ABSTRACT
As individual leaders and as group participants they were instrumental in organizing and nationalizing movements for public health, poor relief, penal and other institutional reform, education for the previously uneducated, and child welfare. Anxiety over socialism was one of the major reasons for the demise of the pure laissez faire system of labor contract in the marketplace. Sheppard-Towner put government, notably the federal government, in the business of providing the public with social services other than protective services and education. Marxists and non-Marxists alike have identified the development of the welfare state as a part of the political process of the development of capitalist industrialism; to the non-Marxist especially it is a part of the political transformation of societies into mass democracies. Social policy is, as Albert Weale has written, “a deliberate attempt by governments to promote individual and social welfare in certain specific dimensions using any suitable policy instruments.”.
