"Who They Are - or Were": Middle-Class Welfare in the Early New Deal
Journal article by Deborah C. Malamud; University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Vol. 151, 2003
Journal Article Excerpt
"Who they are - or were": middle-class welfare in the early New Deal. by Deborah C. Malamud INTRODUCTION Class is all but invisible in contemporary American social discourse. At most, it is a fleeting image, a rarely detected underlayer to the complex texture of race, ethnicity, and gender that captures our society's attention. For many, America stands as the model of the classless society, one in which most people think of themselves as middle class (or at least as potentially so, with hard work and a little luck) and in which middle-classness is the socioeconomic face of "Americanness." (1) The recognized exception, the chronic poor, is seen as an aberration rather than evidence of a general system of class in the United States. (2) Similarly, American law does not recognize class. Constitutional equal protection doctrine and antidiscrimination statutes are the major mechanisms through which American law recognizes and redresses hierarchy in American society. Both are silent on the question of class. (3) Welfare law advocates have utilized litigation and other mechanisms to argue that "the poor" is a legally significant group, that "poverty" is a suspect classification, and that welfare benefits are "new property" entitled to protection. Scholars have exhibited interest in addressing the question of how the law contributes both to the creation of cycles of poverty and to the social construction of poverty. But the very location of this work within poverty advocacy and theory has meant that it has drawn attention not to class as a general social phenomenon but to the aberrational nature of poverty and our social tolerance for it. Thus poverty is marked, middle-classness unmarked; poverty is figure, middle-classness ground. Poverty needs social, culture, and legal explanation. Middle-classness does not. There is something familiar about these questions of figure and ground. Racial studies never used to pay attention to whiteness, assuming that white is just what "we" are and that "blackness" is the problem. Gender studies drew needed attention to issues of female gender but has only more recently started to look at masculinity as socially and legally constructed. For many years, labor historians focused almost exclusively on the historical experiences of the working classes, assuming, perhaps, that we already knew from experience all we needed to know about the middle classes. All these fields have benefited from their broadenings of focus to include close study of the "unmarked" ground against which social difference is perceived. (4) My project is directed toward both of the scholarly lacunae I have identified. My aim is to shed light both on middle-classness and the roles of law and the state in defining, maintaining, and validating it. At numerous points in modern American history, actors within the legal system have been required by their programmatic interests to develop a working understanding of middle-classness. Much of the state's exercise of police power involved (and still involves) the setting of enforceable behavioral standards aimed at making public life safe for the "respectable" people in society, with respectability modeled on the behavior of the white, native-born middle strata. Prohibition, first at the state and then at the federal level, was just one manifestation of this broader trend. (5) On the federal level, the World War I draft presented an important occasion for Progressive-era social reformers to envision middle-classness and protect it from the mixing of the classes in the military. (6) Indeed, it seems at times as if middle-classness simply became "American-ness"--with the government simultaneously helping to define a middle-class set of values and standard of living, to encourage immigrants to embrace it, and to protect people who had done so from the bad influence of those who had not.The New Deal is a particularly fertile ground for the study of the middle classes and the law. During the New Deal, Congress adopted numerous social programs that put government actors in the position to make vital decisions about what it means to be middle class. Just as David Roediger has documented "the wages of whiteness" in America (7)--the societal value of whiteness and how it was fought for and won--I aim to show how the crafters and administrators of New Deal social programs had, and took, the opportunity to define the "wages" of middle-classness. The central question is how key governmental actors decided what middle-class status was worth, not merely in terms of money (though of course money was crucial to all concerned), but also--and most importantly--in terms of dignity and honor. (8) Or, to use a different academic vocabulary, ... |
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