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  • Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State
  • Hugh Davis Graham
Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State. By Robert C. Lieberman (Cambridge Mass., Harvard University Press, 1998) 306 pp. $45.00

Lieberman is a practitioner of the new institutionalism in social science. Since the 1980s, this approach has emphasized the role of historical [End Page 535] circumstances that predispose institutions toward certain policy outcomes. Lieberman studies the construction of American welfare policy from the 1930s onward by reconstructing the development of the New Deal’s three core programs of social provision: Old Age Insurance (oai), Unemployment Insurance (ui), and Aid to Dependent Children (adc)—later, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (afdc).

Like most state-building studies, this one is based primarily on the secondary historical literature, although Lieberman includes a quantitative analysis of adc data. His chief interest is the persistence of the racial discrimination embedded in the programs at their founding by the New Deal’s racist political culture. His conclusions, foreshadowed by the work of Skocpol, Quadagno, Weir, and others, are mixed.1 oai, which began by excluding domestic and farm workers—hence, most African-Americans—developed into a popular national program that was racially inclusive. afdc, which originally supported the deserving widows and children of employed workers, developed into a disproportionately black program by the 1960s. Attacked by Reagan conservatives for breeding welfare dependency, adfc was terminated as an entitlement in 1996.

Lieberman’s study is widely informed, clearly written, and nondeterministic; that is, he agrees that the institutionalized racism surrounding oai at its founding was eventually overcome by political forces supporting inclusive, race-blind policies. Nonetheless, his book emphasizes the troubled career of afdc and concludes that, despite the destruction of most de jure racist institutions and practices in America in the 1960s, institutional racism crippled the afdc and ultimately doomed it.

Lieberman associates desirable social policies with centralized, contributory, generous entitlement programs run by national agencies requiring no annual appropriations (oai). Undesirable social policies are associated with decentralized, noncontributory, and meager means-tested programs run by state and local officials with wide discretionary authority (afdc). ui falls roughly in the middle of this continuum.

Lieberman finds no virtues in federalism, which distrusts centralized bureaucracies and values local policymaking in such fields as education, criminal justice, public health, housing, and welfare. His analysis, by positing a southern, states-rights model of local control by conservative white elites, works well from the 1930s through the 1960s, but cannot account for the post-1960s trend toward minority control in city governments and urban welfare bureaucracies. Lieberman’s equation of white racism and local control, for example, is controverted by the explosive growth of minority contract set-aside programs in American municipal and state governments after 1977.

Overall, Lieberman’s historical analyses of oai and ui are more persuasive than his treatment of afdc. His liberal ideology permits racial [End Page 536] discrimination to flow and ebb in white but not in minority institutional cultures. He rightly debunks the myth of afdc as a dole for black welfare queens, but dismisses the policy relevance of soaring black, out-of-wedlock birth rates. He thus generalizes too broadly and ideologically from an otherwise well-executed study of America’s evolving welfare institutions.

Hugh Davis Graham
Vanderbilt University

Footnotes

1. Theda Skocpol, Social Policy in the United States: Future Possibilities in Historical Perspective (Princeton, 1995); Jill S. Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (New York, 1966); Margaret Weir, Ann Shola Orloff, and Skocpol, The Policies of Social Policy in the United States (Princeton, 1988).

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