Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration, and the American Welfare State from the Progressive Era to the New Deal by Cybelle Fox (review)

In the early twentieth century, African Americans, southern and eastern European immigrants, and people of Mexican descent experienced America's fledgling welfare state in sharply different ways. As the author of this extensively researched book documents, African Americans had virtually no access to public relief before the New Deal, whereas southern and eastern European immigrants had an easier time accessing public and private charity. People of Mexican descent fell somewhere in the middle, although any request for public assistance on their part could trigger one of the harshest state sanctions, deportation. This disparate treatment continued during the New Deal, albeit in altered form. As a case in point, since so many southern and eastern European immigrants were close to retirement age when the Social Security program first took effect, many of them received benefits despite not having paid into the new system. By contrast, the vast majority of African Americans and people of Mexican descent worked in occupations excluded from Social Security—specifically domestic service and agricultural labor.

The bulk of Fox's wonderfully nuanced book is dedicated to describing and explaining these biases in the provision of public assistance. Above all, the author argues that variations in political systems, racial attitudes, and dominant modes of labor relations helped to create three distinct "worlds of relief" in the south, the southwest, and the north for African Americans, people of Mexican descent, and southern and eastern European immigrants, respectively. As the author repeatedly underscores, social workers in each of these regions comprised critical intermediaries whose actions helped to draw the dividing lines of social citizenship. The author's utilization of a variety of methodologies, including quantitative analysis and rich archival research, makes the book an exemplary piece of interdisciplinary scholarship that should permanently push the study of race and the American welfare state beyond the binary of black and white.

Specialists in some subfields might quibble with certain particulars. At one point, Fox cites the number of Progressive Party voters in American cities as a way of partially explaining local relief practices during the late 1920s. Although the Progressive Party remained a force during the decade, garnering nearly 5 million votes in the presidential election of 1924, its membership in American cities at the time was probably not great enough to influence policy outcomes. Additionally, scholars of urban politics might question the degree to which each of the regions under scrutiny was defined by the kinds of political regimes that Fox ascribes to them and, thus, how well her generalizations hold in each case. Yet, the debates about methodological and interpretive issues that this book sparks will further scholarly inquiry on a number of fronts and in multiple disciplines.