Origins of the Welfare State in America

It's fascinating to me that some of harshest critics of the progressive movement in the 19th and early 20th century write with such vivid detail. I found this Libertarian author who was trying to show that labor unions were not that important in the horrible (as he would see it) development of the welfare state. He blames much of the guilt of the rise of the Welfare State on Yankees, who eventually ally themselves with secular Jews. The article is titled "Origins of the Welfare State in America " by Murray Rothbard.

Here's how it connects with the remarkable Goldmark family:

If the female social reform activists were almost all Yankee, by the late 19th century, Jewish women were beginning to add their leaven to the lump. Of the crucial 1860s cohort, the most important Jewess was Lillian D. Wald (b. 1867). Born to an upper-middle-class German and Polish-Jewish family in Cincinnati, Lillian and her family soon moved to Rochester, where she became a nurse. She then organized, in the Lower East Side of New York, the Nurses' Settlement, which was soon to become the famed Henry Street Settlement. It was Lillian Wald who first suggested a federal Children's Bureau to President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905, and who led the agitation for a federal constitutional amendment outlawing child labor. While she was not a Yankee, Lillian Wald continued in the dominant tradition by being a lesbian, forming a long-term lesbian relationship with her associate Lavina Dock. Wald, while not wealthy herself, had an uncanny ability to gain financing for Henry Street, including top Jewish financiers such as Jacob Schiff and Mrs. Solomon Loeb of the Wall Street investment-banking firm of Kuhn-Loeb, and Julius Rosenwald, then head of Sears Roebuck. Also prominent in financing Henry Street was the Milbank Fund, of the Rockefeller-affiliated family who owned the Borden Milk Company.

Rounding out the important contingent of socialist-activist Jews were the four Goldmark sisters, Helen, Pauline, Josephine, and Alice. Their father had been born in Poland, became a physician in Vienna, and was a member of the Austrian Parliament. Fleeing to the United States after the failed Revolution of 1848, Dr. Goldmark became a physician and chemist, became wealthy by inventing percussion caps, and helped organized the Republican Party in the 1850s. The Goldmarks settled in Indiana. 

Actually, the Goldmarks mostly lived in New York. The family of Alice Goldmark's brother, Louis Brandeis, settled in Indiana. Joseph Goldmark lived for many years on 2nd Place near Court Street in Brooklyn. Joseph Goldmark grew up in Hungary, and his younger brother Goldmark Karoly was a famous Hungarian composer.