Making the New Deal Stick? The Minimum Wage and American Political History

THE AMERICAN WELFARE state has long been characterized as a “laggard” in comparative perspective.1 The conventional wisdom suggests that a conservative coalition of southern Democrats and Republicans successfully limited the development of American social policy. Nevertheless, the American political system somehow allowed programs like Social Security, unemployment insurance, food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, and the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit to slip through. Indeed, federal policymakers achieved a range of social policy reforms between 1935 and the present despite the nation’s systematic favoring of the status quo and its fragmented political institutions.2 This essay, focusing on the federal minimum wage, examines the conventional wisdom on the constraints and limits imposed by the conservative coalition within twentieth-century American political history. The most well-known redistributive programs, the “big bangs” of the New Deal and the Great Society, were enacted in congresses with extraordinary Democratic majorities. A range of research holds that narrowly targeted