The New Deal and Beyond - by Elna C Green (Paperback)

About the Book

This collection of ten original studies covers a wide range of issues related to the regional distinctiveness of welfare provision in the South and the development of the larger federal welfare state. The studies examine New Deal and Great Society programs from the WPA and Civilian Conservation Corps to Social Security and Medicare.

Book Synopsis

This collection of ten original studies covers a wide range of issues related to the regional distinctiveness of welfare provision in the South and the development of the larger federal welfare state. The studies examine New Deal and Great Society programs from the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps to Social Security and Medicare. In addition, they draw attention to such private-sector organizations as the Salvation Army and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Some essays look at the degree of federal responsiveness to, or actual engagement with, recipients of assistance. One such study examines the dynamics between the New Deal bureaucracy, poor women who worked in WPA-organized sewing rooms in Atlanta, and local political activists concerned about the women's working conditions. The power of race and racism to shape the delivery of social services in the region, as well as the strong connections between social welfare and civil rights, is a concern common to many studies. One study shows how linking the availability of federal Medicare funds to racial equality helped end segregation in southern hospitals. Others focus on topics ranging from the pioneering North Carolina Fund, a state program that shaped Great Society initiatives, to the public health nurses and home economists of the Farm Security Administration, to Georgia governor Eugene Talmadge's maneuverings against the Federal Emergency Relief Administration.

The New Deal and Beyond is filled with many new insights into initiating and maintaining social programs in the South, a region whose welfare history is key to understanding the larger story of the American welfare state.

Review Quotes

A fine collection of essays examining the intersection of federal policies with the vast transformations that swept the South from the New Deal to the Great Society. The contributors describe, at times in compelling ways, the confrontation of southern poor people with the agents of modernity.

--Nan Elizabeth Woodruff "author of American Congo"

Anyone interested in the history of modern social welfare policy in the South should read The New Deal and Beyond as it offers provocative analyses of how race, gender, class, and region influence relationships between the citizenry and the state.

--Brooke Speer Orr "George Washington University"

Scholars of social policy have examined national government policy in depth, but we also need to remember that a policy can be no better than its actual implementation at the local level. The New Deal and Beyond provides exactly that kind of unromantic, realistic appraisal of how social welfare programs made a difference--or did not make a difference.

--Linda Gordon "author of Heroes of Their Own Lives"

[A] fine collection . . . Green's elegantly written introduction provides a concise, thorough overview of the state of research on southern social welfare since 1930. . . . A better understanding of social welfare efforts from the past can inform today's policy-making. This important work should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the complex workings of social welfare programs in any age.

--South Carolina Historical Magazine

A valuable collection that succeeds in highlighting possible directions for further research . . .Most important, however, The New Deal and Beyond calls attention to the need for a broader reexamination of the state and local dimensions of the expansion of the twentieth-century American welfare state.

--Reviews in American History

Affirms regional distinctiveness while connecting the development of social welfare institutions in the South to the growth of the federal welfare state . . . The fascinating essays in this volume underscore how landmark social welfare programs crafted in Democratic congresses, in which conservative southerners still wielded considerable power, initiated meaningful change but also allowed the survival of regional differences.

--Journal of American History

Overall, the essays succeed in raising significant questions about southern distinctiveness and, moreover, the limits and occasionally unintended goods of social welfare policy.

--H-Net Review

These ten essays fulfill the editor's goal of laying out a new set of research strategies and analytical models for southern welfare history.

--Alabama Review

About the Author

Elna Green is Associate Dean of the College of Humanities and Arts at San Jose State University. She is the author of "This Business of Relief" and the editor of "Before the New Deal" and "The New Deal and Beyond" (all Georgia).