"A Normal Working Life": Employment, Unemployment, Deviancy, and Normativity in the Interwar Making of American Social Policy

In the 1930s, many social critics and policy thinkers believed that the Depression heralded the beginning of the long-term decline of industrial employment. This concern arose not only from the crisis of joblessness since 1929, but the displacement of workers by technology over the 1920s; it proved central to arguments about social insurance. Old age, unemployment, disability, childhood, and marriage were all inflected by this issue in lasting ways. In this paper, Gabriel Winant considers the way that these debates, and broader anxieties about structural economic change, shaped the labor movement and its influence on social policy formation during the New Deal, with enduring consequences for liberalism, the welfare state, and American labor markets.