A New Deal for the Alien

This chapter focuses on the Social Security Act and the disparate treatment of blacks, Mexicans, and European immigrants in the administration of Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Aid to Dependent Children, and Old Age Assistance. Though framed as legislation that would help the “average citizen,” scholars have shown that the Social Security Act in fact excluded the vast majority of blacks from the most generous social insurance programs, relegating them to meager, decentralized, and demeaning means-tested programs. European immigrants, by contrast, benefited from many of the provisions of the Social Security Act, and in at least some respects, they benefited more than even native-born whites. The net result of these policies was that blacks were disproportionately shunted into categorical assistance programs with low benefit levels, European immigrants were disproportionately covered under social insurance regardless of citizenship, and Mexicans were often shut out altogether.

American Federalism, Race and the Administration of Welfare

Recent studies of American federalism have emphasized the division of government functions between the national government and the states. But the effects of federalism depend not only on the balance of functional authority but also on the structure of federalist institutions. The institutional structure of Aid to Dependent Children, created by the Social Security Act of 1935, comprised a system of state operational control unhindered by federal supervision. The effect of this federal bargain was the exclusion of African-Americans from welfare benefits in the South. But the federal structure of the programme also shaped implementation in the North, where decentralization allowed its capture by urban machines, which used welfare as a political benefit. New techniques for ecological inference establish these results. Administrative institutions structured the entry of African-Americans into the American welfare state and created the conditions for the welfare ‘crisis’ of the 1960s and later.

The Stratification of Social Citizenship: Gender and Federalism in the Formation of Old Age Insurance and Aid to Dependent Children

Recently, scholars have shown that welfare state development, across nations, has often incorporated social groups in distinct ways that stratify and divide the citizenry.1 Citizenship has become stratified in terms of gender as policymakers have treated men and women differently in the policymaking process, perpetuating ascribed roles and institutionalizing gender inequality. The American welfare state that was fashioned in the New Deal has long been regarded as a “two-tiered” system that divided men and women as “social citizens,” incorporating them into distinct types of programs for economic security and welfare. How was such stratification of citizenship created in the course of the policymaking process? Some scholars have surmised that policymakers' ideas about gender were responsible for gendered outcomes; others have suggested that preexisting institutional arrangements foreordained the “two-tiered” results. Neither of these approaches, however, has offered an adequate explanation.