Disasters in Welfare History

My research focuses on the history of federal disaster relief, and the mobilization of that history during the 1930s as a political and legal precedent for the New Deal’s social welfare programs. Despite nearly universal scholarly agreement on the absence of federal redistribution during the pre-New Deal period save for Civil War Pensions beginning in the 1880s, my research shows that disaster relief was perhaps the first such program, beginning direct relief for the victims of floods, fires, and similar events in the late 18^th century. I show that the frequency and generosity of federal disaster relief appropriations escalated during the post-Civil War period and that the Supreme Court gave tacit constitutional approval to these appropriations. My book, the Sympathetic State (Chicago Press 2013) recounts this history, with particular attention to the Freedmen’s Bureau and other southern war relief, repeated Mississippi River flooding, and other incidents. The book shows how congressmen and other advocates for the poor during the late 19^th century and the Progressive era unsuccessfully pointed to disaster appropriations as precedent for spending policy innovations for unemployment relief during the 1893 depression. These early efforts by claimants to expand the definition of what could legitimately count as a “disaster” and who could collect as a “victim” were unsuccessful but they foreshadow the New Dealers’ similar efforts during the 1930s on behalf of the unemployed, tenant farmers, and others. My research shows how disaster relief came over time to provide the key institutional, moral and political logic for the American welfare state.