Last week, Kristine A wrote an excellent post from last week, highlighting the BYU-I Medicaid omnishambles. In the post, she mentioned that one rumored reason for the policy was to get students “off the dole.”
Now, I’ve been meaning to write about church (and government) welfare for a while, and that comment got me thinking: variously in lesson manuals and other church contexts growing up, I’ve heard about the evils of the dole. But outside of church contexts, I can’t say I’ve heard the word “dole” very often.[fn1]
Originally, I had a long, comprehensive post vaguely mapped out in my head. But it turns out this is the holiday season, and also the writing-and-grading-finals season, so in place of the comprehensive exegesis of church welfare, I’m going to look at use of the word dole.
According to the OED, dole means “[d]ealing out or distribution of gifts; esp. of food or money given in charity.” It was written as early as 1275, so it’s not a terribly recent addition to our language.[fn2]
We don’t use it a lot today, though. In fact, according to the Google Books Ngram Viewer, use of “the dole” peaked in the mid-30s, roughly corresponding to both the Great Depression and the beginnings of the New Deal.[fn3] While its usage hasn’t dropped back to pre-1930s levels, it has dropped significantly, to the extent that I can totally understand why, outside of the church, I virtually never hear the phrase.
I’ll note that Mormon usage of “dole” doesn’t seem to track general usage; if you run a search on LDS General Conference Corpus for “dole,” you’ll find that, while it was used in the 1930s, its usage spiked in the 1970s and 80s.[fn4]
So what’s up with that? The 1970s and 1980s potentially makes sense for a renewal of talking about welfare: the U.S. faced four recession during those two decades and, in the mid-70s, Ronald Reagan introduced welfare queens into the political discourse (in spite of the fact that it was, in today’s unfortunate political language, fake news).
So we were primed to talk about welfare. But why did Mormon speakers use “the dole”? as the phrase of choice, veering off from the broader trends? I don’t know, but I can speculate: eleven people were responsible for the 31 usages of “dole” in the 1970s: Henry D. Taylor, Victor L. Brown, Ezra Taft Benson, Vaughn J. Featherstone, Marion G. Romney, Howard W. Hunter, Thomas S. Monson, Spencer W. Kimball, J. Richard Clarke, David B. Haight, and Boyd K. Packer. Of those 11 speakers, 4–Packer, Clarke, Monson, and Featherstone–would have been younger than 12 at the mid-30s peak of using the word. In 1935, the other 7 ranged in age from 21 (Brown) to 40 (Kimball).
It makes me wonder: were they using the language of their young(er) adulthood to address contemporary issues? Honestly, I suspect they were; there’s no reason to think that LDS General Authorities were keeping current on government social safety net policies. Rather, to the extent they were thinking about providing welfare, they would have been thinking about it from the perspective of church welfare. So when the social safety net became relevant again, it makes sense that they would frame it according to their earlier, and most salient, memory of it.
Note: while I’m going to get into substantive details about welfare later, I’ll note that questions of framing welfare are always important, and today is no different: the Trump administration is proposing changes to SNAP eligibility that could remove hundreds of thousands of people from the program, with language that reflects skepticism over “the dole” (though without using those two words).
[fn1] With the exception, I suppose, of Bob and Elizabeth in the 1990s. Oh, and the bananas.
[fn2] I apologize for the size of the images in this post; if you click on them, you can seem them full-size.
[fn3] A future post will spend a fair amount of time on the New Deal and its relationship to Mormon welfare.
[fn4] I can’t figure out how to link directly to search results at the Corpus, so if you want to double-check me, you’ll have to run your own search for “dole.”