America's First Social Security System: The Expansion of Benefits for Civil War Veterans

Most of us hold to a nostalgic image of a smaller-scale and less complicated American past, believing that federal and state governments in the United States did not become significant providers of social welfare until the middle of the twentieth century. This received portrait of yesteryear contains much truth, yet it hardly prepares us for some startling facts. Between 1880 and 1910, the U.S. federal government devoted over a quarter of its expenditures to pensions distributed among the populace. Aside from interest payments on the national debt in the early 1880s, such expenditures exceeded or nearly equaled other major categories of federal spending.' By 1910, about 28 percent of all American men aged 65 or more, more than half a million of them, received federal benefits averaging $189 a year.2 Over three-hundred thousand widows,