In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

C H A P T E R 3 Three Worlds of Relief Reviewing recent developments in the field of social work for President Hoover’s Committee on Social Trends, Sydnor Walker noted that “No true idea of trends of social work in the United States can be given without noting the different stages of development in urban and in rural areas, in the east and in the south.” In New Orleans in 1929, she explained , 100 percent of relief work was carried out by private agencies that spent just $0.12 per resident on social welfare assistance. In Detroit, on the other hand, 97 percent of relief work was funded by public monies , and the city spent nearly fifteen times as much per resident as in New Orleans, or $1.74. While New York City had more than 4,500 full-time paid social workers—or one social worker for every 1,700 residents—the state of Arizona had none.1 Despite Walker’s admonition, social welfare scholars have paid little systematic attention to such regional variation in social welfare provision in the three decades leading up to the Great Depression. We have a large and vibrant social welfare literature for this period, but much of it is based on studies of relief systems in large northeastern or midwestern cities like Chicago, Boston, or New York; far less attention has been paid to rural areas, and to the South and West. Northeastern and midwestern cities have received disproportionate attention because they were leaders in the development of social welfare practices. But as Walker suggested, the welfare services available to poor and dependent individuals differed substantially whether one lived in Louisiana, Arizona, or Michigan.2 On the eve of the Great Depression, the southern and much of the southwestern relief system was stunted by comparison with the social welfare system that had begun to flourish in the North. To be sure, there were similarities across regions. The historian Michael Katz has noted that “the continuities in institutional patterns across a sprawling, decentralized , and diverse nation” are remarkable. Poor laws, almshouses, municipal lodges, Charity Organization Societies, state public welfare departments, schools of social work, state conferences of social work, and Mothers’ Pension legislation were adopted by cities and states across the nation. Nonetheless, the South and much of the Southwest tended to spend considerably less on relief and depend far more heavily on private donations, while the North spent considerably more on relief and relied more heavily on public funding. These regional variations are important Three Worlds of Relief • 53 because they suggest that blacks, Mexicans, and European immigrants would have had significantly different access to relief services based solely on their region of residence, let alone whether they were granted access to the services provided where they lived. What is more, private agencies were more likely than their public counterparts to distinguish between the “deserving” and “undeserving,” supervise relief recipients, and try to reform the “deviant” behaviors that allegedly made them poor in the first place, likely significantly shaping poor individuals’ experience with their local relief system.3 Musing about the possible reasons the South had become such a welfare state laggard, a social worker in New Orleans rhetorically asked an audience of his peers in 1920 whether “the fact that there is little public outdoor relief in our part of the South” was any “indication of a lack of interest in relieving suffering? . . . One wonders too whether the fear of large demands on the part of the sick, aged, and destitute negroes has had anything to do with this situation.” What the audience made of his comments, we do not know. But the idea that racial divisions could influence the development and size of the welfare state has now long been recognized.4 In fact, though these regional differences were quite stark, disparities in the amount and type of relief available across cities with different racial and immigrant concentrations were even greater. Even aside from region, cities with more blacks and Mexicans spent less on relief and relied more heavily on private funds. Meanwhile, cities with more European immigrants spent more on relief and relied more heavily on public funding—even more, as it turns out, than cities with more native-born white residents. Variations in urbanization, need, or fiscal capacity do little to clarify why cities with more European immigrants spent so much and cities with more blacks and Mexicans spent so little. Rather, differences in the structure of...

Share