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Citizens and Paupers

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Contents

Abbreviations...............................................................................................................xiAcknowledgments.............................................................................................................xiiiCHAPTER 1. Paupers or Citizens? Struggles over the Status and Rights of Welfare State Claimants............................1I. Claiming Rights as Citizen-Soldiers: Struggles during ReconstructionCHAPTER 2. "The 'pauper slavery' of the poorhouse": The Freedmen's Bureau, 1865-1872........................................31CHAPTER 3. An Honorable Alternative to Poor Relief: Civil War Veterans' Pensions, 1862-1890.................................76II. Claiming Rights as Citizen-Workers: Struggles during the New DealCHAPTER 4. "They are just 'reliefers' and have no rights": The Works Progress Administration, 1935-1942.....................105CHAPTER 5. "A different class from the ordinary relief case": Old Age Insurance, 1935-1949..................................153III. From Citizen-Mothers to Citizen-Workers: Struggles after the New DealCHAPTER 6. "Work with no rights and no pay equals slavery": Workfare in New York City, 1993-2001............................189CHAPTER 7. Respectable Aid for the Working Poor: The Earned Income Tax Credit, 1975-2001....................................241CHAPTER 8. Conclusion: Relief, Rights, and Race in the Development of the Welfare State.....................................269Notes.......................................................................................................................293Bibliography................................................................................................................331Index.......................................................................................................................359

Chapter One

Struggles over the Status and Rights of Welfare State Claimants

What happens in politics depends upon the way in which people are divided.-E. E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People: A Realist's View of Democracy in America

The stigma which clung to poor relief expressed the deep feelings of a people who understood that those who accepted relief must cross the road that separated the community of citizens from the outcast community of the destitute.... The stigma which attached to the Poor Law made 'pauper' a derogatory term defining a class.-T. H. Marshall, Class, Citizenship and Social Development

The central thesis of this book is that social welfare policies have been preeminent sites for political struggles over the meaning and boundaries of citizenship in the United States. These struggles are easier to grasp if we understand citizenship as an instrument of social closure through which people monopolize valuable material and symbolic goods while excluding others. As Brubaker (1992, chap. 1) has shown, the modern state distinguishes members from foreigners, conferring rights upon the former while excluding the latter. In the nineteenth century, for example, states restricted and regulated the immigration of the foreign poor in order to exclude them from national systems of poor relief (Brubaker 1992, 64-71; R. Smith 1997, 225-27). This form of social closure, which may be termed external, excludes noncitizens from rights and benefits that are available only to citizens. In addition, if citizenship is understood to be a gradational category rather than a status that one either wholly possesses or completely lacks, then citizenship may also be seen as a means of internal social closure, an "instrument of social stratification" in the words of T. H. Marshall ([1949] 1964, 110), which operates within the boundaries of the polity. This is readily apparent from the commonplace distinction between second-class and full citizenship. From this perspective, stripping a person of citizenship or barring her from acquiring it are the most extreme forms of civic exclusion-but they are not the only ones. People who are nominally citizens (i.e., members of the polity) but whose citizenship rights are circumscribed or curtailed also experience a form of civic exclusion: They are excluded from some (though generally not all) of the benefits associated with citizenship. Again, poor relief provides a case in point, for states not only barred the immigration of foreign paupers in the nineteenth century but also curtailed the citizenship rights of native-born or naturalized paupers. The internal social closure to which paupers were subjected may be better understood if, following Marshall ([1949] 1964, 71-72), we distinguish civil rights necessary for individual freedom, political rights to participate in the exercise of political power, and social rights to at least "a modicum of economic welfare and security." Although Marshall associated social rights with the twentieth-century welfare state, he did not claim that social rights were a creation of the welfare state. In fact, Marshall noted, social rights were established well before the modern welfare state, but they were "detached from the status of citizenship" (80). In other words, paupers forfeited their civil and political rights in exchange for relief. Traditional poor relief thus "treated the claims of the poor, not as an integral part of the rights of the citizen, but as an alternative to them-as claims which could be met only if the claimants ceased to be citizens in any true sense of the word" (80). Furthermore, "this divorce of social rights from the status of citizenship" (81) was a gendered phenomenon that extended beyond relief to the regulation of labor markets. Legislators and judges, Marshall observed, initially refused to apply protective labor laws "to the adult male-the citizen par excellence. And they did so out of respect for his status as a citizen, on the grounds that enforced protective measures curtailed the civil right to conclude a free contract of employment. Protection was confined to women and children, and champions of women's rights were quick to detect the implied insult. Women were protected because they were not citizens. If they wished to enjoy full and responsible citizenship, they must forgo protection" (81). Hence, in the nineteenth century, citizenship was equated with manly independence and liberty of contract, while relief and protective labor laws were defined as paternalistic and demasculinizing. In Marshall's view, the modern welfare state broke with this legacy, not by establishing social rights, but by incorporating social rights into the status of citizenship. This book builds on Marshall's insights, particularly his suggestion that civil and political rights could be and often were treated as an alternative to social rights rather than a foundation for them. At the same time, I challenge Marshall's claim that the twentieth-century welfare state broke definitively with traditional poor relief; I suggest that the transition from poor relief to the welfare state was instead quite a bit messier. As shown in the chapters that follow, major policy innovations in the United States that expanded state involvement in social provision often generated intense struggles over whether to model the new policy on or sharply distinguish it from traditional poor relief. What Heclo (1974, 317) observes...