War and Welfare: Separation Allowances in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States

This chapter will explore the multifaceted ways the Great War transformed social welfare policies in Europe and the United States. Traditional approaches to this period tend to look at relief and welfare measures as those fitting in either the pre-war or the post-war context. Yet newer scholarship has begun to explore the ways in which ideas about welfare prevalent in the nineteenth century remained and informed more expansive state interventions after World War I. This chapter focuses on the mechanism of separation allowances, that is the direct payments to the dependents of servicemen, in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States. These three nations’ utilization of separation allowances during the war reflects the entrenched beliefs of the nineteenth century and demonstrates that there is a greater continuity of ideas between welfare practices before and after the war. Specifically, separation allowances illuminate the shared anxieties held by middle-class reformers over the proliferation of the undeserving receiving aid and the desire to police the behaviors of recipients in order to use welfare as a mechanism to shape society to a particular bourgeois vision. Ultimately, this chapter asserts that while World War I transformed the nature of social welfare policies, it did little to change the accepted attitudes that undergirded ideas on poverty, relief, and state responsibility.