Book Review

Canada and the United States

Michael K. Brown. Race, Money, and the American Welfare State. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1999. Pp. xxii, 381. Cloth $55.00, paper $22.50.

Political scientists Robert C. Lieberman and Michael K. Brown agree that race penetrates the deepest roots of America's welfare state. While Lieberman finds in the history of Social Security the path through which the welfare state can leave behind its racially biased origins, Brown's emphasis on the limits imposed by the enduring influence of race and money gives no grounds for optimism.	1
Lieberman focuses tightly on the history of three programs—Old Age Insurance (Social Security), Aid to Dependent Children, and Unemployment Insurance—to show the impact of institutional structures and "policy feedbacks" on African Americans. Brown ranges more widely, brilliantly integrating the welfare state into the history of American federal politics since the 1930s. Lieberman combines published primary sources with ingenious quantitative analyses of program and census data; Brown bases his interpretation on research into unpublished sources in presidential archives and reanalyses of published quantitative data.	2
The three federal or federal-state programs on which Lieberman concentrates originated with the Economic Security Act of 1935. (Lieberman omits Old Age Assistance, until the mid-1950s the largest federal-state relief program created by the legislation.) Although each followed a different racial trajectory, Lieberman's story drives home a crucial point: even nominally color-blind policies have racial consequences.	3
In the 1930s, the South's desire for cheap labor imprinted itself onto the structure of America's welfare state through the statutory exclusion from Old Age Insurance of agricultural and domestic work, the major occupations of African Americans. Over time, administrative and statutory change broke down exclusions until, today, Social Security covers virtually all African Americans. The key to Social Security's expansion lay in its uniform national rules and administrative centralization within the national government. Aid to Dependent Children, by contrast, was a weak and decentralized program with a "parochial institutional structure" that allowed local authorities to discriminate against African Americans, first by denying them benefits and later by "making them the central focus of bitter political disputes over benefits, leading to crackdowns, retrenchment, and ever more race-laden welfare policies" (p. 9). As expected, African Americans fared poorly at the hands of local officials in the South; what is more surprising is their inequitable treatment in the North until politicians turned to welfare benefits as a form of patronage designed to win voter loyalty. Unemployment Insurance, a federal-state program, has fallen somewhere in the middle. It began with the same statutory exclusions as Old Age Insurance but shed them less successfully, largely because benefits, set by state governments, require the kind of steady work less often available to African Americans and permit disqualification for reasons open to subjective judgment.	. . .