The Business of Benevolence: Industrial Paternalism in Progressive America - Tapa dura

"Tone's basic thesis is that 'welfare work' provided a means for firms to forestall government regulation of working conditions and to improve their public image and relations with workers.... A thorough and thoughtful survey of an important episode in the development of corporate labor policy." * Choice * "Tone has written the most encompassing study of welfare capitalism to come along in a quarter century. Brilliantly locating welfare work in the complex matrix of Progressive era forces, it makes a powerful case for an interpretation hinged around business strategy to fend off a more labor-sympathetic welfare state. Rarely is gender (not just women) so well integrated into the overall analysis." -- Alan Dawley, author of Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State "Tone has produced a first-rate book that uses welfare work as a window through which to examine a wide range of important topics that range from the philosophical and political to the social and the cultural to the quotidian. The general themes of the book deeply resonate with current debates in American political life and will help us place our current welfare difficulties in a complex historical contexts." -- Lawrence Glickman, author of A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society "Fluent and well-researched... This impressive work locates itself neatly in the existing literature and makes its own contribution by offering a sense of the structures, nuances and forms of early welfare work." * Labor History Review * "Andrea Tone's refreshing new volume deftly combines business, labor, cultural, and gender history to resituate walfare capitalism in its contingent historical setting.... Tone's work is thought-provoking and adds complexity to the historiography of welfare capitalism." -- John Williams-Searle * Annals of Iowa * "A splendid book." -- Michael B. Katz * American Historical Review * "Tone's panoramic analysis of welfare capitalist programs across the industrial landscape of Progressive era America challenges all previous works even as she acknowleges her debt to them.... Tone has written a compelling history... and a first-rate study which goes a long way to helping us understand why the American welfare state is so weak and so easily eviscerated today." -- Daniel J. Walkowitz * Journal of Social History * "By incorporating the perspective of gender, labor, business, social, and political history, Tone adds significantly to our understanding of the development of welfare capitalism." * Journal of Interdisciplinary History *

In the early twentieth century, an era characterized by unprecedented industrial strife and violence, thousands of employers across the United States pioneered a new policy of labor relations called welfare work. The results of the policy were paternalistic practices and forms of compensation designed not only to control workers, but also to advertise the humanity of corporate capitalism to thwart the advance of legislated reform. In a burgeoning literature on the development of the U.S. welfare state, Andrea Tone offers a new interpretation of the importance of welfare capitalism in shaping its development.