John Bertram Andrews

• John Bertram Andrews
• Born: August 2, 1880
• Died: January 4, 1943

Labor and unemployment insurance reformer, was born in South Wayne, Wisconsin, the youngest of two sons and among four children. Philo Edmund Andrews, his father, whose parents came from the Northeast, was born in Illinois, and in 1852 moved to Wisconsin, teaching school and then becoming a farmer. The mother, Sara Jane (Maddrell) Andrews, of English descent, was a Wisconsin native. As a teenager John Andrews embraced the Baptist church of which his father was an enthusiastic member. After attending neighborhood schools, he demonstrated oratorical skills at Warren Academy. Graduating from the University of Wisconsin in 1904, he then received a master’s degree in economics at Dartmouth College (1905). Subsequently, as a student of Professor John R. Commons, the labor historian, at Wisconsin, he acquired his doctorate in economics and history during 1908.

In the spirit of progressivism, Commons and others had formed the American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL) during 1906 as a means of putting the ideas of experts on social welfare into effect legislatively. With Commons’s help, Andrews became executive secretary of the organization, and Irene Osgood, also a former pupil of the Wisconsin expert, became assistant secretary. Andrews married Osgood in 1910, and later they had a child—John Osgood. The couple constituted the driving force of the AALL; John Andrews served as executive secretary throughout its existence.

The association sought to bring old social-welfare legislation up to date and to obtain new laws to compensate workers for industrial mishaps, guarantee industrial safety, and create insurance for old age, health, and unemployment. In 1908 Andrews promoted the industrial-hygiene movement in America with his report to the federal Bureau of Labor on toxic match production. Occupational sicknesses began to be labeled as industrial accidents, and in 1912 Congress banned the application of white phosphorus in such manufacturing. In 1911 Andrews had begun The American Labor Legislation Review, to strengthen the AALL voice. He was its editor for the publication’s lifetime and for his.

Meanwhile Andrews undertook a long-term commitment to advance health and unemployment insurance. After three years, the commission he founded in 1912 to examine these issues suggested that together employers, employees, and government could finance social programs, based on German and British models that had been influenced by social democratic ideas. Local mutual funds would distribute benefits to those whose income fell below a certain level.

During the first World War, a bill encompassing the aforementioned recommendations was proposed in the legislatures of California and New York under his labor association’s influence. The bill met heavy resistance from insurance companies, which feared their own collapse should it pass. Employers and physicians also attacked the bill. So did those labor leaders who followed the offical trade union doctrine of voluntarism, fearing the competition of state action on such matters and being wary that physical evaluations of workers could be used as excuses to fire prounion employees. After the United States entered World War I, the bill also confronted an atmosphere hostile to anything smacking of radical or foreign, particularly German, influence. Andrews attacked conservative opponents, especially the insurance companies, who would, he said, reverse their position if allowed to participate as carriers. He not only joined the political fray at this time but also retained his scholarly engagement, publishing Principles of Labor Legislation (1916), one among a number of volumes that he wrote with Commons, whose adherent he remained.

The difficult legislative struggles and the onset of the conservative postwar 1920s suggested a different strategy to Andrews in promoting social welfare. As conservative ideology advertised Americanism during this period, Andrews and Commons proposed their own putatively nationalistic program. This view stressed voluntarism instead of government intercession. The British, Andrews said, confused government doles with genuine insurance. In the postwar period, new leadership, including that of Paul H. Douglas, reinforced the AALL. A more moderate approach also allowed closer work with the government. Andrews represented the United States in 1919 at a Geneva, Switzerland, International Labor Conference and worked with Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, whom he praised, at the national Unemployment Conference in 1921, sponsored by President Warren G. Harding. He also started to teach labor law and other social issues at Columbia University.

His policies and views on social legislation during this period became a mixture of the voluntarist approach with notions that anticipated President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal program, which began in 1933. The old health insurance plans were no longer alive except for Andrews’s efforts and those of a few followers. He traced the stalemate to “postwar hysteria,” “political indifference,” and “commercial stupidity.” Now his old-age policies included voluntary pension plans. Instead of urging grants to the unemployed, he wanted to stop joblessness via a federal employment service, government work projects, production blueprinting, evaluation of financial trends, and promotion of trade in slow periods. Andrews believed that the responsibility for leadership in creating these enterprises lay with the managers of American industry. He favored planned job education, child labor laws, insuring those who could not be employed, and a proposal—originated by Commons—that employers collect money to aid unemployed workers. Andrews appreciated related Wisconsin legislation of 1931—32 for its moderate features such as each company’s liability only to its own employees. The employer’s inclination to preserve the insurance fund, Andrews felt, would create a desire by management to stabilize employment.

However moderate, Andrews talked throughout the 1920s of the need for social equity. Referring to the aged, he said in 1924 that it was cruel to “tear a veteran of industry” away from his family and place him under the “uncertain care of strangers in a strange place.” He complained during 1928 about the failure to protect four million unemployed. And he advocated the uses of social service organizations like the AALL that “combine resources of technical training for constructive work with a freedom for public expression which does not falter in making hidden truths known in the interest of the general welfare.”

With the Great Depression (1929-1940), Andrews became less cautious and criticized even liberal Governor Herbert H. Lehman of New York for what he perceived as halfhearted commitment to unemployment insurance. Andrews eventually developed a national unemployment bill allowing for state leeway in choosing a pooled-fund or individual-reserve plan. Features of this draft were adopted in the Social Security Act of 1935 through the efforts of United States Senator Robert F. Wagner from New York, who introduced much AALL legislation. But Andrews was assailed by such social-welfare activists as Abraham Epstein and Isaac Rubinow who supported more government sponsorship of the projects. These differences persisted, blended, then reappeared in varying forms.

Andrews, who died at sixty-two years after an operation, is buried at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. Trained with the progressive scholarly understanding that social theory could resolve problems of modern industrial society, he pioneered in social-welfare legislation.

The John B. Andrews Papers at Cornell University offer a perspective on his career and the Survey Associates at the University of Minnesota have some Andrews correspondence. Biographical sources include C. A. Chambers, Seedtime of Reform (1963); R. Lubove, The Struggle for Social Security 1900-1935 (1968); and D. Nelson, Unemployment Insurance (1969). An obituary appeared in The New York Times, January 5, 1943. See also The Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 3 (1973).