The American Dole: Unemployment Relief and the Welfare State in the Great Depression (review)

This small book, much more modest in scope than its title would imply, offers some thoughtful suggestions for the historical study of New Deal relief and welfare measures. Singleton's scope is the period from 1930 to 1935-from the beginning of the unemployment crisis to the stabilization of New Deal welfare policy with the passage of the Social Security Act and the establishment of the Works Progress Administration.

Singleton's most important finding is to show the extent of federal subsidy to local relief agencies before the New Deal began. "Welfare as we know it" was not an exclusively Democratic construct; rather, as he shows, transition to a federalized welfare system, however qualified and begrudging, began in the last year of President Hoover's administration. Singleton's second point is important as well. Federal, voluntary, and local relief efforts impinged reciprocally on each other through the early 1930s, resulting in many cases in improvements in levels of private charitable benefits and local systems of administration.

The book's treatment of the early New Deal relief agencies breaks much less new ground. Brock W. R. , Welfare, Democracy and the New Deal (Cambridge, 1988), and Schwartz Bonnie Fox , The Civil Works Administration (Princeton, 1984), go much deeper into the work of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and the Civil Works Administration than the sketches offered in this book. The politics of unemployment relief is more deeply probed in Sautter Udo , Three Cheers for the Unemployed: Government and Unemployment before the New Deal (Cambridge, 1991). Students of policy formation will find more theoretical and analytical grist in Weir Margaret , Politics and Jobs (Princeton, 1992), and Amenta Edwin , Bold Relief (Princeton, 1998). But Singleton does a useful service in reminding historians of the strength of the New Dealers' animosity toward the "dole," and how eager they were to see the end of emergency welfare as they had constructed it.

Particularly important is Singleton's note that the two-track welfare system did not begin with the passage of the Social Security Act and its second-class grants to mothers with dependent children. The sharp differentiation between status-carrying work-relief and unemployment insurance, on the one hand, and status-demeaning general relief, on the other, predated the construction of Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The recipients of dependent children's grants were slipped into its already established grooves of ambivalence and resentment.

First written as a doctoral dissertation in 1986, The American Dolehas been brought up to date in both its references and its relationship to current events. It concludes with brief, historically informed observations on the welfare reform act of 1996.