| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

David T. Beito. From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890–1967. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2000. Pp. xiv, 320. Cloth $55.00, paper $24.95.

Few topics reveal the cyclical nature of historical interpretation as clearly as the history of the welfare state. Consensus historians of the 1950s celebrated the welfare state as the triumph of liberal reason, while new left historians of the 1960s attacked it as a betrayal of socialism and a tool of class domination. The Reaganite assault on welfare in the 1980s led to a moral rehabilitation of the welfare state as a key player in the broader progressive struggle for social justice, a historiographical trend that perhaps reached its peak with the publication of Daniel T. Rogers's Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (1998). David T. Beito's history of fraternal societies raises important objections to this revitalized progressive narrative. Examining the role of fraternal societies in providing sick benefits and life insurance, Beito sees in the rise of the welfare state less an improvement in material social services than a decline in the cultural value of mutual aid. Ultimately ambivalent about the adequacy of fraternal societies to respond to the economic complexities of the twentieth century, Beito nonetheless convincingly argues that fraternal organizations embodied values that appealed to a broad range of Americans across lines of race, class, gender, and ethnicity. . . .

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