Citizens and Paupers: Relief, Rights, and Race, from the Freedman’s Bureau to Workfare (review)

Why do some social welfare policies work while others don’t? More specifically, why do Americans accept the legitimacy of certain programs but not others? Conventional wisdom tells us those programs incorporating work requirements will work, those that do not will simply stigmatize recipients and doom those initiatives to failure. Citizens and Paupers demonstrates that this is at best a partial explanation.

The central thesis is that social welfare policies in the United States have been the sites for political struggles over the meaning of citizenship. Drawing heavily from Bourdieau’s culture of sociology, Goldberg focuses on what he identifies as classification struggles, principally whether one is labeled a dependent pauper or a rights-bearing citizen-worker when receiving the benefits of various social welfare policies. (If readers think of “deserving” and “undeserving” poor they will quickly grasp the longstanding distinction that this is tapping.) The book focuses on three major policy innovations; the Freedmen’s Bureau (1865–1872), the Works Progress Administration (1935–1942), and the expansion of workfare in the 1990s (particularly in New York City) and compares them to less well known reforms of the same eras; Civil War pensions, Old Age Insurance and the Earned Income Tax Credit. All six had work requirements. Relying on archival and secondary sources along with participant observation, Goldberg concludes that these secondary reforms were more successful; participants were more likely to retain the full benefits of citizenship and less likely to be stigmatized as undeserving, and the programs simply lasted longer.

While recognizing these initiatives were launched in very different times, there are important connections across these eras and initiatives, including the impact of earlier social welfare programs on their successors. Drawing from many theoretical traditions, Goldberg provides a dense but comprehensive discussion of the wide range of cultural and institutional forces (e.g., conservative and liberal political perspectives, the centrality of race and gender, the structure of policies themselves) that account for the contours and dynamics of social welfare policies in the United States.

Though each of the programs examined here had a work-related requirement, the legitimacy attached to beneficiaries. As Goldberg emphasizes, race has long been a central thread shaping the controversies surrounding these policies and helps explain their successes and failures.

The Civil War freed the slaves and the Freedmen’s Bureau was created to facilitate that transition, yet throughout its short history questions prevailed over precisely what rights of citizenship would be granted to the newly freed people. The classification struggle is reflected by those who viewed the recipients (virtually all of whom were black) through the same stigma as that attached to poor relief, while civil war pensioners (who were disproportionately white) were classified as worthy beneficiaries.

Similarly, WPA was not as readily accepted as Old Age Insurance in part because of the racial bias built into the latter’s efforts. The New Deal pension programs excluded agricultural and domestic workers who, of course, were disproportionately black. Both programs incorporated work requirements, but WPA (whose beneficiaries were more likely to be black) was more frequently stigmatized.

A similar dynamic played out with workfare and the EITC. Again both had built-in work requirements, but workfare was associated with welfare, and subsequently with race, in ways that the EITC was not.

While primarily a historical analysis of social welfare policies this book also addresses current critical domestic policy issues. But surprisingly, in a book that focuses so heavily on citizenship, there is virtually no discussion of immigration. And unfortunately, it offers little in the way of a policy agenda to address the issues it explores. Goldberg says, “My hope is that activists and academics alike will read this book.” But the substance and style are not likely to attract activists or many in the policy arena.

The book reads like the dissertation that it is based on. Many names, paradigms, theories and perspectives are mentioned...