Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State (review)

At base this book, which explains the connection between American social welfare policy and race, confirms the conventional wisdom that programs for poor people make poor programs. In examining the relative fates of old age insurance, aid to dependent children, and unemployment compensation, Lieberman finds that the design of social programs matters. Old age insurance, a nationally run program, has taken an inclusive and expansive approach to social policy. As a consequence, it has included blacks on equal or slightly better terms than whites and become a force in the creation of a black middle class. Aid to dependent children (ADC), a locally run program, has, by way of contrast, followed a much more complex course. According to Lieberman, ADC has moved “toward a more inclusive program. This transformation was not toward broad, generous provision, however, but toward an austere and restrictive welfare regime that, although originally designed not to reach African-Americans, in the end perpetuated and deepened their political, economic, and social isolation by including them” (p.118). Unemployment compensation, for its part, has followed a middle course. Like old age insurance, it has been administered in a manner relatively free of racial discrimination and like aid to dependent children it has been subject to local influences that have not always functioned in the best interests of black Americans. Each of the programs has expanded from racial exclusion to racial inclusion, yet only old age insurance has done so in what might be described as a racially beneficial manner.

Although Lieberman does little to stem the conventional wisdom of the Social Security Act as, in Linda Gordon’s terms, a racial conspiracy, he does show that old age insurance has treated people fairly, regardless of race, and has done a great deal to improve the lives of black and white Americans. This finding is alone a major contribution to a discussion in which historians too often confuse the origins of a program with its outcome. Still, he makes much of the racial motivations behind excluding agricultural and domestic workers from coverage in old age insurance. As he demonstrates, these exclusions had the effect of cutting off many black families from the program. In my opinion, though, Lieberman’s empirical work in assessing the disparate racial effects of all three programs is superior to his sometimes sketchy historical narratives.

How much was the Social Security Act about race? How could a minority group, with about eleven percent of the population, have influenced what was clearly intended as a major piece of social legislation? At a time when the unemployment rate was on the order of 25%, one would expect, ceteris paribus, minority influences to have less of an influence than in more affluent times. As Lieberman mentions, occupational exclusions in old age insurance were the product not just of a Congress dominated by southerners but also of a Committee on Economic Security staff that could not be accused of racial discrimination. I would imagine that people regarded the Social Security Act as something of a successor to the recently failed National Industrial Recovery Act, which had been intended for the industrial and commercial sector of the population. Hence, the fact that old age insurance had this same target audience does not seem too surprising. That southern representatives did not act in the interests of African Americans reflected the situation that African Americans were excluded from voting in the vitally important Democrat primaries in southern states. But what of representatives of other states, where the groups being excluded from old age insurance were predominantly white? Few of these representatives complained about the coverage exclusions, in part because no groundswell developed in favor of old age insurance on the part of any region or any occupational group. It was a program that would take money out of workers’ paychecks in 1937 and not pay benefits to anyone until 1940. The benefits would be smaller than...