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C H A P T E R 1 1 The Boundaries of Social Citizenship A popular“national recovery pep song”during the Depression titled “Marching Along Together” tried to galvanize the nation to face the crisis with unity, optimism, and confidence that better times were ahead. Its collective, hopeful theme was reflected in much of the New Deal’s iconography . A Social Security Board poster showed a stream of smiling, well-dressed adults, working-class types and professionals—old and new immigrant stock alike—all marching together out of a teeming industrial city. The poster urged the public to “Join the March to Old Age Security,” which they could do by filing their application for a Social Security number (see Figure 11.1). Highlighting blacks’ exclusion from this sea of faces and from many New Deal programs, the renowned black artist Romare Bearden depicted a similar stream of workers “marching along together” toward “recovery” while “Negro Americans” stood on a hill watching the group march away without them (see Figure 11.2). Bearden’s political cartoon, which appeared in a 1935 issue of The Crisis, illustrates one of the most rigid and enduring boundaries of social citizenship during the first half of the twentieth century: the limited inclusion—and sometimes near wholesale exclusion—of blacks in the relief programs of both the Progressive Era and the New Deal. Mexicans were on the march, too, during this period of course but not toward Social Security. They were on a march south—by train, by car, or by foot—across the border and out of the country in a movement that was sparked by the actions of local relief officials who no longer wanted to support these “unwelcome visitors” (see Figure 11.3).1 Taken together, the treatment of blacks, Mexicans, and European immigrants provides a nuanced picture of how race, citizenship, and nativity served as dividing lines between those who were judged worthy of assistance and those who were not. Despite persistent and widespread nativism, European immigrants were included within the boundaries of social citizenship while Mexicans were left on the periphery, granted limited inclusion at times, completely excluded at other times, and in some instances expelled from the nation entirely. The different treatment of blacks, European immigrants and Mexicans reflected the worlds each group inhabited—worlds bound by both regional political economies and each group’s social position. Blacks, Eu- 282 • Chapter 11 Figure 11.1: Join the March to Old Age Security Source: “Join the March to Old Age Security,” United States Social Security Board, 1936. The Boundaries of Social Citizenship • 283 ropean immigrants, and Mexicans were concentrated in separate regions of the country, and within each region there developed starkly different political systems and race and labor market relations. The vast majority of blacks lived in the South, typically in rural areas, where they worked disproportionately in agriculture and domestic service under a labor system governed by debt peonage and an ethos of paternalism. They were deemed racially inferior and inassimilable, and were subject to exclusion and segregation. They had virtually no political power, the result of widespread disenfranchisement and white Democratic rule. By contrast, the majority of European immigrants lived in the Northeast and Midwest, where they settled in cities and into industrial occupations . The cities in which they lived were often rife with machine politics. While southern and eastern European immigrants were deemed Figure 11.2: Marching Along Together Source: Romare Bearden,“Marching Along Together,” The Crisis (March 1935): 84. Art© Romare Bearden Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. 284 • Chapter 11 racially inferior to northern and western Europeans, they were nonetheless treated as white by most American institutions. And indeed a variety of forces in those cities encouraged their assimilation and naturalization and helped incorporate them into the polity as well as the welfare state. Mexicans lived overwhelmingly in the Southwest, where, like blacks, they tended to live in rural areas and work disproportionately in agriculture . Unlike blacks, they labored under a system of migratory wage labor—not debt peonage and paternalism. Mexicans occupied a more liminal position in the American racial and color hierarchy, too. Guaranteed many of the privileges of whiteness by law, they nonetheless suffered from many of the liabilities of non-whiteness in practice. But the color line they faced in the Southwest was not as insidious as the one blacks faced in the South. And unlike blacks, Mexicans were seen as foreign and “alien” even when they were U...

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