Katie Rader
 |
| (Heritage Art / Heritage Images / Getty Images) |
Na conferência SXSW de 2019, a representante Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, uma das figuras mais reconhecidas na política progressista contemporânea, sentou-se para uma entrevista com a então editora sênior do Intercept, Briahna Joy Gray. Em uma discussão abrangente entregue a um auditório lotado, Ocasio-Cortez se concentrou em estratégias e desafios para a política progressista contemporânea. Em algum lugar no meio da discussão, Gray perguntou a Ocasio-Cortez como ela achava que os políticos progressistas deveriam tentar construir apoio para programas amplos de bem-estar social, dada a "narrativa emergente de que esses tipos de programas universalistas no estilo New Deal não são para comunidades diversas".
De acordo com Gray, um grande desafio para os organizadores é comunicar a utilidade dos programas para aqueles que foram “insuficientemente atendidos por eles no passado”. Ocasio-Cortez respondeu que ela e seus aliados estavam conscientes da necessidade de evitar o tipo de “história revisionista” que levou muitos a “agir como se o New Deal não fosse racista”. Ocasio-Cortez ressaltou este ponto:
O New Deal foi uma política extremamente racista economicamente que traçou linhas vermelhas literais em torno das comunidades negras e pardas. Basicamente, ele investiu na América branca. O que ele fez foi permitir que os americanos brancos tivessem acesso a empréstimos imobiliários aos quais os americanos negros e pardos não tinham acesso, dando a eles a maior forma de riqueza intergeracional, que é o mercado imobiliário. Então isso realmente acelerou muitas partes de uma já horrível lacuna de riqueza racial que continua a persistir hoje. Então como podemos reverter isso?
Pressionando além de uma crítica ao universalismo insuficiente nas políticas de bem-estar federal, Ocasio-Cortez, em vez disso, apontou para um compromisso explícito e consciente de escrever racismo nas políticas de habitação na era do New Deal. Quando ela mudou a discussão para seu esforço político de assinatura, o Green New Deal, Ocasio-Cortez alegou que ela e seus aliados estavam buscando evitar o que ela via como as armadilhas do homônimo do programa. Sua caracterização do "New Deal racista" foi captada pela mídia conservadora especialmente, como o Daily Mail de direita e Sean Hannity da Fox News, que descreveu seus comentários como uma rejeição de Franklin D. Roosevelt e Ronald Reagan como racistas.
Como Gray reconheceu, essa “narrativa emergente” se tornou um refrão cada vez mais comum. Na política liberal e progressista e nos círculos intelectuais, até mesmo os proponentes de um estado de bem-estar social expansivo e universal como Gray e Ocasio-Cortez frequentemente sustentam que uma falha primária do estado do New Deal foi sua incapacidade de alcançar e beneficiar afro-americanos e outras minorias. No entanto, existem diferentes versões dessa narrativa. Alguns, como Gray, focam mais nos resultados ou efeitos das políticas do New Deal (que elas “serviram insuficientemente” aos afro-americanos). Em comentários recentes, o líder da minoria na Câmara, Hakeem Jeffries, seguiu a lógica e o ímpeto das declarações de Gray, destacando como o racismo sistêmico e as exclusões estruturais impediram que os afro-americanos se juntassem à “maior classe média da história”: “Os afro-americanos foram em grande parte esculpidos no New Deal. Então você teve a Depressão e uma resposta a ela, mas uma resposta a ela que se aplicava apenas a alguns americanos, não a todos os americanos em certos casos.”
Tanto Jeffries quanto Gray reconhecem a importância do New Deal em promover um conjunto transformador de políticas para a classe trabalhadora americana, ao mesmo tempo em que criticam as disparidades em benefícios e a exclusão de afro-americanos. Mas outros articulam uma versão diferente dessa narrativa, mais alinhada com as observações de Ocasio-Cortez. Essas narrativas enfatizam não apenas o impacto díspar dessas políticas, mas identificam uma intenção racista motivando os principais arquitetos e administradores do New Deal. Em seu livro amplamente aclamado The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein argumenta que o governo federal foi a mão orientadora por trás da segregação habitacional e da segregação de redlining em meados do século XX. A formulação de Rothstein se tornou comum na política liberal e progressista: o fracasso do governo federal em desafiar diretamente o sistema de segregação de Jim Crow durante o período do New Deal consolidou ainda mais o racismo institucional e exacerbou os efeitos da segregação e da discriminação.
Embora ambas as versões dessas narrativas tenham sido empregadas no discurso político progressista atual, elas podem ser rastreadas até debates que surgiram há mais de cinquenta anos. Um dos primeiros e mais proeminentes debates acadêmicos sobre a história do redlining remonta ao final da década de 1980, quando os acadêmicos buscaram explicar como os processos de suburbanização e desenvolvimento urbano resultaram em bairros racialmente segregados durante grande parte do século XX. Uma veia conectada de bolsa de estudos surgiu para explicar o legado racial do GI Bill e sua dispersão de moradia federal e benefícios educacionais para afro-americanos.
Outro grupo de acadêmicos se concentrou nos limites e contornos do estado de bem-estar social criado durante o New Deal, contrastando a versão dos EUA de provisão social e política trabalhista com outras nações industrializadas ocidentais no século XX e destacando as limitações para afro-americanos. Em todos esses trabalhos, a tensão entre intenção e efeito levou os acadêmicos a conclusões muito diferentes sobre os benefícios e limitações do estado do New Deal — e de políticas universalistas de forma mais ampla — convidando a um exame atento do contexto empírico, teórico e político em que esses debates ocorreram.
Um exame completo de cada um desses tratados de políticas e alegações relacionadas, mas distintas, sobre as limitações do estado do New Deal está além do escopo deste ensaio. Em vez disso, este ensaio explora o trabalho de cientistas políticos proeminentes que, começando no final da década de 1980, buscaram descrever os mecanismos pelos quais os negros americanos foram desproporcionalmente excluídos dos programas de bem-estar e regulamentações trabalhistas criados no período do New Deal. É importante ressaltar que esses relatos buscaram combater as representações de bem-estar das eras Reagan e Clinton, que individualizaram e racializaram sua provisão, ao mesmo tempo em que obscureceram as limitações estruturais de longa data embutidas no estado de bem-estar dos EUA em seu momento de origem. Com base em evidências empíricas semelhantes, uma vertente desta bolsa enfatiza a ideia de que o racismo explícito e as preferências raciais menos abertas, particularmente dos legisladores democratas do sul, foram os fatores centrais que limitaram a política do New Deal.
Os relatos de Jill Quadagno de 1988 e 1994 sobre o desenvolvimento do estado de bem-estar social introduzem esse argumento, que foi expandido por Robert Lieberman em 2002 e amplamente popularizado por Ira Katznelson em 2005 e 2013. Quadagno, Lieberman e Katznelson apontam para a influência singular dos legisladores do New Deal do Sul na formação dos contornos do New Deal, chamando a atenção para exemplos como a exclusão de trabalhadores agrícolas e domésticos do Social Security Act (SSA) e do National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Em suma, esses acadêmicos fornecem o relato empírico e causal que veio a sustentar as alegações de Ocasio-Cortez — que a intenção racista dos arquitetos e oponentes do estado do New Deal, em última análise, produziu programas que, por design, excluíam os afro-americanos.
No entanto, essa narrativa eclipsou um segundo conjunto de alegações de cientistas políticos como Michael Brown em seu livro de 1999 Race, Money, and the American Welfare State. Brown enfatiza que o estado de bem-estar criado pela política do New Deal produziu um "universalismo truncado" que estendeu alguns, mas não todos, os direitos sociais aos afro-americanos de maneiras que não eram apenas o resultado das preferências raciais dos formuladores de políticas. Em contraste com outros relatos, as evidências de Brown indicam que, especialmente na fase inicial da formulação de políticas do New Deal, os afro-americanos eram os beneficiários desproporcionais de programas de bem-estar mais amplos e de estilo universal. Para esse fim, Brown adverte que assumir que a exclusão racial era o "único problema que as famílias afro-americanas enfrentam corre o risco de simplificar demais o problema".
Em última análise, Brown conclui que o fracasso dos New Dealers em estabelecer uma provisão de bem-estar suficientemente ampla e abrangente foi a causa primária do estado de bem-estar racialmente bifurcado. Essas limitações, ele argumenta, não podem ser explicadas exclusivamente como o resultado de animosidade racial. O relato de Brown se alinha com os historiadores economistas Lee Alston e Joseph Ferrie, que argumentam que a oposição dos legisladores do Sul ao New Deal estava enraizada em sua resistência inicial a um estado de bem-estar social federalmente mandatado e administrado — e mais tarde às regulamentações trabalhistas federais — que ameaçavam o cerne do sistema econômico paternalista do Sul. Em suma, esses relatos tentam explicar a bifurcação racial e as desigualdades no estado de bem-estar social como efeitos das políticas do New Deal, mas eles descobrem que a intenção racial não era o cerne ou o principal impulsionador dessas decisões políticas. E, especialmente no relato de Brown, eles ressaltam que os programas mais universalistas também eram os mais inclusivos — um ponto político crítico para os debates de hoje.
Este ensaio reexamina as evidências empíricas e os argumentos apresentados nessas duas vertentes distintas de bolsa de estudos. Em particular, enfatizo que os acadêmicos desses campos interpretativos se baseiam em evidências históricas e empíricas semelhantes para chegar a conclusões distintas sobre as causas de um estado de bem-estar social desigual e bifurcado. É importante declarar desde o início que cada um dos autores foi e continua sendo um fervoroso defensor de um estado de bem-estar social expansivo e universalista. Em linha com essa visão, seu objetivo abrangente tem sido destacar os limites e as falhas do New Deal. No entanto, as explicações para o que levou a um estado de bem-estar social mais limitado e menos generoso tornaram, de certa forma, mais difícil construir apoio para políticas universalistas.
É indiscutível que os democratas do sul e muitos outros legisladores no início do século XX tinham fortes crenças supremacistas brancas e tinham interesses políticos e econômicos vinculados à manutenção de uma hierarquia racial na política; no entanto, não há evidências suficientes para a alegação de que o racismo e as preferências raciais dos democratas do sul foram o principal fator que levou os programas do New Deal a serem divididos de maneiras que excluíam estruturalmente os afro-americanos. Além disso, relatos que enquadram esses esforços como projetados exclusivamente para exclusão racial, amplamente distintos ou secundários ao conflito de classes em um regime capitalista, obscurecem a flecha causal. Na verdade, as evidências fornecidas nesses relatos oferecem uma explicação mais convincente: o racismo foi uma ferramenta importante usada para promover um conjunto de metas em mudança para os legisladores do sul. Embora no início do New Deal eles se opusessem ao seguro social nacional amplo, em ondas posteriores de formulação de políticas os democratas do sul mudaram seu foco para restringir as regulamentações trabalhistas nacionais. Ambos os conjuntos de programas invadiram e ameaçaram o sistema econômico paternalista do sul.
Em suma, este ensaio busca distinguir preferências raciais e um compromisso com a manutenção de uma hierarquia racial, claramente alinhada com o amplo apoio dos legisladores e administradores do Sul à segregação de Jim Crow, de suas ações e motivações para manter o controle sobre um sistema econômico e uma força de trabalho que incluía muitos trabalhadores negros. Manter a intenção racista como um mecanismo fixo que determinou uma série de políticas limita nossa compreensão das mudanças nas metas e estratégias do Sul ao longo do tempo. A alegação amorfa de que "raça importa para a política" — onde raça é imaginada como um fator político primordial — acabou turvando os conflitos políticos da formulação de políticas do New Deal, minando nossa capacidade de entender as principais barreiras a um estado de bem-estar abrangente e universalista na década de 1930.
Reformas da era Reagan e Clinton: primeiras caracterizações da raça e do estado de bem-estar social
Não é coincidência que relatos sobre as origens do estado de bem-estar social tenham surgido no final dos anos 1980 e 1990, quando programas de bem-estar social e políticas sociais se tornaram a fonte de divisões profundas e significativas na política americana. Os acadêmicos agora conectaram esse momento à fratura e ao colapso da ordem política do New Deal, após um período de governo do Partido Democrata e liberalismo político triunfante. No final dos anos 1980, em meio a narrativas sobre um aumento significativo na criminalidade (particularmente em cidades e centros urbanos) e após a ascensão de figuras como Richard Nixon e Ronald Reagan, muitos componentes do estado do New Deal foram criticados. Era conveniente e plausível para muitos culpar a agitação urbana e os tumultos raciais no partido que havia defendido a reforma dos direitos civis na década de 1960, criticando a ação afirmativa e os programas de bem-estar social.
Buscando desviar essa linha de ataque, acadêmicos no final da década de 1980 começaram a construir um relato historicamente mais preciso do desenvolvimento do estado de bem-estar social dos EUA. Em dezembro de 1991, em uma edição especial da Nation, Frances Fox Piven e Richard A. Cloward declararam a questão claramente: "A sabedoria política atual, mesmo entre alguns da esquerda, é que negros e liberais são os culpados pelo Partido Democrata". Piven e Cloward, assim como seus colegas colaboradores desta edição especial (incluindo Adolph Reed Jr, Julian Bond, Rogers Smith e James Forman Jr), tentaram reformular essa caracterização destacando as falhas estruturais da coalizão Democrata do New Deal, particularmente quando se tratava de raça. Seu objetivo era defender a ação afirmativa e criticar a abordagem do Partido Democrata à reforma do bem-estar social.
O mesmo teor e crítica motivam claramente dois dos primeiros argumentos acadêmicos nesse sentido: The Transformation of Old Age Security e The Color of Welfare, de Jill Quadagno. No volume anterior, Quadagno adota uma visão ampla do desenvolvimento do estado de bem-estar social, perguntando “por que o estado de bem-estar social americano se desenvolveu mais tarde e de forma menos abrangente do que seus equivalentes europeus”. Ela identifica três explicações principais: a força e o poder do setor privado, divisões significativas entre trabalhadores artesanais e de produção em massa, e o “dualismo” do desenvolvimento econômico americano no Norte e no Sul.
Quadagno’s focus on regional dualism in American political development in particular provides a comprehensive account of the features of the Southern plantation economy, which connects to her arguments about race, Southern lawmakers, and the welfare state. While the lines of class conflict in the Northern economy were drawn between capital and labor, the South’s “labor-intensive agrarian sector” formed a distinct mode of production, not feudal or capitalist but a “plantation mode of production” that was most “characteristic of the cotton-growing counties.” And, importantly, it was a mode of production that relied heavily on African American workers. The Southern agricultural sector sought to preserve control over the plantation mode of production, which it was able to do given the critical committee leadership of Southern Democrats in Congress, particularly in the House of Representatives, and in the Democratic Party.
Especially in the early phase of New Deal policymaking, Quadagno traces Southern lawmakers’ attempts to restrict the size and scope of federal social insurance programs, both by insisting that states be granted greater control over program administration and by arguing for a wide variety of exclusions. Yet Southern lawmakers were not alone in weakening insurance programs; Quadagno also argues that business was critical in pushing toward a contributory (not redistributive) social security framework, and that organized labor was too divided internally to provide an alternative. Ultimately, Quadagno contends that the resulting welfare state reflected fundamental class-based hierarchies. However, she also points to other elements of social stratification. Referring to relative access and benefits provided in old-age assistance and disability insurance, she emphasizes that “the quality of benefits varied, not only along lines of class but also by race and gender.”
But Quadagno’s conclusion is not that racial stratification in program benefits was an effect of class-based inequities; she argues that Southern lawmakers were motivated by concerns that broad, national legislation would “undermine planters’ paternalistic control over tenant labor, particularly black labor,” and that “southern congressmen had no intention of letting federal funds go directly to black workers.” In support of this claim, Quadagno points to what has become one of the most frequent examples of Southern lawmakers’ racial preferences being written into the law: the fact that agricultural and domestic workers were excluded from the SSA and the NLRA. As of 1935, she points out, “three-fifths of all black workers, most of whom resided in the South, were employed in agricultural or domestic service.”
However, disparate impact does not necessarily prove discriminatory intent. While it was true that the 3.5 million black workers who were excluded from the SSA constituted the majority of black workers, many of whom lived in the South, they did not constitute the overall majority of workers cut out of federal insurance programs. As Social Security historian Larry DeWitt has documented, these agricultural and domestic worker exclusions also prevented nearly twelve million white workers from benefiting from the old-age insurance program. Although Southern lawmakers employed the same kinds of local control arguments in marshaling opposition to federal attempts to roll back Jim Crow laws and later to resist implementation of desegregation following Brown v. Board of Education, their objectives in this case are not best understood through the lens of racial exclusion.
Instead, my own research has found much stronger support for a version of Quadagno’s dualism thesis. The division between the agricultural and industrial sector, however, transcended regional lines in important ways. In national policy debates over federal agricultural and labor regulation, a variety of representatives of the agricultural sector argued forcefully (and successfully) for agricultural workers to be excluded from industrial policy for fear of “dual administration” under differing policy domains. Policymakers, including some New Dealers, accepted this distinction and allowed agricultural workers to be segmented from the industrial workforce. Importantly, this delineation was not challenged by organized labor, which instead remained largely silent in this policy fight.
Broadening the lens beyond the Southern Democrats brings into sharper relief the reasons their policy proposals were ultimately accepted by other national politicians. As David Kennedy suggests, Roosevelt’s willingness to devolve authority to the states was rooted in “the constitutional doubts that overhung any federal initiative,” which “created a tightly confining matrix within which the Committee on Economic Security planners were compelled to work.” Roosevelt needed to narrowly tailor policies to avoid the constitutional challenges that had brought down the first wave of New Deal policies. Despite Quadagno’s attention to these dynamics elsewhere in the book, she does not provide the same context to help make sense of the agricultural and domestic workers’ exclusions.
Racial stratification and the racism of Southern lawmakers were not the primary focus of Quadagno’s 1988 volume. However, in The Color of Welfare, published in 1994, she moved away from her focus on class and the development of the welfare state, arguing instead that “means-tested programs of the American welfare state had less to do with maintaining class divisions than with maintaining racial segregation.” Quadagno’s shift in analytical framework was likely an effort to align with other Clinton-era welfare critiques. In the introduction, she acknowledges the significance of urban and social unrest in the 1990s, including the Rodney King riots, and criticizes President Clinton’s failure to reject Republican arguments linking the root of the unrest to “liberal social programs of the 1960s” that unfairly benefited racial minorities.
Instead, she argues, the triumphs of the Great Society and War on Poverty resulted from their use of social programs designed to promote equal opportunity for African Americans through community-action programs, job-training programs that forced skilled unions to integrate, and, most important, affirmative action policy. These social programs were not special favors but rather necessary corrections to a social welfare state established in the New Deal period that had created “impediments to racial equality.” The primary culprits, she argues, were not only Southern Democrats, who refused to “support any welfare programs that would place federal funds in the hands of black sharecroppers,” but also President Roosevelt and the New Dealers, who agreed to exclude African Americans from core Social Security programs in order to secure Southern support. While Southern Democrats were the architects, it was New Dealers’ acceptance of those exclusions that cemented them into law.
These assessments lead Quadagno to a broader critique of the civil rights legacies of the Northern Democrats and Roosevelt, beyond his capitulation in social welfare provision. Quadagno argues that, in an effort to “stabilize his unwieldy coalition of northern workers and white southerners,” Roosevelt refused central demands of civil rights activists at the time — namely, to support anti-lynching and anti-poll-tax legislation in Congress. Roosevelt’s refusal to support civil rights priorities in the 1930s and ’40s is frequently cited as evidence of the segmentation of racial and economic liberalism in this period of partisan history.
Eric Schickler has effectively documented how slow, state-level shifts led the Democratic Party to embrace national commitments that reflected principles of both racial and economic liberalism in the 1960s. However, Schickler’s own analysis also indicates that, regardless of Roosevelt’s civil rights policies, African Americans were more supportive of New Deal federal jobs and social welfare programs than white Americans, which supports the point that, despite its limitations, the New Deal was a transformative program for African Americans.
Further, recent scholarship has highlighted other important aspects of Roosevelt’s civil rights legacy. Kevin McMahon documents Roosevelt’s creation of the Civil Rights Section in the Department of Justice and his focus on and support for civil rights efforts in the federal judiciary. Sidney Milkis points to the importance of Roosevelt’s 1938 purge campaign — an electoral effort to push Southern Democrats out of office. While ultimately unsuccessful, the campaign shows that Roosevelt and Northern New Dealers were engaged in concerted efforts to rein in the power and influence of Southern Democrats. These accounts point to a more complicated and fraught relationship between Roosevelt and the Southern Democrats.
Despite these efforts to purge Southern Democrats, Quadagno describes Roosevelt as primarily capitulating to them. She argues that Roosevelt actively wove “racial inequality into his new welfare state,” again pointing to the exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers from old-age insurance and the lack of national standards for unemployment insurance. “These omissions were not random,” she notes. “Rather they reflected a compromise reached with southern Democrats over the structure of the welfare state.” Quadagno does not provide her own empirical evidence for these claims of exclusionary intent behind Southern Democratic demands and Roosevelt’s response. Instead, she references two other accounts of the development of the US welfare state: James Patterson’s America’s Struggle Against Poverty and Edward Berkowitz’s America’s Welfare State.
Yet neither of these accounts provide evidence that racial exclusion was the primary factor that led to the agricultural and domestic workers’ exclusions. Patterson argues that the failure to offer a comprehensive and national unemployment insurance program resulted from liberals’ inability to build support for the idea that, since “unemployment was a national structural problem, it should be funded by federal subsidies from general tax revenues.” Their second failure was not to secure the inclusion of the classes of workers most in need — “employees of small firms or to domestic and agricultural workers,” all of whom were excluded. Instead, unemployment mirrored private pension funds, which had been developed in the 1920s, and reflected an overall desire for economic efficiency over broad inclusion. Reflecting on the consequences, Patterson highlights that “women, blacks, and migrants suffered especially from this policy.”
Similarly, Berkowitz’s discussion of the exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers points to New Dealers’ and social insurance architects’ acceptance and adoption of the “popular prejudice” that farms and farmers functioned very differently than large industrial employers. In particular, planners accepted the idea that farmers “kept poor records of their payroll, and in many cases hired live-in help, which meant that part of the laborer’s income took the form of room and board.” Exclusion of these workers, then, was an effort to “start modestly” and prioritize “effective enforcement” of the plan.
Both Patterson and Berkowitz provide compelling evidence that the exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers was intentional, not random, and that it resulted in an uneven national social insurance system. The delineation between the industrial and farm economy certainly served the interests of the largely farm-based economy in the South. But these exclusions did not have exclusively Southern roots. For example, Mary Poole documents the influence of Wisconsin economists on members of Roosevelt’s Committee on Economic Security. Wisconsin’s system for unemployment insurance, which was established in 1932, served as a model for the federal architects of the SSA, and importantly the Wisconsin program excluded agricultural and domestic workers. Richard Rodems and H. Luke Shaefer document that agricultural workers were similarly excluded from welfare programs in other Western democracies.
Despite this being a broader tendency, Quadagno focuses on race as the primary and unchanging barrier to social welfare in the United States. Even after the political influence of the South faded, Quadagno claims, race continued to be “the defining feature of the American welfare state in the 1960s.” Yet it was during the 1950s that Congress amended the SSA to include agricultural and domestic workers in the programs. Quadagno’s failure to acknowledge this essential change significantly undercuts her argument, and it also elides the critical point that Southern Democrats’ resistance shifted significantly during the New Deal period. Economic historians Lee Alston and Joseph Ferrie argue that, at a certain point, Southerners no longer marshaled the same resistance to old-age benefits and other welfare programs. Instead, as later sections will discuss, Southern resistance was trained on labor policy.
Intenção racial versus efeito racial: narrativas causais concorrentes
To understand the shift in Quadagno’s causal arguments, it is useful to consider two subsequent accounts that sought to further document racial segmentation in the welfare state and, in so doing, opened two potential directions for subsequent scholarship. Robert Lieberman’s Shifting the Color Line and Michael K. Brown’s Race, Money, and the American Welfare State each explore New Deal welfare state development and its impact on African Americans. Although they draw on similar bodies of evidence, their distinct arguments lead to fundamentally different assessments of the New Deal. While both authors examine policy development and implementation, Lieberman’s emphasis on racial intent as a primary causal force in the design and implementation of New Deal programs runs against Brown’s narrative, which underscores that the racial effects of policies resulted from an array of influences. These distinct historical and empirical trajectories point toward different political conclusions.
In Shifting the Color Line, Lieberman, aligning closely with Quadagno, argues that “race inhibited the development of a strong, unitary, centralized welfare state in the United States.” Here Lieberman adopts a dialectical understanding of race, arguing not only that race stymied welfare state development but also that welfare state development in turn “helped reshape the politics of race and the place of racial minorities in American life,” fixing the position of African Americans in contemporary society.
Lieberman’s use of this dialectical frame to make sense of the politics of race provides a clear illustration of what sociologist Karen Fields and historian Barbara Fields have described as a tendency to describe a variety of identities, experiences, and social practices under the umbrella term “race.” In particular, using “race” as a shorthand produces a “weird causality,” conflating ideas about group characteristics and identities (race) with the social practices that act on and cement perceptions of those identities (racism). Ultimately, Lieberman’s account suffers from this causal confusion. While he points to specific actions of policymakers and administrators, he also claims that those same policies contain a set of “racially relevant, or race-laden, exclusions,” which does little to describe the cause or intention behind them.
Lieberman’s account begins with the construction of social insurance in the SSA of 1935. He argues, like Quadagno, that social insurance “sorted Americans by class, classifying their target populations by occupation and work status.” This class segmentation, he posits, also led to further sorting into racial categories, “in keeping with the prevailing racial norms of the 1930s and the institutional structure of American politics.” The result was a class-based and racially discriminatory welfare state by design. He examines the design and administration of three separate policies under the SSA: old-age insurance (OAI), Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), and unemployment insurance. Each of these policies followed a different trajectory of statutory and administrative excision and inclusion.
Overall, Lieberman identifies two primary strategies opponents used to make Social Security less inclusive: limit federal oversight and regulation and shift implementation to the state and local levels. His primary evidence for this claim is, once again, the exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers from both the SSA and the NLRA. Lieberman asserts that exclusion based on job category was an effective strategy for limiting the OAI program and points to its exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers, which disproportionately impacted black workers, particularly in the South.
However, for programs like ADC, where occupational categories were not the determining metric for public assistance, the result was quite different. Lieberman notes that “blacks were not systematically excluded as they were from social insurance benefits”; rather, it was the case that “blacks throughout the country were more likely than whites to be among [ADC’s] beneficiaries.” Importantly, Lieberman’s evidence indicates that African Americans disproportionately benefited from programs that were not means-tested around job categories. However, he goes on to argue that for programs like ADC, the “race-laden” administration still worked to limit the program’s impact on African Americans.
Lieberman’s evidence here seems to support the idea that programs that did not discriminate along class lines (either by means testing, directed exclusions, or program limitation) were ultimately more inclusive of African Americans. Where programs were “sorted by class,” they became narrower and more limited in ways that also, consequently, limited the welfare state along racial lines. Yet from this base of evidence, Lieberman’s conclusion that “race and class were mutually constitutive in the making and growth of the American welfare state” does not clearly align with his overall thesis that “race inhibited the development of a strong, unitary, centralized welfare state.” Instead, Lieberman’s primary evidence introduces some causal confusion into his account. At many points, Lieberman inverts his original claim that beneficiaries were sorted by occupation and class and posits instead that the primary point of sorting and excluding was to divide the population by race.
Lieberman’s discussion of the exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers from OAI is a clear example of this inversion. In trying to construct large, federally managed, and inclusive welfare programs like OAI, New Dealers faced opposition from Southern Democrats. The most pronounced debate over inclusivity, Lieberman reports, was over the “question of inclusion or exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers,” who were ultimately excluded from OAI. While these were occupational exclusions, he points to occupational data from the 1930s in order to demonstrate that those exclusions had “a racially imbalanced effect, and this effect was national, touching the North as well as the South.”
Lieberman’s claim is more guarded than that of Quadagno and other scholars. However, by foregrounding the racial implications of an exclusion based on occupation, he begins to invert the race-class ordering and the logic he claims to follow. He points toward the racially stratified consequences of this exclusion as evidence of racial motivations of the legislation’s architects and, perhaps more importantly, its opponents. While Lieberman acknowledges that those opponents, Southern members of Congress, were not “monolithically conservative,” he nevertheless contends that their racial preferences were the primary driver behind a racially circumscribed welfare state.
Michael Brown poses a direct challenge to Lieberman’s characterization of Southern lawmakers. While many of the most powerful Southern Democrats, like Senators Howard W. Smith and Harry F. Byrd, showed considerable support for the relief programs that would benefit the struggling Southern economy (the same programs that initially disproportionately benefited African Americans), these programs are noticeably absent from Lieberman’s account. Brown shows that Southern support for the New Deal’s early relief efforts began to wane when national efforts became focused on social insurance, which Southern lawmakers feared would increase taxes and remove local programmatic control by instituting nationalized benefits standards.
Alston and Ferrie provide further support for Brown’s critique of Lieberman, documenting the shift among Southern members who supported early relief measures and later opposed the expansive, federally managed programs in the SSA they believed would threatened their “paternalistic system of southern labor relations,” which was defined by low labor and supervision costs. Brown also argues that Lieberman overstates the stranglehold that the South had over Roosevelt, instead suggesting that Roosevelt held leverage but chose not to use it because of his preference for fiscally circumscribed policies and regressive taxation. Ultimately, Brown doesn’t contend that race and racism were irrelevant factors in the development of the American welfare state, but he cautions that the assumption that “racial exclusion” was the “sole problem confronting African-American families risks oversimplifying the problem.”
Like Quadagno, Brown also situates himself in the debates over 1990s welfare reform. “Had we created a more capacious and comprehensive welfare state,” Brown argues, “there would have been more racial equality within the welfare state, and racial hostilities would be less likely to serve as a channel for conflict over social policy.” In order to understand the racial dynamics undergirding the ’90s welfare debate, Brown claims, it is necessary to understand the initial construction of a less “capacious and comprehensive” US welfare policy during the New Deal era. He characterizes this as a poorly funded set of fragmented welfare programs that relied heavily on means-tested programs, private health insurance, and a “historically weak commitment to full employment.”
In short, racial stratification was an important effect of New Deal welfare provision but not its only limitation. While there were some exceptions, and some programs provided more universal and comprehensive benefits across the population, Brown argues that the “pattern of social provision” that emerged from the New Deal was a version of “truncated universalism.” He identifies two primary fetters on welfare state development: race and money. Despite building a political coalition around the promise of New Deal universalism, where class identity “overwhelmed ethnic and racial status,” the welfare state “concealed a racial bifurcation” in its new policies and programs.
Brown’s analysis begins in 1933, in the earliest phase of New Deal policymaking, a period that Quadagno and Lieberman both pass over, which was characterized primarily by massive relief payments aimed at lessening the extreme consequences wrought by the Great Depression. These relief payments targeted those most impacted by the economic downturn, which meant they disproportionately benefited African Americans, who were overrepresented in the lowest rungs of the economy. During the second major wave of New Deal policy development, which included the SSA of 1935 (the origin of many welfare state programs), Brown’s evidence shows that while many African Americans were excluded from old-age and unemployment insurance through “statutory occupational exclusions,” they were, once again, disproportionate beneficiaries of some means-tested programs.
However, he also demonstrates that despite being major beneficiaries of these early programs, African Americans’ overrepresentation in relief and means-tested programs produced a negative backlash and stigmatization of black Americans as overly reliant on the welfare system. For example, when he compares the transfer processes for individuals receiving different forms of government assistance, he finds that while African Americans were disproportionate beneficiaries of relief, they were transferred from relief programs to other benefits programs, like those within the Works Progress Administration, at much lower rates than their white counterparts. Here Brown provides a clear basis to connect 1930s welfare development to the political realities of the 1990s. Yet as Brown’s careful and thorough documentation of the effects of social policy was taken up by Ira Katznelson, as the next section will show, key arguments and evidence were mischaracterized, and important distinctions between the accounts of Brown, Lieberman, and Quadagno were lost.
“O trabalho tornou-se raça”: concepções populares do New Deal
Ira Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action Was White, published in 2005, has become one of the most popular interventions and commonly cited books in these debates. Its primary goals are to examine the ties between social and racial policy and to underscore the influence of Southern Democrats — “guardians of racial segregation” — on Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. Katznelson admits that his use of “untold” is polemical, particularly since he sought to draw together various strands of existing scholarship that, in his opinion, had “not been brought together sufficiently.”
His conclusion, as suggested by his provocative title, is that the New Deal was profoundly influential in building the American middle class, but that those public policies were “crafted and administered in a deeply discriminatory manner,” leaving African Americans out of the nation’s first affirmative action programs. In contrast to the works of Brown and Quadagno, neither the preface nor the introductory chapter of When Affirmative Action Was White provide any sort of link to Clinton-era welfare debates. The political stakes Katznelson underscores is the failure to live up to the goals Lyndon B. Johnson elaborated in his June 1965 address, “To Fulfill These Rights,” a challenge that, according to Katznelson, grew out of the New Deal period and persists to this day.
This shift in political target is significant, as Katznelson does not directly intervene in the same scholarly debates over welfare state development that Brown and Quadagno engage. And while he follows much of the logic and impetus of Lieberman’s focus on racial intent, Katznelson is also less focused on program administration and the broader structural impact of the welfare state. He is instead more attentive to the legislative origins of social policies and programs, placing particular emphasis on identifying the actors who actually pulled the strings of exclusion. He claims that, while they never admitted it, Roosevelt and Truman’s efforts to create universal programs were cut off at the knees by the Southern Democrats’ stranglehold on Congress and national politics. However, where Quadagno, Lieberman, and Brown were more cautious about assigning blatantly racist motivations as the key or sole factor driving policy design and implementation, Katznelson claims that the SSA, NLRA, and GI Bill were explicitly “crafted in a discriminatory manner,” constituting the core of America’s first affirmative action project: building the white middle class.
Following Quadagno and Lieberman’s cues, Katznelson also fixes the blame on Southern Democrats in Congress, who were allowed to “dictate the contours of Social Security” by insisting that these laws be “tailored to meet their preferences, most notably their desire to protect Jim Crow.” However, despite these bold and provocative claims, Katznelson lacks clear and concrete evidence of racist intent driving Southern opposition to labor regulations, instead providing interpretations of congressional debates that point toward a different set of goals.
Katznelson foregrounds three core mechanisms in his account: the inclusion of race-laden provisions in New Deal policies, the failure to include antidiscrimination proposals, and the uneven administration of the resulting policies. He moves through the early, middle, and late New Deal periods, drawing together the work of other scholars and adding some novel analysis. For example, his discussions of the early New Deal reconstruct Brown’s assessment of relief distribution (under the Federal Emergency Relief Act, or FERA) and his consideration of the middle period draw heavily on Lieberman’s commentary on the SSA provision. Katznelson’s own analysis, in this book and in other work published in the same period, focuses on labor policy, primarily the 1935 NLRA and the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).
Strikingly, in several places, Katznelson uses Brown’s evidence to construct completely contradictory conclusions. For example, Katznelson does not acknowledge that FERA beneficiaries were disproportionately African American, a crucial empirical and analytical point for Brown. Brown argues that FERA was “potentially the foundation for a centralized welfare state” and provoked consistent tension and conflict between Harry Hopkins, the federal administrator, and state administrators, whose relations were “frayed and hostile.” Brown acknowledges that there were limits to efforts to maintain federal standards: Hopkins and his chief deputy “had to tailor their relief policies to accommodate the demands of southern plantation owners for cheap farm labor by curtailing relief payments to agricultural laborers and sharecroppers.” However, Brown claims that this was the exception to an overall “radically centralized” program that was best characterized by sharp conflict between federal and Southern administrators in providing relief payments that disproportionately went to black Americans.
Katznelson quotes this exact passage from Brown in his own discussion of FERA, arguing that “neither the size of benefits nor the pattern of [FERA] distribution was standardized” and painting Hopkins and his deputy’s tailoring to Southern plantation owners as the rule, not the exception. Katznelson omits Brown’s point that the program was “radically centralized,” instead framing FERA as being, on the whole, decentralized and shaped to Southern demands. While he draws on Brown’s evidence, Katznelson does not acknowledge the difference in their conclusions.
Beyond this, the new evidence Katznelson supplies emphasizes disparate outcomes but without careful consideration of the political economic context. For example, Katznelson argues that local discretion allowed for lower relief rates for black people as opposed to white people in ten Southern states, including some counties in the state of Georgia that excluded black Americans altogether from their relief rolls. In addition, he draws heavily on Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma as well as Richard Sterner’s The Negro’s Share. (Sterner was a lesser-known Swedish researcher who was part of Myrdal’s research team.)
Katznelson relies on Myrdal and Sterner’s evidence to paint a picture of racial differences and “unequal patterns.” Katznelson’s use of the Swedish researchers points to what Adolph Reed Jr and others argue has become a standard trope in race relations research starting in the mid-twentieth century. Myrdal and his Swedish research team are frequently cited in this body of research, which also emerged during the Clinton era, that emphasizes disparate impacts and outcomes while eclipsing consideration of broader structural and economic forces. Reed has emphasized that these studies are characterized by a “naïve, often evasive pursuit of a notion of scientific objectivity that eschews political discussion of the sources of inequality.”
Katznelson is more faithful to Lieberman’s evidence and argument in his characterization of the second wave of New Deal policymaking, particularly on the creation and implementation of the SSA. He posits that the social welfare policies included in the SSA were overall less generous to African Americans, since social insurance programs distributed benefits based on income level and African Americans were in the bottom rungs of employment. Second, he also nods to the exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers in place until 1954, when Republicans gained control of Congress and eliminated the exclusion.
Katznelson’s argument here is somewhat perplexing: he asserts that it was increasingly conservative Republican control of Congress that finally loosened the Southern Democrats’ stranglehold control over the lawmaking process. Are we to understand, then, that it was Republican lawmakers who came to the aid of the disproportionately black agricultural and domestic workforce? This conclusion seems out of step with the political inclinations of Katznelson’s work and particularly discordant with the well-documented partisan realignment that took place in these decades, which ultimately led conservative Southern Democrats to merge with Republicans.
Along those lines, Katznelson’s most significant empirical contributions in the book can be found in his discussion of New Deal labor policy, which has been less thoroughly examined than the welfare state provisions but is deeply connected to them. Here Katznelson again argues that Southern Democrats “traded votes” of support for New Deal labor legislation in exchange for the exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers. These groups of workers were included in Senator Robert Wagner’s original draft legislation, but in another version of the bill put forward by six senators, three of whom were Southern Democrats, agricultural and domestic workers were explicitly omitted from the bill’s definition of “employee.” That these exclusions were intentional and deliberate is clear. However, Katznelson fails to present compelling evidence that the primary intention was racial exclusion. On the contrary, he acknowledges that “there was no debate on the Senate floor that explains the motives or purposes behind the exemptions.”
While it is true that the racial motives of policymakers are not made plain in these debates, my research identifies two other motivating factors. The agricultural industry, which had significant interest and impact on the debates over the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) and the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), argued that these two frameworks would result in double oversight for the agricultural industry, making it needlessly subject to two sets of regulations. To avoid this issue of “dual administration,” they argued that they should be subject only to regulation under the AAA. Southern and Northern lawmakers’ acceptance of this argument meant that the agricultural industry was able to evade federal labor regulations, which were part of the NIRA framework but not the AAA one (a fact that members of the agricultural industry explicitly acknowledged in their congressional testimony). In sum, there is evidence as to the motivations and interests of those who sought to exclude their sector from being subject to labor regulations; however, that motivation was not primarily racial exclusion in these early debates.
Katznelson makes a more concerted effort to document the racial motivations in debates over the second wave of New Deal labor policy but fails to present clear evidence for his claims. He argues that votes on labor legislation had become a vehicle to protect Southern racism and that opposition to labor bills was rooted in a narrowly construed fear that stronger unions would increase civil rights protest. Rather than acknowledging the fact that stronger unions might transform the economic system and power structures more broadly, he concludes that, for Southern Democrats, “labor had become race.”
He expands these arguments in a 2005 article published with Sean Farhang in Studies in American Political Development that examines the shifting positions of Southern Democrats on labor proposals over three distinct periods of New Deal policymaking. In the piece, Farhang and Katznelson provide a clearer description of the process through which “labor had become race,” yet their evidence fails to provide a compelling foundation for that claim. First, they argue that the only reason Southern Democrats signed on to prewar labor legislation like the NLRA was because it included carve-outs for agricultural and domestic workers. But beyond the fact that those occupational groups were excluded, the authors include very little evidence that this was in fact the bargain.
Furthermore, their account of the exclusion of those occupational groups indicates that Southern lawmakers, serving as champions for the agricultural industry, primarily sought to keep any and all labor regulations out of agricultural production. They do not link this objective in a direct or indirect way to racism or racial motivations, beyond the fact that the agricultural sector included many black workers. Considering the earlier resistance to federal labor regulations in the NIRA and AAA, the more plausible conclusion from these debates is that the agricultural industry had a vested interest in curtailing labor organizing in the South (as well as in other parts of the country) and that Southern lawmakers readily acted upon this concern.
Farhang and Katznelson point to more explicit discussion of the racial motivations of members of Congress when they move into a discussion of the FLSA, which they argue was a pivotal moment when the Democratic coalition in Congress fractured. They claim that similar exclusions in the FLSA were intended to avoid setting a “floor on wages,” which would have required employers to increase wages in the lowest-paid industries and address the “wide wage disparities between African American and white wage workers.” This suggests, and their evidence supports, that there was rhetoric around the wage differentials between white and black workers deployed in conservative and Southern Democrats’ assault on the FLSA. However, Farhang and Katznelson do not draw a clear connection between those debates and the overall “fear of civil rights organizing” they claim drove opposition to the FLSA. On the contrary, the passages they reference reveal an enduring interest in reducing, avoiding, and eliminating federal labor standards.
This evidence indicates a more compelling and coherent explanation: Southern opposition grew as federal standards and regulation expanded, a conclusion that is clearly supported by Brown, Alston, and Ferrie. Employers’ desire for greater regional and local control over their labor markets was no doubt in part fueled by an interest in maintaining racial wage differentials in addition to a whole host of factors allowing employers and industry to depress wages and control workers. The fact that this hostility toward labor standards continued to grow over the next decade, which the authors clearly document, even as lawmakers removed Social Security exclusions for agricultural and domestic workers in the 1950s, seems to suggest that Southern lawmakers’ preferences and resistance to federal intervention had once again shifted target.
Conclusão
Em suma, partindo de um gênero de literatura de desenvolvimento do estado de bem-estar social que visava descobrir os limites da marca de universalismo do New Deal, When Affirmative Action Was White, de Katznelson, popularizou uma versão do desenvolvimento político do New Deal que contornou a consideração crítica do contexto político econômico. Ele ofereceu um relato mais redutor das motivações dos formuladores de políticas e administradores federais e regionais para ilustrar que a segregação e a discriminação raciais não apenas permaneceram intactas após várias ondas de formulação de políticas do New Deal, mas também foram o principal motivador para os arquitetos dessas leis.
Em 2013, Katznelson publicou o acompanhamento Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time. Com base nos mesmos argumentos e evidências de seu trabalho anterior, ele apresenta a ideia provocativa e concisa de que os democratas do sul formaram uma "gaiola do sul" que lhes permitiu restringir a formulação de políticas no interesse de manter o sistema racial do sul. Apesar da popularidade de When Affirmative Action Was White, Katznelson também afirma que esse medo e deferência à estrutura racial do Sul continua a ser "o tema mais negligenciado em quase todas as histórias anteriores do New Deal". No entanto, como Dylan Riley observa em sua análise de Fear Itself, Katznelson novamente falha em fornecer evidências convincentes de que foi a preferência racial que impulsionou a crescente oposição ao New Deal no Sul. Riley contrapõe que o controle trabalhista, que serviu para manter o controle sobre os trabalhadores negros, é uma explicação mais historicamente fundamentada para o comportamento dos legisladores do Sul.
Apesar dessas questões empíricas e analíticas, o relato de Katznelson, que se baseia e reinterpreta conclusões mais cuidadosas apresentadas por Lieberman, Brown e Quadagno, tornou-se a representação mais popular do legado racial dos programas do New Deal. Retornando ao exemplo da Representante Ocasio-Cortez e Briahna Joy Gray, as ligações entre seus argumentos e a análise de Katznelson são abundantemente claras, particularmente no foco na ascensão da classe média e na ênfase na intenção racial e no racismo que sustentam os programas do New Deal. O crescimento dessas ideias serviu, em última análise, para obscurecer o legado do New Deal e limitar nossa compreensão do desenvolvimento de um dos episódios mais importantes no desenvolvimento político americano. Ao atribuir a restrição da provisão de bem-estar social e do desenvolvimento da lei trabalhista às motivações raciais dos democratas do sul, a análise de Katznelson oferece suporte retórico à caracterização de que o New Deal foi racista. Essa linha de argumentação se baseia em bases empíricas relativamente fracas, tornando suas alegações teóricas suspeitas.
Este ensaio não é um convite para que os progressistas celebrem acriticamente o estado do New Deal e ignorem suas limitações significativas. Em vez disso, é um convite para sermos concretos e específicos nas conclusões que tiramos sobre suas limitações e claros sobre como elas informam a política progressista. Uma maneira de fazer isso é reconhecer que, enquanto muitos dos programas que compõem o estado de bem-estar do New Deal aderiram e recriaram demarcações sociais racistas, onde o New Deal teve sucesso em construir programas mais amplos e universais, esses programas beneficiaram desproporcionalmente os afro-americanos.
A troca entre Gray e Ocasio-Cortez deixa claro que a ênfase na motivação racial se infiltrou no discurso contemporâneo de maneiras que, em última análise, representam um desafio aos esforços para construir amplo apoio para um estado de bem-estar mais robusto, confundindo efeitos desiguais com uma intenção racista ou discriminatória. Tais alegações levam a tentativas confusas de apelar à ampla popularidade do New Deal, ao mesmo tempo em que condenam o racismo inerente ao programa. E, mais criticamente, essas alegações não fazem nada para promover os objetivos daqueles que tentam fazer um estado de bem-estar social mais generoso, sugerindo, em vez disso, uma certa futilidade nos esforços para construir um conjunto mais robusto de instituições social-democratas voltadas para o avanço do bem comum — um argumento que a direita avidamente (e facilmente) capitalizou.
1Intercept editors, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the New Left,” Intercept, March 9, 2019.
2 Emily Goodin, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez uses her SXSW talk to label FDR’s New Deal ‘racist’ compared to her ‘Green New Deal’ and protests minorities being treated like ‘garbage’ — as she draws a bigger audience than any Democrat 2020 hopeful,” Daily Mail, March 9, 2019; Sean Hannity, “Sean Hannity: Don’t believe Pelosi — she’s House Speaker in name only. Ocasio-Cortez is Dems’ real leader,” Fox News, March 12, 2019.
3 Paloma Losada, “Addressing structural racism in public policy with Rep. Hakeem Jeffries,” Brookings Institution, February 24, 2020.
4 Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright, 2017).
5 Some scholars have attended to the particular architects of these programs. As mentioned above, Richard Rothstein focuses on the role of federal administrators and the federal government in creating and maintaining racist redline policies. In a more recent response, Gene Slater shifts the focus to actions outside the federal government, focusing on the role of realtors and the real estate market. See Gene Slater, Freedom to Discriminate: How Realtors Conspired to Segregate Housing and Divide America (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2021); Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Thomas W. Hanchett, Sorting Out the New South City: Race, Class, and Urban Development in Charlotte, 1875–1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
6 For a thorough debate and discussion, see Ira Katznelson and Suzanne Mettler, “On Race and Policy History: A Dialogue about the G.I. Bill,” Perspectives on Politics 6, no. 3 (2008).
7 Michael K. Brown, Race, Money, and the American Welfare State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Jill Quadagno, The Transformation of Old Age Security: Class and Politics in the American Welfare State (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Liveright, 2005); Sean Farhang and Ira Katznelson, “The Southern Imposition: Congress and Labor in the New Deal and Fair Deal,” Studies in American Political Development 19, no. 1 (2005); Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2013).
8 Robert C. Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Quadagno, Transformation of Old Age Security; Quadagno, Color of Welfare; Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White; Katznelson, Fear Itself.
9 Brown, Race, Money, and the American Welfare State, 9.
10 Lee J. Alston and Joseph P. Ferrie, “Labor Costs, Paternalism, and Loyalty in Southern Agriculture: A Constraint on the Growth of the Welfare State,” Journal of Economic History 45, no. 1 (1985): 98–100.
11 Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, “Race and the Democrats,” Nation, December 9, 1991, 737.
Quadagno, Transformation of Old Age Security, x.
Quadagno, Transformation of Old Age Security, x and 15.
Quadagno, Transformation of Old Age Security, 15.
Quadagno, Transformation of Old Age Security, 17.
Quadagno, Transformation of Old Age Security, 113–14.
Quadagno, Transformation of Old Age Security, 2.
Quadagno, Transformation of Old Age Security, 115–16.
Larry DeWitt, “The Decision to Exclude Agricultural and Domestic Workers from the 1935 Social Security Act,” Social Security Bulletin 70, no. 4 (2010).
Katherine Rader, “Delineating Agriculture and Industry: Reexamining the Exclusion of Agricultural Workers from the New Deal,” Studies in American Political Development 37, no. 2 (2023).
David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 264.
Quadagno, Color of Welfare, 9.
In 1992, an all-white jury in Los Angeles acquitted four white police officers who had beat a black man, Rodney King, in an incident that had been captured on film. The announcement set off mass protests and riots that lasted for six days. See Quadagno, Color of Welfare, 3.
Quadagno, Color of Welfare, v.
Eric Schickler, Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932–1965 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).
See figure 6.2 in Schickler, Racial Realignment, 140; Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Kevin J. McMahon, Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race: How the Presidency Paved the Road to Brown (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 12, 144–150.
Sidney M. Milkis, “Franklin Roosevelt, the ‘Third New Deal,’ and the transformation of partisanship,” Social Science Quarterly (December 25, 2023): 6.
Quadagno, The Color of Welfare, 20.
James T. Patterson, America’s Struggle Against Poverty, 1900–1980, 1st ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Edward D. Berkowitz, America’s Welfare State: From Roosevelt to Reagan, 1st ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).
Patterson, America’s Struggle Against Poverty, 72–75.
Patterson, America’s Struggle Against Poverty, 72.
Berkowitz, America’s Welfare State, 25.
Mary Poole, The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
Richard Rodems and H. Luke Shaefer, “Left Out: Policy Diffusion and the Exclusion of Black Workers from Unemployment Insurance,” Social Science History 40, no. 3 (2016).
Quadagno, Color of Welfare, 4.
Lee J. Alston and Joseph P. Ferrie, Southern Paternalism and the American Welfare State: Economics, Politics, and Institutions in the South, 1865–1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 74; William Nelson, “Employment Covered Under the Social Security Program, 1935–84,” Social Security Bulletin 48, no. 4 (1985): 34–35.
Karen Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (New York: Verso Books, 2012), 16–18.
Robert C. Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State, 6–7.
Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line, 6.
Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line, 37–38.
Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line, 39–40.
Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line, 48.
Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line, 26, 6–7.
Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line, 39.
Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line, 43.
Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line, 37.
Brown, Race, Money, and the American Welfare State, 46 fn 38.
Alston and Ferrie, “Labor Costs, Paternalism, and Loyalty”; Alston and Ferrie, Southern Paternalism and the American Welfare State.
Brown, Race, Money, and the American Welfare State, 33.
Brown, Race, Money, and the American Welfare State, 9.
Brown, Race, Money, and the American Welfare State, xiv.
Brown, Race, Money, and the American Welfare State, 2.
Brown, Race, Money, and the American Welfare State, 5.
Brown, Race, Money, and the American Welfare State, 63.
Brown, Race, Money, and the American Welfare State, 5.
Brown, Race, Money, and the American Welfare State, 84–88.
Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White, x.
Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White, xiv. He lists the primary scholarly accounts he seeks to weave together: Robert Lieberman, Jill Quadagno, Michael Brown, Suzanne Mettler, Neil Foley, Lizabeth Cohen, Daniel Kryder, Desmond King, Nancy Weiss, and William Julius Wilson.
Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White, 17.
Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White, preface.
Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White, 17, 19.
Brown, Race, Money, and the American Welfare State, 36–37, 42.
Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White, 37.
Adolph Reed Jr, “America Becoming — What Exactly? Social Policy Research as the Fruit of Bill Clinton’s Race Initiative,” New Politics 8, no. 4 (Winter 2002), 2.
Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White, 42–50.
Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White, 55–56.
Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White, 57.
Rader, “Delineating Agriculture and Industry.”
Katznelson, 68, 79.
Farhang and Katznelson, “The Southern Imposition,” 6, 15.
Farhang and Katznelson, “The Southern Imposition,” 12.
Farhang and Katznelson, “The Southern Imposition,” 13–14.
Katznelson, Fear Itself, 9, 24–25, 15, 34.
Dylan Riley, “Southern Questions,” New Left Review 85 (2014): 156.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário