The History Book Club discussion
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY - GOVERNMENT
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SOCIAL WELFARE PROGRAMS
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by Joe Soss (no photo)Synopsis:
Over the past three decades, the contours of American social, economic, and political life have changed dramatically.
The post-war patterns of broadly distributed economic growth have given way to stark inequalities of income and wealth, the GOP and its allies have gained power and shifted U.S. politics rightward, and the role of government in the lives of Americans has changed fundamentally.
Remaking America explores how these trends are related, investigating the complex interactions of economics, politics, and public policy.
Remaking America explains how the broad restructuring of government policy has both reflected and propelled major shifts in the character of inequality and democracy in the United States.
The contributors explore how recent political and policy changes affect not just the social standing of Americans but also the character of democratic citizenship in the United States today.
Lawrence Jacobs shows how partisan politics, public opinion, and interest groups have shaped the evolution of Medicare, but also how Medicare itself restructured health politics in America.
Kimberly Morgan explains how highly visible tax policies created an opportunity for conservatives to lead a grassroots tax revolt that ultimately eroded of the revenues needed for social-welfare programs.
Deborah Stone explores how new policies have redefined participation in the labor force—as opposed to fulfilling family or civic obligations—as the central criterion of citizenship.
Frances Fox Piven explains how low-income women remain creative and vital political actors in an era in which welfare programs increasingly subject them to stringent behavioral requirements and monitoring.
Joshua Guetzkow and Bruce Western document the rise of mass incarceration in America and illuminate its unhealthy effects on state social-policy efforts and the civic status of African-American men.
For many disadvantaged Americans who used to look to government as a source of opportunity and security, the state has become increasingly paternalistic and punitive.
Far from standing alone, their experience reflects a broader set of political victories and policy revolutions that have fundamentally altered American democracy and society.
Empirically grounded and theoretically informed, Remaking America connects the dots to provide insight into the remarkable social and political changes of the last three decades.
About the Authors:
JOE SOSS is the Cowles Professor for the Study of Public Service at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota.
JACOB S. HACKER is professor of political science at Yale University and resident fellow of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies.
SUZANNE METTLER is Clinton Rossiter Professor of American Institutions in the Government Department at Cornell University.
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by Frances Fox Piven (no photo)Synopsis:
Have the poor fared best by participating in conventional electoral politics or by engaging in mass defiance and disruption? The authors of the classic Regulating The Poor assess the successes and failures of these two strategies as they examine, in this provocative study, four protest movements of lower-class groups in 20th century America:
-- The mobilization of the unemployed during the Great Depression that gave rise to the Workers' Alliance of America
-- The industrial strikes that resulted in the formation of the CIO
-- The Southern Civil Rights Movement
-- The movement of welfare recipients led by the National Welfare Rights Organization
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by Frances Fox Piven (no photo)Synopsis:
Piven and Cloward have updated their classic work on the history and function of welfare to cover the American welfare state's massive erosion during the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton years. The authors present a boldly comprehensive, brilliant new theory to explain the comparative underdevelopment of the U.S. welfare state among advanced industrial nations. Their conceptual framework promises to shape the debate within current and future administrations as they attempt to rethink the welfare system and its role in American society.
"Uncompromising and provocative. . . . By mixing history, political interpretation and sociological analysis, Piven and Cloward provide the best explanation to date of our present situation . . . no future discussion of welfare can afford to ignore them."
--Peter Steinfels, The New York Times Book Review
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by St. Clair Drake (no photo)Synopsis:
Ground-breaking when first published in 1945, Black Metropolis remains a landmark study of race and urban life. Based on a mass of research conducted by Works Progress Administration field workers in the late 1930s, it is a historical and sociological account of the people of Chicago's South Side, the classic urban ghetto. Drake and Cayton's findings not only offer a generalized analysis of black migration, settlement, community structure, and black-white race relations in the early part of the twentieth century, but also tell us what has changed in the last hundred years and what has not. This edition includes the original Introduction by Richard Wright and a new Foreword by William Julius Wilson.
"Black Metropolis is a rare combination of research and synthesis, a book to be deeply pondered. . . . No one who reads it intelligently can ever believe again that our racial dilemma can be solved by pushing buttons, or by gradual processes which may reach four or five hundred years into the future."—Bucklin Moon, The Nation
"This volume makes a great contribution to the building of the future American and the free world."—Louis Wirth, New York Times
"By virtue of its range, its labor and its insight, the book seems certain to become a landmark not only in race studies but in the broader field of social anthropology."—Thomas Sancton, New Republic
Award:
Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction (1946)
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Without a Home, Everything Else Falls Apart
https://justshelter.org
Source: Just Shelter
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by Beryl Satter (no photo)Synopsis:
Part family story and part urban history, a landmark investigation of segregation and urban decay in Chicago—and cities across the nation
The "promised land" for thousands of Southern blacks, postwar Chicago quickly became the most segregated city in the North, the site of the nation’s worst ghettos and the target of Martin Luther King Jr.’s first campaign beyond the South.
In this powerful book, Beryl Satter identifies the true causes of the city’s black slums and the ruin of urban neighborhoods throughout the country: not, as some have argued, black pathology, the culture of poverty, or white flight, but a widespread and institutionalized system of legal and financial exploitation.
In Satter’s riveting account of a city in crisis, unscrupulous lawyers, slumlords, and speculators are pitched against religious reformers, community organizers, and an impassioned attorney who launched a crusade against the profiteers—the author’s father, Mark J. Satter.
At the heart of the struggle stand the black migrants who, having left the South with its legacy of sharecropping, suddenly find themselves caught in a new kind of debt peonage.
Satter shows the interlocking forces at work in their oppression: the discriminatory practices of the banking industry; the federal policies that created the country’s shameful "dual housing market"; the economic anxieties that fueled white violence; and the tempting profits to be made by preying on the city’s most vulnerable population.
A monumental work of history, this tale of racism and real estate, politics and finance, will forever change our understanding of the forces that transformed uurban America.
Note: Although nationally representative historical data on eviction do not exist, these historical accounts of the first half of the twentieth century depict evictions as rare and shocking events. Some local studies from the second half of the twentieth century, however, document nontrivial rates of involuntary displacement in American cities.
Desmond, Matthew. Evicted (p. 343). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition.
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by Beryl Satter (no photo)Synopsis:
Part family story and part urban history, a landmark investigation of segregation and urban decay in Chicago—and cities across the nation
The "promised land" for thousands of Southern blacks, postwar Chicago quickly became the most segregated city in the North, the site of the nation’s worst ghettos and the target of Martin Luther King Jr.’s first campaign beyond the South.
In this powerful book, Beryl Satter identifies the true causes of the city’s black slums and the ruin of urban neighborhoods throughout the country: not, as some have argued, black pathology, the culture of poverty, or white flight, but a widespread and institutionalized system of legal and financial exploitation.
In Satter’s riveting account of a city in crisis, unscrupulous lawyers, slumlords, and speculators are pitched against religious reformers, community organizers, and an impassioned attorney who launched a crusade against the profiteers—the author’s father, Mark J. Satter.
At the heart of the struggle stand the black migrants who, having left the South with its legacy of sharecropping, suddenly find themselves caught in a new kind of debt peonage.
Satter shows the interlocking forces at work in their oppression: the discriminatory practices of the banking industry; the federal policies that created the country’s shameful "dual housing market"; the economic anxieties that fueled white violence; and the tempting profits to be made by preying on the city’s most vulnerable population.
A monumental work of history, this tale of racism and real estate, politics and finance, will forever change our understanding of the forces that transformed uurban America.
Note: Although nationally representative historical data on eviction do not exist, these historical accounts of the first half of the twentieth century depict evictions as rare and shocking events. Some local studies from the second half of the twentieth century, however, document nontrivial rates of involuntary displacement in American cities.
Desmond, Matthew. Evicted (p. 343). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition.
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Kathryn EdinSynopsis:
Welfare mothers are popularly viewed as passively dependent on their checks and averse to work.
Reformers across the political spectrum advocate moving these women off the welfare rolls and into the labor force as the solution to their problems.
Making Ends Meet offers dramatic evidence toward a different conclusion: In the present labor market, unskilled single mothers who hold jobs are frequently worse off than those on welfare, and neither welfare nor low-wage employment alone will support a family at subsistence levels.
Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein interviewed nearly four hundred welfare and low-income single mothers from cities in Massachusetts, Texas, Illinois, and South Carolina over a six year period.
They learned the reality of these mothers' struggles to provide for their families: where their money comes from, what they spend it on, how they cope with their children's needs, and what hardships they suffer.
Edin and Lein's careful budgetary analyses reveal that even a full range of welfare benefits—AFDC payments, food stamps, Medicaid, and housing subsidies—typically meet only three-fifths of a family's needs, and that funds for adequate food, clothing and other necessities are often lacking.
Leaving welfare for work offers little hope for improvement, and in many cases threatens even greater hardship.
Jobs for unskilled and semi-skilled women provide meager salaries, irregular or uncertain hours, frequent layoffs, and no promise of advancement.
Mothers who work not only assume extra child care, medical, and transportation expenses but are also deprived of many of the housing and educational subsidies available to those on welfare.
Regardless of whether they are on welfare or employed, virtually all these single mothers need to supplement their income with menial, off-the-books work and intermittent contributions from family, live-in boyfriends, their children's fathers, and local charities. In doing so, they pay a heavy price.
Welfare mothers must work covertly to avoid losing benefits, while working mothers are forced to sacrifice even more time with their children.
Making Ends Meet demonstrates compellingly why the choice between welfare and work is more complex and risky than is commonly recognized by politicians, the media, or the public.
Almost all the welfare-reliant women interviewed by Edin and Lein made repeated efforts to leave welfare for work, only to be forced to return when they lost their jobs, a child became ill, or they could not cover their bills with their wages.
Mothers who managed more stable employment usually benefited from a variety of mitigating circumstances such as having a relative willing to watch their children for free, regular child support payments, or very low housing, medical, or commuting costs.
With first hand accounts and detailed financial data, Making Ends Meet tells the real story of the challenges, hardships, and survival strategies of America's poorest families.
If this country's efforts to improve the self-sufficiency of female-headed families is to succeed, reformers will need to move beyond the myths of welfare dependency and deal with the hard realities of an unrewarding American labor market, the lack of affordable health insurance and child care for single mothers who work, and the true cost of subsistence living.
Making Ends Meet is a realistic look at a world that so many would change and so few understand.
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by Nicolas P. Retsinas (no photo)Synopsis:
Rental housing is increasingly recognized as a vital housing option in the United States.
Government policies and programs continue to grapple with problematic issues, however, including affordability, distressed urban neighborhoods, concentrated poverty, substandard housing stock, and the unmet needs of the disabled, the elderly, and the homeless.
In Revisiting Rental Housing, leading housing researchers build upon decades of experience, research, and evaluation to inform our understanding of the nation's rental housing challenges and what can be done about them.
It thoughtfully addresses not only present issues affecting rental housing, but also viable solutions. The first section reviews the contributing factors and primary problems generated by the operation of rental markets.
In the second section, contributors dissect how policies and programs have—or have not—dealt with the primary challenges; what improvements—if any—have been gained; and the lessons learned in the process.
The final section looks to potential new directions in housing policy, including integrating best practices from past lessons into existing programs, and new innovations for large-scale, long-term market and policy solutions that get to the root of rental housing challenges.
Contributors include William C. Apgar (Harvard University), Anthony Downs (Brookings), Rachel Drew (Harvard University), Ingrid Gould Ellen (New York University), George C. Galster (Wayne State University), Bruce Katz (Brookings), Jill Khadduri (Abt Associates), Shekar Narasimhan (Beekman Advisors), Rolf Pendall (Cornell University), John M. Quigley (University of California–Berkeley), James A. Riccio (MDRC), Stuart S. Rosenthal (Syracuse University), Margery Austin Turner (Urban Institute), and Charles Wilkins (Compass Group).
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by John Gurda (no photo)Synopsis:
These words call up an image of an ethnic, industrial town whose skyline is thick with smokestacks and steeples, a place whose character can be summed up in another "B" word: blue-collar.
It's true that Milwaukee's German accent was unmistakable in the 1880s; it was the Beer Capital of the World; and it's the home of the steam shovels that dug the Panama Canal the engines that powered the New York City subway system, and the motorcycles that made Harley-Davidson an American legend.
But the stereotypes don't begin to convey the richness of Milwaukee's past.
They don't describe the five citizens killed by the state militia as they marched for the eight-hour day.
The Jewish community leader who wrote The Settlement Cookbook.
The Italian priest who led the local crusade for civil rights in the 1960s.
The railroad promoter who bribed an entire state legislature. The Socialists who made Milwaukee the best-governed big city in America. Allis-Chalmers and Pabst Blue Ribbon. Summerfest and Irish Fest. Golda Meir. Carl Sandburg. Robin Yount.
The Making of Milwaukee tells all those stories and a great many more.
Well-written, superbly organized, and lavishly illustrated, it is sure to be the standard reference for many years to come.
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by St. Clair Drake (no photo)Synopsis:
Ground-breaking when first published in 1945, Black Metropolis remains a landmark study of race and urban life. Based on a mass of research conducted by Works Progress Administration field workers in the late 1930s, it is a historical and sociological account of the people of Chicago's South Side, the classic urban ghetto. Drake and Cayton's findings not only offer a generalized analysis of black migration, settlement, community structure, and black-white race relations in the early part of the twentieth century, but also tell us what has changed in the last hundred years and what has not. This edition includes the original Introduction by Richard Wright and a new Foreword by William Julius Wilson.
"Black Metropolis is a rare combination of research and synthesis, a book to be deeply pondered. . . . No one who reads it intelligently can ever believe again that our racial dilemma can be solved by pushing buttons, or by gradual processes which may reach four or five hundred years into the future."—Bucklin Moon, The Nation
"This volume makes a great contribution to the building of the future American and the free world."—Louis Wirth, New York Times
"By virtue of its range, its labor and its insight, the book seems certain to become a landmark not only in race studies but in the broader field of social anthropology."—Thomas Sancton, New Republic
Award:
Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction (1946)
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William Julius WilsonSynopsis:
"The Truly Disadvantaged should spur critical thinking in many quarters about the causes and possible remedies for inner city poverty. As policy makers grapple with the problems of an enlarged underclass they—as well as community leaders and all concerned Americans of all races—would be advised to examine Mr. Wilson's incisive analysis."—Robert Greenstein, New York Times Book Review
"'Must reading' for civil-rights leaders, leaders of advocacy organizations for the poor, and for elected officials in our major urban centers."—Bernard C. Watson, Journal of Negro Education
"Required reading for anyone, presidential candidate or private citizen, who really wants to address the growing plight of the black urban underclass."—David J. Garrow, Washington Post Book World
Selected by the editors of the New York Times Book Review as one of the sixteen best books of 1987.
Award:
Winner of the 1988 C. Wright Mills Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems.
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by Jason DeParle (no photo)Synopsis:
Bill Clinton's drive to "end welfare" sent 9 million women and children streaming from the rolls.
In this masterful work, New York Times reporter and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Jason DeParle cuts between the mean streets of Milwaukee and the corridors of Washington to produce the definitive account.
As improbable as fiction, and equally fast-paced, this classic of literary journalism has captured the acclaim of the Left and Right.
At the heart of the story are three cousins, inseparable at the start but launched on differing arcs.
Leaving welfare, Angie puts her heart in her work. Jewell bets on an imprisoned man. Opal guards a tragic secret that threatens her kids and her life. DeParle traces back their family history six generations to slavery, and weaves poor people, politicians, reformers, and rogues into a spellbinding epic.
At times, the very idea of America seemed on trial: we live in a country where anyone can make it, yet generation after generation some families don't.
Washington Post: "Riveting... like a searing novel of urban realism -
Theodore Dreiser comes to Milwaukee." Chicago Tribune:
"Sweeping scope and dramatic detail worthy of Charles Dickens."
Award:
Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism (2005)
The History Book Club
Books mentioned in this topic
American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare (other topics)The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (other topics)
Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (other topics)
The Making of Milwaukee (other topics)
Revisiting Rental Housing: Policies, Programs, and Priorities (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
Jason DeParle (other topics)William Julius Wilson (other topics)
St. Clair Drake (other topics)
John Gurda (other topics)
Nicolas P. Retsinas (other topics)
More...
Medicaid
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)
Supplemental Security Income (SSI)
Federal Public Housing Assistance
Bureau of Indian Afffairs General Assistance
Totally Administered Temporary Assistance for Needy Families
Food Distribution on Indian Reservations
Veterans Pension and Survivors Benefit Programs
Lifeline Program
Pell Grants
TANF
Child Nutrition
Head Start
Job Training Programs , etc.
And Others