Regional Differences and the Growth of the Twentieth-Century American Welfare State

Elna C. Green, ed.The New Deal and Beyond: Social Welfare in the South Since 1930. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 2003. xix + 275 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

In the last decade, there has been a resurgence of scholarly interest in American social welfare history, fueled in part by contemporary debates over "welfare reform." Despite this renewed interest, however, we still have only an incomplete understanding of how the expansion of the federal social welfare role since the New Deal reshaped welfare policies on the state and local level. In much scholarship, the assumption persists that state and local governments were primarily reactive, merely responding to federal policy initiatives, often in the effort to block them, rather than actively pursuing their own social policy agendas.¹ Interpretive models depicting twentieth-century American state building as a process of "centralization," in which federal power largely displaced state and local authority, have reinforced this assumption.² State and local obstructionism has been a particularly prominent theme in scholarly work on federal policies' impact on the American South.

In this context, The New Deal and Beyond makes a valuable contribution by reminding us of the role of state and local politics in shaping the twentieth-century American welfare state. In addition, the volume often provides an unusually complex picture of the varied range of southern responses to the expansion of the federal social welfare role.³ Editor Elna Green notes that most accounts of twentieth-century American social welfare history have been "top down" interpretations "dominated" by "national trends, national policies and national programs" (p. vii). In contrast, she contends, state, local, and regional studies can be useful, particularly for understanding how federal programs actually operated on the local level. Most New Deal and Great Society programs were not as administratively centralized as is commonly thought but instead gave state and local officials considerable discretion. "[L]ocal conditions and local initiatives" shaped what federal programs could accomplish, producing results which varied widely by locality (p. viii).

Green's prior edited collection of articles, Before the New Deal: Social Welfare in the South, 1830-1930 (1999), emphasized the regionally distinctive features of southern social welfare policies. Her new volume carries the exploration of this theme into the New Deal and the Great Society. One of its central questions is whether federal intervention since the New Deal ended southern exceptionalism in social welfare. Did this intervention promote national uniformity, bringing southern social welfare standards into line with those in the rest of the nation? Or did federal social welfare policies accommodate, rather than challenge, many of the South'sidiosyncrasies? The contributors suggest a number of quite different answers to these questions.

Green contends that New Deal social welfare policies had a particularly dramatic impact on the South, where they represented a "fundamental break with the past" (p. x). The New Deal induced states to develop statewide social welfare programs and to create state and local social welfare bureaucracies, which remained in existence long after the 1930s. These policies were particularly innovative in the South, where Progressive social welfare reforms had generally had little impact outside of urban areas. As late as 1930, many rural southern counties had not created public welfare departments. In some localities, the county poorhouse was the only place where the poor could go for aid. The New Deal's policy innovations, however, did little to alter the racial inequities of the southern social welfare system. A "nationalization of racism in welfare" accompanied the expansion of the federal social welfare role (p. x). Southern congressmen and senators wrote "regional racial mores" into New Deal social legislation (p. xi). Although pursuing "far bolder goals" than the New Deal, Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty ultimately also "foundered on the rocks of racism," in part due to the actions of southern politicians (p...