Slavery and the Modern Welfare State

So I’m currently reading A People’s History of Poverty in America by Stephen Pimpare. Pimpare asserts that if we define the welfare state to be any government approved and government enforced system for providing (to some extent) for people’s basic needs, then in the United States we have to consider slavery to be one of our first systems of social welfare.¹ This is a pretty provocative idea, at least for a social welfare history wonk like myself. Most social policy histories start with the Progressive Era, move into the New Deal, and then continue to chart the growth and reforms of the welfare state from there.* The convenient thing about that approach is that it gets to start with good news: the moral righteousness and overall awesomeness of Jane Addams and her crew of settlement house reformers and muckrakers. According to this version of history, all social welfare has sprung forth from her saintly benediction, so we see social welfare as a benevolent and moral institution. Any abuses that have occurred, any indignities suffered by the recipients of our benevolence, can easily be explained away as the fault of miserly politicians or a few bad apples among social policy practitioners.

However, when we consider the welfare state in this country to have included slavery, then we have to realize that the Mr. Hyde side of the welfare state has always been there, infiltrating the Dr. Jekyll half we like to think about. Mr. Hyde has economic interests in maintaining a pool of low cost (in slavery’s case, virtually no cost) labor. Mr. Hyde has all kinds of pseudo-scientific justifications for why poor people and black people, and heaven-help-me poor and black people are inferior, unindustrious, and incapable of their own care. Mr. Hyde denies people freedom to control their own lives, their own families, their own work, in many cases their own bodies, but calls them ungrateful when they aren’t sufficiently humbled by all they have received. Mr. Hyde employs a sector of overseers and bounty hunters to make sure his “clients” follow the rules, and Mr. Hyde has vicious punishments waiting if they don’t.

It is unnervingly easy to draw parallels between the welfare institution of slavery and the welfare institution of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families in which I work every day. This is not to say that those parallels aren’t grossly exaggerated. They are exaggerated. To say that the modern welfare state is like slavery would be an unfair assessment of the progress of the last century and a half, as well as a severe understatement of the horrors of slavery. Nonetheless, it is undeniable that there are aspects of control and coercion in the modern welfare state. Today’s system is, as it was then, ultimately managed by powerful people with powerful economic interests. As much as egalitarian practitioners may try to avoid it, today’s system is influenced by racist and classist assumptions, or (less malevolent but equally problematic) simple ignorance of the true experience of, causes for and implications of living in poverty. And today’s system certainly employs an army of people who make a living by monitoring the behavior of this era’s “grateful” beneficiaries of their services.

Does any of this mean we need a Declaration of Emancipation from the welfare state? Certainly not. Having a welfare state, albeit a flawed system, is better than a system of callous indifference based on a euphemistic rhetoric of individualism. But it is critical for practitioners, and especially reformers, to realize that the evils of the welfare state have not always simply been the result of a few wayward miscreants, nor have they always been simply due to a lack of resources or capacity. Rather, there have always been injustices woven right into the fabric of any kind of safety net we have ever constructed. Welfare benefits have never truly been something-for-nothing. There have always been costs in dignity, privacy and choice. The only differences have been that the severity has vacillated with changing times and changing political administrations. This is crucial to understand, because denial has never done much to combat injustice. The sooner we recognize that Mr. Hyde has always been a part of us, the sooner we can figure out how to confront him.

*I re-read my unfortunately rather dusty textbook from my social policy course ² to see if its account of history conforms to the norm of starting with St. Jane [Addams] and moving on from there. In actuality, the history chapter does devote four pages to pre-Progressive era United States history. And while it mentions slavery, it focuses on the impact of the English Elizabethan Poor Laws in shaping U.S. policy. It states that “the Elizabethan Poor Laws were not applicable to slaves, who had no legal claim to social welfare support.” So, the book’s perspective seems to be that from a social welfare perspective, one of the innumerable injustices of slavery was that it excluded slaves from the social welfare state. That, of course, is a far cry from slavery being considered one of the institutions of the welfare state.

Oh, and the picture at the beginning of the history chapter is of St. Jane reading to children.

1. Pimpare, Steven. (2008). A People’s History of Poverty in America. New Press: New York.

2. Segal, Elizabeth and Brzuzy, Stephanie. (1998). Social Welfare Policy, Programs, and Practice. F.E. Peacock: Itasca, IL.