| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Welfare Politics in Boston, 1910–1940. By Susan Traverso. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003. xviii, 164 pp. $34.95, ISBN 1-55849-378-6.)

This study of public welfare policy indicates the importance of place. As Susan Traverso points out, local political context helped to shape the scope of social welfare spending and practice in the first third of the twentieth century. In Boston, ethnic rivalry between the Irish and the Yankees, with its overtones of Catholics battling with Protestants, mattered, even after the introduction of national social welfare programs during the New Deal. The Protestant view of social welfare meshed with the professional view that emphasized the good government principles of efficiency and the supervision of social workers in the distribution of social benefits. The Catholic view of social welfare emphasized the broad distribution of benefits and the need to guard against a view of Catholicism as an undesirable trait in welfare beneficiaries. In these regards, Traverso provides valuable additions to the literature on public welfare and reinforces the trend, present in the work of Dorothy Brown and Elizabeth McKeown, to bring Catholics back into the story of public welfare policy.

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