Citizens and Paupers: Relief, Rights, and Race, from the Freedmen's Bureau to Workfare - Hardcover

Goldberg, Chad Alan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226300765 ISBN 13: 9780226300764

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2008

Synopsis

There was a time when America’s poor faced a stark choice between access to social welfare and full civil rights—a predicament that forced them to forfeit their citizenship in exchange for economic relief. Over time, however, our welfare system improved dramatically. But as Chad Alan Goldberg here demonstrates, its legacy of disenfranchisement persisted. Indeed, from Reconstruction onward, welfare policies have remained a flashpoint for recurring struggles over the boundaries of citizenship.

Citizens and Paupers explores this contentious history by analyzing and comparing three major programs: the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Works Progress Administration, and the present-day system of workfare that arose in the 1990s. Each of these overhauls of the welfare state created new groups of clients, new policies for aiding them, and new disputes over citizenship—conflicts that were entangled in racial politics and of urgent concern for social activists.

This combustible mix of racial tension and social reform continues to influence how we think about welfare, and Citizens and Paupers is an invaluable analysis of the roots of the debate.

About this title

About the Author

Chad Alan Goldberg is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Citizens and Paupers

Relief, Rights, and Race, from the Freedmen's Bureau to WorkfareBy CHAD ALAN GOLDBERG

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2007 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-30076-4

Contents

Abbreviations...............................................................................................................xiAcknowledgments.............................................................................................................xiiiCHAPTER 1. Paupers or Citizens? Struggles over the Status and Rights of Welfare State Claimants............................1I. Claiming Rights as Citizen-Soldiers: Struggles during ReconstructionCHAPTER 2. "The 'pauper slavery' of the poorhouse": The Freedmen's Bureau, 1865-1872........................................31CHAPTER 3. An Honorable Alternative to Poor Relief: Civil War Veterans' Pensions, 1862-1890.................................76II. Claiming Rights as Citizen-Workers: Struggles during the New DealCHAPTER 4. "They are just 'reliefers' and have no rights": The Works Progress Administration, 1935-1942.....................105CHAPTER 5. "A different class from the ordinary relief case": Old Age Insurance, 1935-1949..................................153III. From Citizen-Mothers to Citizen-Workers: Struggles after the New DealCHAPTER 6. "Work with no rights and no pay equals slavery": Workfare in New York City, 1993-2001............................189CHAPTER 7. Respectable Aid for the Working Poor: The Earned Income Tax Credit, 1975-2001....................................241CHAPTER 8. Conclusion: Relief, Rights, and Race in the Development of the Welfare State.....................................269Notes.......................................................................................................................293Bibliography................................................................................................................331Index.......................................................................................................................359

Chapter One

Paupers or Citizens?

Struggles over the Status and Rights of Welfare State Claimants

What happens in politics depends upon the way in which people are divided.-E. E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People: A Realist's View of Democracy in America

The stigma which clung to poor relief expressed the deep feelings of a people who understood that those who accepted relief must cross the road that separated the community of citizens from the outcast community of the destitute.... The stigma which attached to the Poor Law made 'pauper' a derogatory term defining a class.-T. H. Marshall, Class, Citizenship and Social Development

The central thesis of this book is that social welfare policies have been preeminent sites for political struggles over the meaning and boundaries of citizenship in the United States. These struggles are easier to grasp if we understand citizenship as an instrument of social closure through which people monopolize valuable material and symbolic goods while excluding others. As Brubaker (1992, chap. 1) has shown, the modern state distinguishes members from foreigners, conferring rights upon the former while excluding the latter. In the nineteenth century, for example, states restricted and regulated the immigration of the foreign poor in order to exclude them from national systems of poor relief (Brubaker 1992, 64-71; R. Smith 1997, 225-27). This form of social closure, which may be termed external, excludes noncitizens from rights and benefits that are available only to citizens. In addition, if citizenship is understood to be a gradational category rather than a status that one either wholly possesses or completely lacks, then citizenship may also be seen as a means of internal social closure, an "instrument of social stratification" in the words of T. H. Marshall ([1949] 1964, 110), which operates within the boundaries of the polity. This is readily apparent from the commonplace distinction between second-class and full citizenship. From this perspective, stripping a person of citizenship or barring her from acquiring it are the most extreme forms of civic exclusion-but they are not the only ones. People who are nominally citizens (i.e., members of the polity) but whose citizenship rights are circumscribed or curtailed also experience a form of civic exclusion: They are excluded from some (though generally not all) of the benefits associated with citizenship. Again, poor relief provides a case in point, for states not only barred the immigration of foreign paupers in the nineteenth century but also curtailed the citizenship rights of native-born or naturalized paupers. The internal social closure to which paupers were subjected may be better understood if, following Marshall ([1949] 1964, 71-72), we distinguish civil rights necessary for individual freedom, political rights to participate in the exercise of political power, and social rights to at least "a modicum of economic welfare and security." Although Marshall associated social rights with the twentieth-century welfare state, he did not claim that social rights were a creation of the welfare state. In fact, Marshall noted, social rights were established well before the modern welfare state, but they were "detached from the status of citizenship" (80). In other words, paupers forfeited their civil and political rights in exchange for relief. Traditional poor relief thus "treated the claims of the poor, not as an integral part of the rights of the citizen, but as an alternative to them-as claims which could be met only if the claimants ceased to be citizens in any true sense of the word" (80). Furthermore, "this divorce of social rights from the status of citizenship" (81) was a gendered phenomenon that extended beyond relief to the regulation of labor markets. Legislators and judges, Marshall observed, initially refused to apply protective labor laws "to the adult male-the citizen par excellence. And they did so out of respect for his status as a citizen, on the grounds that enforced protective measures curtailed the civil right to conclude a free contract of employment. Protection was confined to women and children, and champions of women's rights were quick to detect the implied insult. Women were protected because they were not citizens. If they wished to enjoy full and responsible citizenship, they must forgo protection" (81). Hence, in the nineteenth century, citizenship was equated with manly independence and liberty of contract, while relief and protective labor laws were defined as paternalistic and demasculinizing. In Marshall's view, the modern welfare state broke with this legacy, not by establishing social rights, but by incorporating social rights into the status of citizenship. This book builds on Marshall's insights, particularly his suggestion that civil and political rights could be and often were treated as an alternative to social rights rather than a foundation for them. At the same time, I challenge Marshall's claim that the twentieth-century welfare state broke definitively with traditional poor relief; I suggest that the transition from poor relief to the welfare state was instead quite a bit messier. As shown in the chapters that follow, major policy innovations in the United States that expanded state involvement in social provision often generated intense struggles over whether to model the new policy on or sharply distinguish it from traditional poor relief. What Heclo (1974, 317) observes about Britain and Sweden was, thus, true in America as well: new policies were shaped by the "reaction against the poor law" and the search for "an alternative to poor relief" for those deemed deserving. Yet Heclo's observation captures only half of the truth, for reformers were constrained again and again by conservatives (in the literal sense of the word) who drew different lessons from the past and sought to preserve or reproduce many of the features of traditional poor relief. At stake in these struggles were the citizenship status and rights of the policies' clients, who struggled not only to acquire new social rights but also to avoid losing their civil and political rights in the process. These struggles continued to emerge well into the twentieth century, reflecting broader and more enduring conflicts over the meaning of citizenship and its relationship to labor, gender, nationality, and race in the United States.

Along with recurring pressures to limit the rights of welfare state claimants, there is another reason why social welfare policies have so often been the site of political struggles over the meaning and boundaries of citizenship. Traditional poor relief tended to conflate poverty with deviance and criminality, and the poorhouse consequently provided care to the needy on condition that they "agreed to reform their characters" (Wagner 2005, 40-41). New social welfare policies often assumed this rehabilitative function. Such policies continued to operate on the assumption that poverty was a consequence (or, alternatively, a cause) of poor morals and poor habits, and they aimed, implicitly or explicitly, to mold the habits, behavior, or dispositions of their clients and thereby turn them into (or preserve their character as) good and virtuous citizens. Thus, these policies were not merely exclusionary-even when they stripped recipients of citizenship rights-but were also formative and constitutive. This rehabilitative function ensured that new social policies had the potential to be as paternalistic and authoritarian as traditional poor relief. When policymakers agreed that recipients' vices or deficiencies made them unworthy of full citizenship, and when they viewed the recipients as suitable objects for civic improvement, new policies usually became not so much a means of helping the recipients as they were, but a means of making them what they ought to be. The purpose of the policy, in other words, became the creation of a new person upon whom policymakers could write something acceptable to themselves. As in the poorhouse, the rights of the recipient became conditional upon his or her transformation. Under these circumstances, conflicts frequently arose over the nature of the transformation required, the degree to which it had been or could be successfully completed, and the fairness of the demands placed upon recipients. Of course, attempts by policymakers to foster good citizen ship need not be so sinister. Indeed, when autonomy and participation are deemed essential to citizenship, such efforts may even empower recipients. Yet even the most benign efforts are likely to turn social welfare policies into sites of political struggle, because policymakers, recipients, and other interested groups rarely agree about what it means to be a good citizen. In this way, too, social welfare policies provide a window into larger conflicts over the content and meaning of citizenship.

Research Design and Overview

The chapters that follow examine the contested status and rights of welfare state claimants in the United States through a comparison of three major policy innovations from the nineteenth century onward: the Freedmen's Bureau (1865-1872), the Works Progress Administration (WPA, later renamed Work Projects Administration, 1935-1942), and the dramatic expansion of workfare after the 1996 federal welfare reform. These cases were selected for several reasons. All of them involved important changes in social welfare policy that postdated traditional poor relief. In addition, each of these policy innovations created a new group of clients whose status and rights were initially uncertain and subsequently contested. Finally, in all three cases, the policy innovations coincided with moments of crisis and reform: the Civil War and Reconstruction; the Great Depression and the New Deal; and the protracted unraveling of Fordism, the New Deal political order, and the Keynesian welfare state. In at least the first two cases, the policy innovations did not merely affect the citizenship status and rights of their newly defined clients, but were part of larger processes of political and constitutional change that transformed American citizenship more generally.

Drawing on a combination of archival and secondary sources, chapter 2 focuses on the Freedmen's Bureau. In the aftermath of the Civil War, four million freed slaves-turned-citizens sought economic independence in the form of land redistribution. What they received instead were limited and grudging forms of government assistance from the U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, America's first federal welfare and regulatory agency. The Freedmen's Bureau, as it was popularly known, positioned its clients in contradictory ways. The agency strove to assist freedpeople's transition from slavery to freedom, worked to establish and protect new citizenship rights for them, and conditioned public relief on work in keeping with the prevailing ideology of free labor. Nevertheless, the bureau's relief and regulatory efforts made freedpeople vulnerable to stigmatizing charges of dependence, idleness, and pauperism, all of which were understood to be incompatible with full citizenship. Consequently, from 1865 until Congress terminated the Freedmen's Bureau in 1872, the agency's supporters and opponents, including freedpeople themselves, clashed over the civic status and rights of its clients.

Sixty years later, when millions of Americans found themselves unemployed as a result of a new and different kind of crisis, the unemployed demanded jobs. What they received instead were new forms of federal assistance, including work relief from the WPA, a federal program that provided temporary employment at a substandard security wage for millions of Americans certified as needy by their local relief agencies. This policy innovation, also investigated through archival and secondary sources, is the focus of chapter 4. Like the Freedmen's Bureau, the WPA positioned its clients inconsistently. Neither the policymakers who designed the program nor the officials who administered it ever resolved whether the WPA should operate as a work program or a relief program. Although supporters praised the WPA for allowing the unemployed to preserve their dignity and self-respect as workers and citizens, it was never completely divorced from local relief. Consequently, as one administrator ruefully admitted, the program forced workers to "submit to the equivalent of a pauper's oath" (quoted in D. Howard 1943, 413). These conflicting tendencies gave rise to an intense struggle from 1935 until Congress terminated the WPA in 1942 concerning the civic status and rights of WPA workers. While WPA workers mobilized to protect and expand their citizenship rights, conservative counter-movements sought to disenfranchise federal relief recipients and curtail their political activities.

In 1996, Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which radically reshaped the social policies established by the New Deal. Fulfilling President Clinton's promise to "end welfare as we know it" (Clinton 1993), the legislation repealed the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, which had been the primary form of public assistance for poor, single mothers in the United States for sixty years. Like unemployed workers in the 1930s, welfare recipients had demanded jobs, not welfare. What they received instead were decentralized, locally administered workfare programs that required most adult public-assistance recipients to work within two years of receiving aid. Using participant observation of a workfare organizing campaign; documents and reports from government, labor unions, and community organizing groups; newspaper accounts; and secondary sources, chapter 6 focuses on the largest of these workfare programs, which was in New York City. There, tens of thousands of welfare recipients labored in municipal agencies in exchange for their meager benefits. Like the Freedmen's Bureau and the WPA, New York's workfare program positioned its clients in ambiguous ways. Welfare recipients found themselves doing the same work as unionized municipal employees and often working alongside them, but receiving only a fraction of union pay and little protection from existing labor laws. In the 1990s, New York City workfare workers denounced the program as a new form of slavery, echoing earlier struggles that had arisen with the Freedmen's Bureau and the WPA, and demanded the same rights and protections as unionized municipal employees.

Through a comparison of these three primary cases, this book seeks to explain why struggles over the citizenship status and rights of welfare state claimants emerge, when they are most likely to erupt, and why these struggles are a recurring feature of American welfare state development. To be sure, these cases are dissimilar in many respects; the struggles of freed people, WPA workers, and workfare workers took place in very different economic, social, political, and historical contexts. Yet it is precisely these differences that make comparison fruitful. These comparisons reveal that similar mechanisms and processes generated similar struggles over the citizenship status and rights of welfare state claimants in all three cases, despite the many other differences between the cases that might have seemed causally relevant. As Charles Tilly (1995, 1602) describes it, this explanatory strategy involves "breaking down big events into causally connected sequences of events, and examining each link in the chain" in order to "identify deep causal analogies across detailed features of ostensibly different historical sequences." In other words, my comparisons do not aim to show that these cases are equivalent or that they conform to a single invariant model; rather, it is to demonstrate that historically specific struggles over the citizenship status and rights of welfare state claimants can be accounted for in terms of more general social mechanisms or combinations of mechanisms. Some of these mechanisms, such as social closure, have already been noted. Others, including policy competition, moral entrepreneurship, and criteria shifting, are described more fully below.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Citizens and Paupersby CHAD ALAN GOLDBERG Copyright © 2007 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226300765
• ISBN 13: 9780226300764
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336