Walter Trattner From Poor Law To Welfare State Summary

Walter Trattner, in his From Poor Law to Welfare State, does a remarkable job of overviewing the major points of early American history, particularly the aspects of history that relate to social welfare. However, Trattner fails to acknowledge that the groups of people most remembered by history are not necessarily representative of the larger population. History is quick to remember virtuous individuals, especially if such individuals are wealthy and socially esteemed. Nancy Isenberg argues in White Trash that the dominating origin stories of early America that canonize figures like John Winthrop and George Washington act to distract from the fact that much of early American colonists were anything but virtuous. In essence, America was thirteen colonies dominated by people that, for better or worse, refused to act in accordance to the day's
It is simply impossible for an entire generation to be well-behaved. The biggest impact on my understanding of the American colonists was not the realization that misbehavior occurred, as I was not naïve enough to think that all early Americans were model citizens. What struck me the most was the evident extent of such waywardness. Particularly, statistics that Russell included in his piece greatly contributed to my improved perspective, like "During the War of Independence, Americans drank an estimated 6.6 gallons of absolute alcohol per year-equivalent to 5.8 shot glasses per of 80-proof liquor a day-for each adult fifteen or older." It is one thing to suggest that we drink less alcohol today that early Americans. It is quite another to add that fifteen-year-olds were drinking about six shots of hard alcohol daily…and that the statistic "likely understates beer consumption." While I had a vague sense that all colonists were not the model citizens my third-grade teacher portrayed them as, statistics greatly allowed me to understand the extent to which misbehavior