War, Region, and Social Welfare: Federal Aid to Servicemen's
Dependents in the South,
1917–1921

K. Walter Hickel

In its sudden growth, wide distribution of benefits, and bureaucratic administration, the system of federal payments to the dependents of World War I servicemen was a milestone in the development of the American welfare state. When the system was in effect (between November 1, 1917, and July 31, 1921), 2.1 million beneficiaries "in almost every State, city, town, and hamlet of the United States" received such payments, officially entitled "Allotments and Allowances" and provided under the War Risk Insurance Act (WRIA) of October 1917. The Bureau of War Risk Insurance (BWRI), a small agency established in the Treasury Department in 1914 to insure ships and crews engaged in the Atlantic trade during the war, quickly grew into one of the largest federal agencies after it was charged with administering benefits created by WRIA. The BWRI had 15,480 employees by July 1919. It dispensed almost $570 million in allotments and allowances, a sum equivalent to two-thirds of the federal budget for the last fiscal year before the outbreak of war in 1914. Monthly payments amounted to not less than $30 for wives—the largest group of beneficiaries—and as much as $65 for wives and children. Often benefits exceeded prewar family income, especially in rural and low-income regions such as the South. The system of family support payments, officials of the BWRI proudly stated, represented "one of the largest financial undertakings the country has ever known."1	1
The Bureau of War Risk Insurance sent out so many checks to the numerous recipients of allotments and allowances—2.1 million throughout the country—that the signing of checks had to be mechanized. With the help of this machine, designed especially for the bureau, clerks could sign ten checks at once. Courtesy Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LOT 12356-11.
Progressive reformers, Congress, and beneficiaries endorsed the system of allotments and allowances because it, like other contemporary social policies, conformed to established social norms regarding men's and women's family responsibilities, economic roles, and citizenship. The system automatically allotted part of an enlisted man's pay to his wife and supplemented that with an allowance that varied according to the size of the family.2 Like mothers' pensions, family support payments were intended to allow dependent women to dedicate themselves to the care of home and children when they could not rely on the income of a husband. Like Civil War–era military pensions as well as workmen's compensation and other forms of Progressive Era social provision, allotments and allowances were to safeguard the prerogative of men as providers and heads of households even if they were unable to support their dependents through wage labor. The system thus blended what historians have called "maternalist" and "paternalist" welfare policies—the first designed to protect women in their roles as mothers and homemakers, the second to protect men as wage earners and heads of households—in a new and complex configuration.3	. . .