Borders and Bootstraps

In a 2012 primary-season campaign speech, Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum claimed, “When my grandfather came to this country back in 1925, there were no government benefits.” His grandparents, Santorum said, realized the American Dream on their own, without help from the state. In her brilliant Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration, and the American Welfare State from the Progressive Era to the New Deal, sociologist Cybelle Fox explodes this common “bootstrapping white ethnic” myth. As the Great Depression settled in, Santorum’s grandparents would have found themselves among the fortunate recipients of an array of government benefits not available to African American citizens and Mexican immigrants.

Fox explains how the “intersection of labor, race, and politics” shaped three distinct welfare states for European immigrants, blacks, and Mexicans. (Her title echoes Gosta Esping-Anderson’s influential The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism [1990]). In these welfare states, four factors—regional concentration, labor market context, political context, and racial/color status—combined to produce vastly different outcomes.