Bringing the World Back In: The Cold War and the Origins of a Guns and Butter Consensus in Postwar Social Policy

There is substantial concern about how social work and social welfare will evolve in a world without socialism (Reisch 1993). On the one hand, if guns competed with butter during the Cold War, now that the Cold War is over, a peace dividend should be forthcoming. On the other hand, without a socialist alternative, elites might not be as motivated to support social welfare measures. This proposed study of the origins of a guns and butter consensus among key elites within the Truman Administration is related to this concern. but is also relevant to a number of other larger issues: the need to distinguish between the roots or origins of welfare state development and explanations for subsequent welfare state development; the degree to which social welfare rights are real, illustory or historically contingent; the relationship of social welfare to war, preparation for war, and the aftermath of war (Titmuss 1963); the impact of globalization on national social welfare, and the influence of exogenous factors such as international context on national social welfare development (Block 1977a; Skocpol 1980; Gil 1992: 120). Is modern society characterized by a “warfare-welfare state” (Laswell 1941; Gouldner 1970), where militarization casts a shadow over welfare entitlements (Sherry 1995)? Or is social welfare growth part of the logic of industrialization (Wilensky 1975)?

Despite the salience of these larger issues to understanding the degree of importance of the Cold War as an explanatory factor in social welfare history, Esping-Anderson (1990: 1) pointed out that the causal influence of wars for the welfare state remains an issue “which has been almost wholly neglected in the large literature of welfare state origins.” Tilly (Tilly 1984: 19) contended: “..the most pressing theoretical problems are to connect

local events to international structures of power...”. The establishment of a guns and butter consensus can be seen in such a light.

This paper seeks to respond to these larger concerns by specifying a researchable question concerning the origins of a guns and butter consensus undergirding the massive expansion of the welfare state during the Cold War. This study seeks to identify an additional structural variable influencing U.S. postwar social welfare development (Cold War bi-polar contention), and to describe an agency-level process in which elites arrived at Cold War-motived guns and butter consensus leading to consent to social policy which displayed the human face of democratic capitalism.

Three kinds of sources materials are used: (1) Existing theoretical perspectives, (2) Secondary historical accounts, (3) Primary data on Truman Administration discussion of the recommendation of National Security Council Memorandum #68 to slash domestic social expenditures (as indexed in the Declassified Documents Retrieval Service).

This goal of seeking illuminating cases has lead historical sociological research on welfare state development to (1) identify anomalous situations; (2) identify historical paradoxes, and (3) ask counterfactual questions. Is it possible that the massive welfare state development during the Cold War was itself an historical anomaly, an artifact of Cold War contention? Could the driving force of post-W.W. II Western social welfare development be found not mainly in Stockholm and London but, but rather (paradoxically) amongst elite policymakers in Washington D.C.? Counterfactually, what if there had not been a Cold War? Would the postwar welfare state still have grown as strongly as it did, or, as is commonly assumed, did Cold War military expenditures actually diminish social welfare development? If we could answer such questions, we would be better able to control for the

influence of the no-longer-really-existing Cold War as we go about seeking to shape and study the social welfare of the future. The possibility that a guns and butter consensus developed during this period has been a little-discussed element of the much-discussed Cold War social compact between elites, anti- Communist liberals and labor. By and large, from just before the end of World War II until the present, the literature has stressed a guns v.s. butter perspective, and concluded that guns won out over butter as part of the growth of a military-industrial complex. Few analysts then or now have argued that a social-industrial complex had also evolved (O’Connor 1973) within a warfare-welfare state (Lasswell 1941). This assumption that one form of spending grows at the other’s expense was made both by advocates for strengthened social welfare policies and proponents of growing military might. The prevailing social science and social work discourse has been that it was military expenditures -- not capitalism per se -- were largely responsible for holding back social welfare growth.

The literature has tended to assume a zero-sum relationship between military and social spending (Dumas 1977). The Cold War was seen as having limited social welfare expenditures in the United States, and an end to the Cold War was seen as creating conditions for social welfare growth (Trattner 1989). Thus, a master narrative argued that military and social spending were implacable enemies of each other over the course of the Cold War, and that the military grew at the expense of the welfare state. But there may be flaws in this master narrative. Military and social spending may instead have grown in tandem, and may have been dependent upon each other for

legitimation of the overall level of growth in the state during this period. At any one budgetary moment, they may have competed with each other, but only as part of a mutual upward spiral in state expenditures related to a Cold War-justified growth of the national state during this period.

A number of theoretical perspectives have been used to understand postwar social welfare development. Although these have been typologized in a number of ways, they can here be divied into elite/systemic control perspectives (instrumentalist, structuralist, regulationist and corporate liberal theory), elite compromise perspectives (pluralist and polity-centered theory), and elite defeat perspectives (social democratic and popular mobilization theory). This typological continuum involves variation in the key structural and agency-related factors identified as associated with the ideal-typical elite outcome. Elite/systemic control perspectives tend to stress the role of the capitalist

class (instrumentalist); capitalist system (structuralist) or capitalist-era mode of regulation (regulationist). Elite compromise perspectives stress structures associated with constitutional democracy, voluntary association, and regulated labor-management relations. Elite defeat perspectives evoke social democratic theories which stress the key role of varying class capacities and degrees of class unity, or utilize popular mobilization theories which stress the role of break down of earlier forms of social controls. As is implied by the structural implications of this

continuum, there is also variation in the specific agency-level role of elites, from acting as controlexercising

representatives of the capitalist class or interpreters of the needs of the capitalist system (ideal-typically elite control), to engaging in active compromises as part of pluralistic processes (elite compromise), to going down to elite defeat against optimally mobilized collectivities of labor and/or the poor and disenfranchised (elite defeat). The degree of elite consensus may be high or low regardless of which theory is applied. Finally, the degree of activity or passivity of elites is a source of variation in such a theoretical amalgamation. Due to an unfortunate historical bias towards identifying and analyzing elite action (rather than elite inaction), active elite roles have been better theorized than more passive elite roles. The proposed paper hypothesized that more passive elite

roles (labeled elite strategic consent and elite enforced consent) can be identified, which introduce further variation into this continuum.

This paper will seek to determine the extent to which agency-level development of consensus and subsequent granting of consent to social policy development was motivated by awareness of the value of various social policy advances in responding to and shaping the nature of the structural-level variable of bi-polar Cold War conflict. This will be done by studying discourse among the key elite actors who influenced the nature of foreign and domestic policy during a crucial year of the Cold War (1950), in particular that finite set of elite actors privy to the debate over the merits of the top secret NSC-68 memorandum. 1950 was one example of what has been called a critical choice point in national life. During such critical choice points, Burton argued that the boundaries of allowed political discourse are often set. Much of the history of this period has suggested that the implementation of NSC-68 itself defined these boundaries, and that subsequent social policy development was held hostage to the victory of Cold War anti-communist actors, events and ideas.

This paper argues that the origins of a postwar guns and butter consensus can be found in the period consisting of the debates over NSC-68. Although such a consensus was merely emerging and still had somewhat ill-defined boundaries, the essence of the consensus at that point was that neither guns or butter would be allowed to crowd each other out of access to the resources of the national state. It is hypothesized that this historical process is an example of the hypothesized agency-level structural variable identified here: elite consent to social welfare development. It is further hypothesized that this historically-specific explanation is an example of the influence of the hypothesized structural-level variable of the bipolar Cold War contention.