The WPA and the (Short-Lived) Triumph of Nativism

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cybelle Fox
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Mexican Americans ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Works Progress Administration ◽  
Emergency Relief ◽  
Illegal Aliens ◽  
Local Implementation ◽  
Over Time ◽  
The Welfare State

This chapter discusses the subsequent battle over citizenship and legal status restrictions in the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and the local implementation of those restrictions. When the WPA was first authorized in 1935, there were no citizenship or legal status restrictions for access to the program. Just as with Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), New Deal officials expressly forbade local WPA administrators from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, or non-citizenship. Because of these non-discrimination provisions, blacks and Mexican Americans gained unprecedented access to WPA employment. Over time, however, Congress imposed successively harsher restrictions against aliens, barring the employment of illegal aliens on WPA projects in 1936 and imposing a full ban for legal non-citizens by 1939. While these citizenship restrictions constituted the greatest challenge to aliens' access to the welfare state during this period, its impact was short-lived and its effects fell disproportionately on Mexican non-citizens.

A Fair Deal or a Raw Deal?

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cybelle Fox
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Mexican Americans ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Public Works ◽  
Civilian Conservation Corps ◽  
Emergency Relief ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Economies ◽  
Relief Program ◽  
Work Relief

This chapter focuses on the first New Deal and access to Federal Emergency Relief, as well as the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Public Works Administration, and the Civil Works Administration. Despite the New Deal's nationalizing reforms, intended largely to standardize relief policies across the country, local political economies and racial regimes continued to influence the administration of relief. Like blacks, Mexicans gained significantly greater access to relief during the New Deal, although they continued to face racial discrimination at the local level. Citizenship barriers were also typically strongest for local public work programs out West, and Mexican Americans were sometimes wrongly denied work relief on the assumption that they were non-citizens. The largest relief program during the first New Deal was the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), which brought blacks and Mexicans unprecedented access to relief.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger E. Backhouse ◽  
Bradley W. Bateman ◽  
Tamotsu Nishizawa ◽  
Dieter Plehwe
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Provision ◽  
Economic Argument ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The World ◽  
Recent Origin ◽  
Welfare Discourse ◽  
Over Time ◽  
The Welfare State

During the last several decades, the welfare state has come under increasing pressure around the world, with social provision often being cut or privatized. Often the justification for these changes has been made as an economic argument, especially a neoliberal argument that the welfare state diminishes growth or produces disincentives to work. These arguments are of relatively recent origin, however; many types of economists have supported the creation of the welfare state, even liberal economists. The purpose of this book is to examine the economic arguments that have been used in the United Kingdom, Japan, and Germany in support of, and in opposition to, the welfare state. Special attention is paid to the transnational dimensions of recent welfare discourse and to the ways that liberal and neoliberal arguments about the welfare state have changed over time.

Reducing Risk as well as Inequality: Assessing the Welfare State's Insurance Effects

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Jacob S. Hacker ◽  
Philipp Rehm
Keyword(s):  
Panel Data ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Risk Reduction ◽  
Cross Section ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Education Levels ◽  
Risk Spreading ◽  
Broad Cross Section ◽  
Over Time ◽  
The Welfare State

Abstract Leading accounts of the politics of the welfare state focus on societal demands for risk-spreading policies. Yet current measures of the welfare state focus not on risk, but on inequality. To address this gap, this letter describes the development of two new measures, risk incidence and risk reduction, which correspond to the prevalence of large income losses and the degree to which welfare states reduce that prevalence, respectively. Unlike existing indicators, these measures require panel data, which the authors harmonize for twenty-one democracies. The study finds that large losses affect all income and education levels, making the welfare state valuable to a broad cross-section of citizens. It also finds that taxes and transfers greatly reduce the prevalence of such losses, though to varying degrees across countries and over time. Finally, it disaggregates the measures to identify specific ‘triggers’ of large losses, and finds that these triggers are associated with risks on which welfare states focus, such as unemployment and sickness.

Widowhood and Ageing in Traditional English Society

1984 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 429-449 ◽  
Author(s):  
James E. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Life Expectancy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Total Population ◽  
Relative Effectiveness ◽  
Age Group ◽  
Economic Support ◽  
English Society ◽  
Over Time ◽  
The Welfare State

ABSTRACTThe persistence of greater life expectancy among women than men means that widowhood on a large scale is a feature of both pre-industrial and subsequent societies. This paper examines the changing structure of widowhood along with the familial and economic support afforded to women in this category, in the 17th and 18th centuries by contrast with the present day. It indicates, by drawing on parish data for England, that the incidence of the widowed status is today lower in each age group than two hundred years previously, but higher as a proportion of total population. Current widows are however twice as likely to be over 55 and to be heads of households. Further comparisons over time are used to make observations about the relative effectiveness of the parish, kin, and the Welfare State in providing material support.

scholarly journals The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History

2008 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jefferson Cowie ◽  
Nick Salvatore
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
New Deal ◽  
American History ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Franklin Roosevelt ◽  
The New Deal ◽  
The Welfare State

Abstract“The Long Exception” examines the period from Franklin Roosevelt to the end of the twentieth century and argues that the New Deal was more of an historical aberration—a byproduct of the massive crisis of the Great Depression—than the linear triumph of the welfare state. The depth of the Depression undoubtedly forced the realignment of American politics and class relations for decades, but, it is argued, there is more continuity in American politics between the periods before the New Deal order and those after its decline than there is between the postwar era and the rest of American history. Indeed, by the early seventies the arc of American history had fallen back upon itself. While liberals of the seventies and eighties waited for a return to what they regarded as the normality of the New Deal order, they were actually living in the final days of what Paul Krugman later called the “interregnum between Gilded Ages.” The article examines four central themes in building this argument: race, religion, class, and individualism.

scholarly journals 2 Planning, knowledge and technocracy in historical perspective

2019 ◽  
pp. 19-30
Author(s):  
Michael Hebbert
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Expert Knowledge ◽  
Technical Knowledge ◽  
The Core ◽  
Modern Project ◽  
The New Deal ◽  
Looking Back ◽  
The Welfare State

This chapter examines the planning histories associated with writings on technocracies. It highlights some of the core distinctions that exist between different schools of thought over the form, character, and roles of technical knowledge in the planning of cities and reflects on the extent to which we are now living in an era within which ‘new’ technocracies can be said to exist and what these might consist of. To make sense of the new technocracy, the chapter thus offers an understanding of the old. It puts the present critique of expert knowledge into historical perspective, looking back to the interplay of planning and technocracy in the century of two world wars, the New Deal, the Welfare State, and the Modern Project. It traces the roots of the technocratic critique to planning up to the mid-1980s.

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