Citizens and Paupers: Relief, Rights, and Race, from the Freedmen's Bureau to Workfare

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University of Chicago Press, 2007 - 366 pages
There was a time when America’s poor faced a stark choice between access to social welfare and full civil rights—a predicament that forced them to forfeit their citizenship in exchange for economic relief. Over time, however, our welfare system improved dramatically. But as Chad Alan Goldberg here demonstrates, its legacy of disenfranchisement persisted. Indeed, from Reconstruction onward, welfare policies have remained a flashpoint for recurring struggles over the boundaries of citizenship.

Citizens and Paupers explores this contentious history by analyzing and comparing three major programs: the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Works Progress Administration, and the present-day system of workfare that arose in the 1990s. Each of these overhauls of the welfare state created new groups of clients, new policies for aiding them, and new disputes over citizenship—conflicts that were entangled in racial politics and of urgent concern for social activists.

This combustible mix of racial tension and social reform continues to influence how we think about welfare, and Citizens and Paupers is an invaluable analysis of the roots of the debate.
 

Contents

CHAPTER 1 Paupers or Citizens? Struggles over the Status and Rights of Welfare State Claimants
1
Struggles during Reconstruction
29
Struggles during the New Deal
103
Struggles after the New Deal
187
Notes
293
Bibliography
331
Index
359
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About the author (2007)

Chad Alan Goldberg is professor of sociology and affiliated with the Center for German and European Studies, the George L. Mosse/Laurence A. Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies, and the George L. Mosse Program in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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