This Business of Relief

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A groundbreaking study of social-welfare policy in the urban South. The South has been largely overlooked in the body of historical work prompted by the wave of welfare reforms during the 1990s. This book helps correct that imbalance. Using Richmond, Virginia, as a case study, Elna C. Green looks at issues and trends related to two centuries of relief for the needy and dependent in the urban South. Throughout, Green links her findings to the larger narrative of welfare history in the United States. She also ties social-welfare policy in the South to other southern histories, showing how each period left its own mark on policies and their implementation--from colonial poor laws to homes for children orphaned in the Civil War to the New Deal's public works projects. The primacy of public welfare across southern history emerges as a central theme. Green shows that, consistent with national practices, public monies have always accounted for the greatest share of relief spending--despite a steady growth in the number and size of private charities. Green also highlights the uniqueness of the South's welfare history. The Freedmen's Bureau, for example, which operated as a vast federal welfare agency for former slaves during Reconstruction, has no equivalent outside the region. Among other topics, Green covers the South's ongoing urbanization and industrialization, the selective application of social services along racial and gender lines, debates over the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor, the professionalization of social work, and the lasting effects of New Deal money and regulations on the region. Through Richmond's example, readers will be able more fully to understand a variety of keypublic and private welfare issues--in history and in the present, as policy and reality, and in terms of welfare's recipients and its providers.