Down and Out in the USA: General Relief and the Politics of Precarity in the Shadow of the Welfare State, 1935-1964

Abstract

This dissertation examines the history of general relief from the New Deal to the War on Poverty. General Relief refers to state and local programs of public assistance. As "catch-all" programs of public assistance, general relief was external to the two-channel welfare state. Instead, state and local officials retained ultimate administrative and financial discretion over these programs of public assistance to persons categorized as "employable." State and local officials marshaled this discretion, in part, to continue to make determinations of who did and did not belong in their communities. They sought to expel and deny relief to those who lacked legal settlement, in the process reinforcing inequalities of race, gender, and class in their communities and across the country. The question of state and local versus federal control of general relief, however, was neither inevitable nor uncontested. Instead, the dissertation shows this question was contested by liberal and conservative political activists across decades and was productive of partisan political fracture across the midcentury. Grounding its analysis in both the history of women and gender and legal history, this dissertation is simultaneously a social history, a history of the state, and a political history. Cumulatively, this history helps to reframe our understanding of the trajectory of twentieth-century United States history. It suggests a way of seeing economic precarity, the devolved power of state and local governments, and partisan political fracture across the mid-twentieth-century United States and leading to the political economy of our own time.