Why did the United States lag behind Germany, Britain, and Sweden in adopting a national plan for the elderly? When the Social Security Act was finally enacted in 1935, why did it depend on a class-based double standard? Why is old age welfare in the United States still less comprehensive than its European counterparts? In this sophisticated analytical chronicle of one hundred years of American welfare history, Jill Quadagno explores the curious birth of old age assistance in the United States. Grounded in historical research and informed by social science theory, the study reveals how public assistance grew from colonial-era poor laws, locally financed and administered, into a massive federal bureaucracy.

A system for old-age security should probably combine different approaches: mandated savings and annuities; a redistribution of income to old people who did not earn enough when they were young to build an adequate cushion of savings; fiscal incentives for nonmandatory savings and annuities (including tax incentives for job-based pension plans); and an informal system of purely voluntary personal savings and family arrangements.

"Haber and Gratton lay to rest many conventional assumptions concerning the place of older persons in American history." -- Choice "Haber and Gratton's meaty little book does more than provide an intelligent synthesis of existing old-age history; its new interpretations, insights, and shifts of emphasis will provoke responses and help move historians' work away from the now threadbare original disputes in e field toward new questions and approaches." -- American Historical Review "Indeed, Haber and Gratton give us a refreshingly multidimensional history of the shift in old-age security from work, assets, or children to government annuities." -- Contemporary Sociology "... the history of old age has finally come of age. The authors successfully synthesize the best of the earlier social and cultural studies with new empirical evidence and recent findings of economic historians." -- Journal of Economic History "A truly 'revisionary' interpretation of the cultural and structural forces that shaped the elderly's lives from the colonial period to the present. Lucid and controversial, [it] is bound to be widely cited and hotly contested." -- W. Andrew Achenbaum This social history of the American elderly offers a provocative new view of aging in the United States. It revises traditional assumptions about the economic status of the old and challenges the long-held contention that industrialization destroyed family relationships.

The product of a three-year research program, this work focuses on the economic and social implications of aging at the level of the individual and of society as a whole.