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

In an ambitious and meticulously researched work, Cybelle Fox takes on the sizeable historiography of the development of the American welfare state and argues that scholars of relief have relied too heavily on a Black-white framework that cannot be meaningfully applied to European and Mexican immigrants. Fox argues that African Americans, Mexicans, and Europeans inhabited “three worlds” with distinct patterns of race relations, labour relations, and political engagement. The differing positions of each group in America’s racial hierarchy led social workers and politicians to view African Americans and Mexicans as much more likely to become dependent on relief than were European immigrants. Fox painstakingly traces national, regional, and local patterns in relief distribution and highlights the disparities between the highly developed relief systems in the Northeast and Midwest and the much more rudimentary systems in the South. White immigrants in northern cities had access to a much wider range of programs and services than Black or Mexican labourers in the South and Southwest. Part of this was due to the differences between urban and rural labour patterns: Southern landlords and growers reliant on tenant or migrant labourers opposed state aid to their work-force, wanting to ensure the dependence of their workforce even in the off season. Yet Fox demonstrates that even in cities in the South, less was spent on relief and private, rather than public, funds were used in the years prior to the Depression. (61)

Popular notions about the relative merits of Europeans, African Americans and Mexicans shaped the access of each group to relief. Social workers and government officials, believing stereotypes about white Europeans as hardworking and assimilable, used data selectively to “prove” that immigrants were not likely to become dependent on relief. (121) Some even lobbied against harsh immigration and deportation laws that they felt unfairly targeted European immigrants. Yet at the same moment that these officials were protecting Europeans from public disapproval, others reinforced notions of Mexicans as shifty and culturally alien. In Southern California, deportation seemed the most appropriate way to deal with the Mexican “dependency problem” discussed by officials and in the popular press. Even when studies seemed to suggest that Mexican and Black men and women were not more likely than whites to become dependent on relief, racist attitudes trumped data. For example, Fox shows how white officials contorted themselves to explain why “thriftless, lazy, unreliable, sexually amoral and intellectually inferior.” (119) African Americans were the group actually least likely to receive relief. Racist social workers argued that the Blacks had naturally lower standards of living, thus masking the extent of their “true pauperism.” (120)

Fox argues that political context made a crucial difference in determining access to aid. The systematic disenfranchisement of African Americans in the South had profound effects on Black eligibility for relief. White southerners controlled the ballot boxes and the relief rolls, lowering levels of Black participation and levels of social spending. In contrast, European immigrants became participants in the political machines of northern cities. While still subject to some discrimination, they had access to programs and services on a much greater scale. Fox argues, “at a time when white Americans in the South were working to achieve the wholesale exclusion of Blacks from American political and civic life, many of their counterparts in the North were virtually pushing and dragging European immigrants to jump into the American melting pot.” (39) After the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the federal government took some steps to nationalize relief policies, but important regional variations persisted. African Americans and Mexicans did gain greater access to relief during the New Deal, but officials continued to view them as less worthy of assistance than native-born whites or European immigrants. (213)

Three Worlds of Relief is, by design, a national synthesis which traces wide-ranging contours in the distribution of relief. Fox does pay...