Toward a Federal Social Policy

The Progressive Era was a formative period in the history of American social policy during which state governments exercised their “police power” on a mounting scale to protect the health and welfare of their citizens. However, campaigns for regulatory legislation were all too often frustrated by interstate variations, the consequences of which were prejudicial, both to the welfare of disadvantaged citizens in those states which lagged behind in their social provision and to employers in the more progressive commonwealths who labored under the competitive disadvantage of higher taxes and stricter regulation. Such inequalities were regularly cited as arguments against state action. It seemed as if the federal system was out of tune with the requirements of a national economy.

The alternative of prescribing national standards by federal statute appeared to be ruled out by the Constitution. Social policy was almost universally regarded as a preserve of the states. In several cases the Supreme Court had affirmed that the protection of public health, morality and order was “a power originally and always belonging to the States, not surrendered by them to the general government.” Admittedly it had muddied the waters somewhat in the Champion v. Ames case of 1903 by upholding a federal law banning the interstate shipment of lottery tickets as “a reasonable and proper prohibition of immoral and unsafe trade through the channels of interstate commerce.”