Corporate Welfare and the Invention of Industrial Humanity in the Progressive Era
Abstract
This paper examines how Progressive Era corporate welfare programs at the Ford Motor Company and the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company (CF&I) functioned as both instruments of reform and mechanisms of control. Between 1890 and 1930, such initiatives extended managerial authority into workers’ domestic and civic lives under the guise of benevolent improvement. By analyzing company records, welfare manuals, and contemporary publications, the study argues that corporate welfare sought to engineer a morally, racially, and civically “fit” industrial citizen. Programs like Ford’s Sociological Department and CF&I’s Sociological Division fused economic reward with behavioral, racial, and gender conformity—linking industrial efficiency to moral virtue and national identity. While these welfare systems provided tangible material benefits, they also reinforced hierarchies of race, gender, and citizenship, embedding exclusion within structures of care. Worker responses—ranging from strategic compliance to subtle resistance—reveal welfare capitalism as a negotiated and contested social order. Ultimately, the paper contends that Progressive Era corporate welfare helped shape a distinct American model of conditional social provision, where access to welfare became tied to employment, discipline, and moral worth rather than universal civic rights.
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