Paula Rabinowitz: Film Noir, Social Welfare, & National Defense (was Re: RM Conf: Selection of Panels)

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

Carrol posted some Rethinking Marxism panels of interest, and I
spotted among them:

> 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