). Tone asserts that welfare capitalism succeeded in undermining Progressive era reform and established the dominant employer role in the provision of welfare benefits for the rest of the century.

The Business of Benevolence also adds important insight into the implementation of welfare work. Other historians have associated welfare capitalism with larger firms, but Tone provides the best explanation for the diffusion of this personnel innovation. Company size, the degree of worker control over production, labor markets, geographical location, and the gender makeup of the work force were all significant factors in the decision to adopt welfarism. Tone particularly highlights the gendered nature of welfare work. Firms with large numbers of women workers were most likely to embrace fringe benefits, and employers’ conceptions about traditional gender roles shaped the nature of welfare programs. The factory was to be “refashioned into an agent of female uplift and feminine reform” (12). Benefits for women, such as special rest periods, meals, restrooms, and domestic education classes, protected them from the hazards of the workplace while enhancing their femininity. Benefits for men, such as profit sharing, pensions, stockholding, and savings plans, were mostly financial, promoting working-class masculinity by emphasizing male workers’ economic role as family providers.

Tone exaggerates the transformation of welfare work after the twenties, but by incorporating the perspectives of gender, labor, business, social, and political history, she adds significantly to our understanding of the development of welfare capitalism.