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

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 Paupersexplores 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, andCitizens and Paupersis an invaluable analysis of the roots of the debate.

Chad Alan Goldbergis assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

1  Paupers or Citizens? Struggles over the Status and Rights of Welfare State Claimants

Part One. Claiming Rights as Citizen-Soldiers: Struggles during Reconstruction

2  “The ‘pauper slavery’ of the poorhouse”: The Freedmen’s Bureau, 1865–1872

3  An Honorable Alternative to Poor Relief: Civil War Veterans’ Pensions, 1862–1890

Part Two. Claiming Rights as Citizen-Workers: Struggles during the New Deal

4  “They are just ‘reliefers’ and hlÓ%