A New Welfare History

Daniel Story

I’m Daniel Story, and I’m pleased to welcome you to Season 3 of History in Focus, a podcast by the American Historical Review. What responsibility does a government have to care for its people? That you might say is the central concern of the welfare state, those aspects of federal, state, and local programming aimed at ensuring the fundamental well being of society’s most vulnerable—at least that’s the idea. Conceptions of a welfare state in the US have most often been associated with the New Deal programs of FDR and through the post war years to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

 

Lyndon Johnson at University of Michigan on May 22, 1964

For in your time, we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society. The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all.

 

Daniel Story

Through programs like public housing, unemployment benefits, and Medicaid, welfare history has charted these changes, how they came about, and what impacts they’ve had, intended and otherwise, all critical questions for understanding America in the 20th century. But what if we took that question—who does the state care for, how, and why—and widen the scope beyond established government programs or government officials, or beyond programs that have traditionally been labeled welfare? What could we see through that lens? Today, we talk with Salonee Bauman, Bobby Cervantes, and Salem Elzway about their AHR article, “A New Welfare History.”

 

Salonee Bhaman  

When we talk about the new welfare history, all we are doing is essentially saying those programs and those arguments about what the nature of the American state would be, and what it owed people, and how people made claims on that state, are actually in dialog with far more than just governmentality. But in fact, only through interrogating immigration through that lens, or race through that lens, do we actually get to a more comprehensive and inclusive idea of what all the things that the welfare state actually touches.

 

Daniel Story  

In 2021 these three historians came together as Jefferson Scholars Foundation fellows, each with their own projects on American political history, projects that were, in some ways, quite distinct from one another, with subjects ranging from industrial automation, to the HIV/AIDS crisis, to South Texas border communities. But as they began sharing their work, a common interest in the state and who it cares for became clear.

 

Salonee Bhaman  

I think what our big intervention is saying is that you know, the history of industrial capitalism, the history of migration, the history of health care, those are all parts of welfare history.

 

Salonee Bhaman  

Today, we talk with them about what it was like to collaborate, to connect these seemingly disparate histories into one analytical lens, and what they really mean by “a new welfare history.” But before we dive into that conversation, it might be helpful to know a bit more about each of the histories they explore. So, let’s start with Bobby.

 

Salonee Bhaman

I’m Bobby Cervantes. I’m a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows, and I am a historian of poverty in modern America, specifically among Latino communities on the US-Mexico border. I’m working on a book on the history of the Texas colonias in the 20th century. These colonials are communities on the Texas side of the Rio Grande, from El Paso to Brownsville. They’re predominantly rural, peri-urban maybe you could describe them, and they are almost always unincorporated, which means that they’re outside the city limits, whatever city is closest to them. There are about 3,000 of them on that border, and they’re home to about a million Texans right now, mostly working poor and intergenerational societies. What I’m trying to do in this essay is offer a case study of one colonia called Balboa Acres and its relationship to its nearest city, McAllen, Texas, which is in the Rio Grande Valley in deep south Texas.

 

From “A Thirst in the Garden,” 1976, The Walter J. Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia

People are lucky if there’s a tap along the main road running by the colonia, like this one in colonia Balboa, provided by the city of McAllen, where Pedro Ibanez comes to get water for his wife and three children.

 

Bobby Cervantes  

The article charts the relationship of how the colonia grew, why it grew in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, how the city of McAllen was responding to this colonia, Balboa Acres, growth over that time. And it ends in the mid 1970s when the city of McAllen and Balboa Acres are debating whether to become one entity in which the city of McAllen would take in the colonia and now be responsible for everything from drainage, to trash collection, to police and fire protection. And so there are questions there about urban sprawl, about civil rights, and about rural disinvestment.

 

From “A Thirst in the Garden”

We’re lucky that the public water hydrant is this close to our house. Of course, if I had the money, I would buy a house within the inner city where water and indoor bathrooms are already in service.

 

Bobby Cervantes  

That case study I use as one example of similar fights that were happening across the borderland between these colonials and these cities that really defined the last quarter of the 20th century in the Texas-Mexico borderlands broadly.

 

Daniel Story  

Salem.

 

Salem Elzway  

I’m Salem Elzway. I’m a postdoc at the University of Southern California’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities. I’m a 20th century US historian who focuses on the political economy of automation, artificial intelligence, and robotics. My piece, the reason why I titled it “The Price of Progress” is, I think, like a lot of historians, we come across a document or a quote and we’re like, oh my god, what was this thing? How did this come to be? And I actually found this title in a memo for what was called the Labor Management Advisory Committee, or lMAC. So at the time the Council of Economic Advisors chairman Walter Heller was writing a memo to this committee, which is made up of labor leaders, corporate leader, corporate executives, government bureaucrats. And they were discussing the issues of automation, how that is going to be shaping Kennedy’s political regime, how they are shaping welfare development of these things at the time. Heller has this quote where he essentially says that individuals who are going to be losing their jobs to technology or automation are going to become, quote, “the human fallout of technological change.”

 

From “A Robot for Industry” (1967)

A robot for industry. A machine that can reach up to seven feet and perform a multitude of tasks in factory or laboratory as skillfully as a man, but without getting tired.

 

Salem Elzway  

And he essentially said that this was the price of progress, right? This is going to happen. We have to figure out a way to navigate this. And to me, using something like “human fallout” as a way to describe the negative externalities, or negative consequences, of high tech Cold War capitalism was telling. I immediately thought, okay, if this is the price of progress, who’s actually paying the cost, and why is it that there are certain kinds of individuals that have the power to say, we get to choose who actually gets to bear this, and who actually gets the benefits of that price of progress? I think that’s a really interesting question, and that’s actually what really got me into trying to look at how automation and the welfare state are connected to each other. I’m really interested in trying to figure out, how does the American state both fund and support the development of new technologies? How do they manage those? How does the government come into play? The American state is actually playing a very large role in the development of these technologies, and private actors can use them as they see fit. The fact that workers don’t have a lot of democratic saying in how those things are being used, and then they have to essentially react to the uses of these things got me to really think about what exactly does the kind of traditional social welfare state. What is it doing? Why is it that, with one hand, essentially the military industrial complex is funding these things, and then with the other hand, it’s trying to clean up the mess? Why don’t we consider this kind of private welfare state in a different kind of sense?

 

Daniel Story  

And Salonee.

 

Salonee Bhaman  

I’m Salonee Bhaman. I’m currently a postdoctoral fellow at the New York Historical Society at the Center for Women’s History, and I will be a faculty fellow at NYU next year. I’m a 20th century US historian, historian of sexuality. I study the welfare state, the first years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. I also studied the politics of healthcare. My piece is a case study of the struggle to expand the definition of HIV/Aids to include symptoms commonly experienced by women.

 

From ABC News Nightline on December 17, 1982

It’s mysterious, it’s deadly, and it’s baffling medical science. Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.

 

Salonee Bhaman  

The AIDS case definition was set by the CDC and expanded a couple of different times, and one needed to be diagnosed with a particular kind of opportunistic infection in order to qualify for an AIDS diagnosis, which also meant that you would qualify for disability benefits and Medicaid provisions, etc. The struggle kind of happens at an interesting time in this history. It’s in the 90s, and it’s really driven by women who know that they have HIV, know that they are too sick to work, often that they deserve, for lack of a better word, federal disability benefits, but are often denied them systematically. It’s also happening at a time when many HIV/AIDS activists are being included in conversations with the CDC, particularly around medication, drug trials, things like that. It’s kind of that Act Up moment where you have members from ACT Up’s Treatment and Diagnosis Committee actually meeting with Anthony Fauci. But women are really being left out of this. And so many of the women who kind of build a case and understandings of disease in prison at places like Bedford Hills or Chowchilla State Correctional Facility come to mount a lawsuit. They sue the Social Security Administration, with the help of an attorney named Terry McGovern, who’s working at the HIV Law Project. And the lawsuit doesn’t actually, you know, quote, unquote, win, but it results in the CDC changing its AIDS case definition to include some, but not all, manifestations of that illness. The questions it really raises were multifold for me: one, it was sort of the legacy of this longer feminist healthcare movement, and a different idea of the body and how expertise is constructed, but also showed a lot about how administrative agencies rely on certain regimes of classification, epistemologies of disease and how it’s produced and evidence in order to create social policy, and how this is kind of a moment where you do see different institutions of what we might consider marginal sites of the welfare state, or places where the most stigmatized, most marginalized people within the welfare state really do have an impact on how that policy is interpreted, and are able to change it, but through a pretty adversarial process.

 

Daniel Story

I love the way that you all bounce these ideas around, and it makes me want to go back with you to kind of the beginning here, where you were coming in with what you maybe felt were these like discrete projects, or projects that didn’t necessarily cohere in the way that you maybe see it now. This was back in 2021 that you started your time with the Jefferson Scholars Foundation as fellows. Is that right?

 

Salonee Bhaman

I think it was yes, 2021.

 

Daniel Story  

Take me back into those early days.

 

Salonee Bhaman  

We had an initial meeting at the Jefferson Scholars Foundation where I think, I’ll say candidly, I was thrilled to have received two years of research funding where I was basically able to do what I wanted. We were all coming out of Covid, and I think it felt like the shark infested waters of the academic job market were particularly treacherous, and it felt a little bit like safe harbor. I think all of us were in a stage of figuring out our projects. I had presented a chapter about health insurance, and I had been studying the ways that private insurers were using an HIV diagnosis as a means to kick people off private insurance. It was an enormously generative conference, because we had so much time to talk about each of our papers, all working on one chapter, and we had a day long conference where we read each other’s work and gave each other feedback. We had other scholars come and offer us feedback and advice. And it was the first time I had really felt that my work, which in graduate school had been sort of this work about the history of sexuality. And often historians of capitalism did not totally understand what I was trying to do. I didn’t quite have the language to think about the project as investigating the production of inequality and understanding the levers of how the neoliberal state actually worked. And so it was through those conversations that I was able to recast my project as something that was really interested in inequality, in political economy. I had all these disparate programs, and I didn’t understand how they fit together. This really helped me understand this as part of a linked story.

 

Bobby Cervantes  

Yeah, I had an initial dissertation project that was wrecked by Covid. The amount of archival travel was just going to be impossible, given the restrictions in late 2020, early 2021. So I was coming into the Jefferson Scholars Foundation, and this meeting in the Fall of 2021 with a new project on the colonias. It just became such a bigger project, and I think it was entirely tied to the expansive thinking that happened when the four of us got in a room together. The fellowship came at the right time for me and the right time in the life of the project, and that’s kind of been paying off ever since.

 

Salem Elzway  

Maybe I’ll give like some context for listeners, they may not be familiar with what the Jefferson Scholars Foundation is. So you know, it started originally as the Miller Center, and that was like a main home for graduate students that were studying American political history. So that’s like really what the Miller Center had done for a couple of decades. The Jefferson Scholars Foundation decided to continue the Miller program under a little bit different guise, and that’s what brought the four of us together. We were actually the very first cohort of this new formation, which was really fun, because I think we all kind of understood not only are we embarking on our own journeys of our dissertation and trying to finish those, but we have this, you know, little beta group, I guess you can say, little test group, to see how this thing was going to work. I got really interested in it in my own project, because of Bobby and because of Salonee and because of Marc Aidinoff, our other colleague at the Jefferson Scholars Foundation. I never even thought I was going to engage with it in the way that I did until I met these people, which is what’s so kind of cool about this collaboration.

 

Salonee Bhaman  

We all finished our dissertations together, so I think it was something like a  trauma bond.

 

Salem Elzway  

I think we got really lucky that we found each other, at least, I’ll just speak for myself, I’m really lucky that I found these other three people, because all of our projects, they’re very different. I mean, they really do take place at different like registers and sites and scales. We’re all interested in really different questions, but there was this really cool linkage, and this is where this whole welfare history came from. And that’s what I think is useful about our contribution, is that, you know, there’s just different ways of looking at this body of scholarship, and there’s new directions we can take it in.

 

Salonee Bhaman  

Well, what was interesting is when we all got together and started thinking about this, we realized inadvertently that we all work on the welfare state in different ways, though that framing of our topics has really seemed to fall out of vogue in a lot of the academy. So we had all come in thinking that we had wildly different projects, and then as soon as we started talking about them in our first meetings, it became clear that we are all welfare state historians, just with different angles and particular topics and things that we’re enumerating on.

 

Daniel Story  

I wondered about what we are even talking about when we talk about welfare history or the welfare state.

 

Salonee Bhaman  

It’sdifficult to say what exactly welfare state history is in a small way. I think that it can encompass histories of the state. The state provides for certain people, how certain people are excluded from the state. There’s kind of selective inclusion. I know all of us have thought alongside someone like Brian Ballou to think about how liberalism has changed, or how the state has changed. I am tremendously influenced by someone like Karen Tani, who has written about disability activism and sort of the laws of the welfare state and how the administrative state does structure so much of how welfare is actually experienced, or social provision is actually experienced.

 

Bobby Cervantes  

One thing that I think sets us apart is that we all have private actors who are running the show in key ways in our histories. And so whereas I think welfare literature often follows agencies and advocates in public or in governmental structures, I think we have more imprecated stories. So I think the way we found this out was looking at the sites that we were studying. They weren’t just simply extensions of agencies or government offices or the authorities or even the activist groups that form around questions about who gets taken care of and who doesn’t. We’re looking at where the sites of where these problems surfaced. So in my work, these border colonias, these poor Latino communities on the US-Mexico border there, what happens when poor people with limited equity are trying to look for material security, and they try to do that via extra legal means. And so little to none of that is happening within governmental structures that we’re used to studying, and so it’s really about where and and how we looked at these particular sites that we’re studying that, I think, together bring us into a wider study of American welfare and the welfare state. So it’s that sort of looking at the production of inequality, and not simply its effects or its consequences. We are all writing parts of this essay from different vantage points at different points of the 20th century and different communities, different parts of of the United States. And there’s a throughline here that means that we can see overlap between all of these histories.

 

Salonee Bhaman  

My work looks the first decades of HIV/AIDS crisis, and I had initially begun thinking that it would be a pretty straightforward story of exclusion along the lines of sexuality or problematic behavior, that stigma would sort of define it. But what I found was far more like what Bobby is describing, that there are many people using multiple threads to make the best of a pretty bad situation that was never intended to account for them, but they’re often working in between different levers of power, sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully, sometimes creating programs that don’t hold up ten years down the line. But that origin story of making do with either the laws you have in place or the administrative agencies you have in place, and working between those things, is something that I think all of the actors we talk about do, and the public and the private don’t always function in our work as discrete entities that we can differentiate between. There is this new class of people who are sort of in this liminal space between public and private that I think is something new that all of us sort of bring to this conversation about what the welfare state is and how we start to understand something as complex as neoliberal assembled within it.

 

Salem Elzway  

One thing that I got really interested in is like, what, not just who is left out, but what is left out, and what do we consider the welfare state. And that’s where I think you typically think of like individuals who are engaging with the state, engaging with liberalism, typically those that are underpaid or don’t have a certain amount of resources, whether it’s from the private sector, because of exclusions, because of race or gender or sexuality, or issues like that. I got really interested in trying to think of like, how do we incorporate issues of corporate welfare. Why is it that essentially welfare for the affluent or the rich are essentially left out that has its own kind of literature? When I’m working on the history of automation, a big part of that story is talking about who is losing jobs, who is not losing jobs to machines and technology. Whether or not that’s an accurate way of assessing these things, individuals are essentially engaging interfacing with the welfare state, because they are either underemployed or unemployed, and technology has something to do with that. So there’s welfare going into these things, but then the individuals who are on the losing end of the stick, then they have to interface with the welfare state in a brand new way, and it changes the way those kind of dynamics work.

 

Salonee Bhaman  

So it felt like adding rather than intervening and changing, which at least felt more comfortable to me. Because I had, I had no beef with the scholars that came before us.

 

Bobby Cervantes  

Yeah, I think there’s a melding that’s happening in our work in ways that were we are interested in the sort of rich community studies that come out of these traditions. Whether there are, you know, there are entire books published on, you know, the ten-year Social Security or welfare fight in a community, in a random community in the United States. And then on the other side of the spectrum, maybe you have a really dense study of the Social Security Act and its amendments, and I think there’s a part of my work, and I think I think Saloni and Salem’s work also, that says we can do both of those things at the same time, that we can be interested in government and politics, especially as it gets down to really obscure agencies or county governments or city politics, and also not lose the people in those stories. And I think that’s a level of mixture that hasn’t hasn’t really happened in such a broad way that we’re proposing in this essay. Because we do look at so many different places, so many diverse places in the same 20th century. I’d say we’re asking readers to really try to wrestle with how all of these different distinct histories can be threaded together, if they would consider the argument in the introduction.

 

Daniel Story  

What do you hope readers of your piece will take away in terms of their understanding of welfare history, or maybe even the idea of collaboration among historians? What do you hope readers will take away?

 

Salem Elzway  

I guess I’ll take a shot at it. In terms of collaboration, I was very pro collaboration even before this. I’m even more pro collaboration after this. I think historians have been historically stodgy about, you know, writing pieces. It’s like, maybe we’ll do an edited collection together, or something like that. And I would rarely ever be a person who advocates for, like, taking on models of scholarship like STEM because I have my own critiques of them. But I actually do think the social sciences and, like engineering and the other sciences, a lot of their collaborative work is extremely useful. I don’t understand why we can’t do it. Obviously as historians, we do tend to work like in isolation. That’s just the nature of what we do. But I think when it comes to talking about the kind of ideas that we did in this piece, and very similar things where you’re trying to come at like a particular locus from different positions, it makes complete sense. Like, why would you not get the input? It’s just like, that’s the reason why certain edited collections work so well is because they do have some kind of overarching theme that you can approach. If I was going to speak on just like quickly, about like, what I would like to come out of this in terms of my own kind of personal research and my own work, I’ve long been a critic of American political history not taking issues like the military industrial complex seriously. It’s mostly been like that’s security studies, that sociology, other people do that kind of stuff. And there’s so much more work to be done, and there’s really great work that’s being, that is being done that I think people don’t take more seriously. And even more to that point is my primary refute of you  the history of technology and then STS, is that these are two kind of, like very disparate communities that have actually so much in common, and there’s so many different sites and actors that they share in common that really need to be discussed, I think, in much more generative ways. So that’s kind of like one of my lifelong I guess, like career goals, is to try to bring American political history into that place, and then technology and STS into American political history, because you really cannot do one without the other. And until you start to highlight where those kind of connections are, those linkages are. It’s hard to convince people, but I think this is, this is a good start.

 

Salonee Bhaman  

Yeah, I think we’re all, I don’t know, I mean, everyone’s work begins at an earlier time, but I think we can all safely describe ourselves as historians of the recent past too. And I do think that there is a certain ambivalence in our field right now about the value of studying the recent past. And I think if I would love for people to come away with anything reading this, it’s that a study and an engagement with a period of time that may have been in the reader’s lifetime can still be historically rigorous. It can still be analytically rich. It could still make deep connections with a more distant past, but that’s still history. I think that, you know, touching the 90s can sometimes feel a little bit, I’m also called a sociologist often, or told that that is the work that I’m interested in. And I think that there’s something that the archival historical method actually brings to our work that is rich and it’s political history, but it’s also helping to explain a kind of like bigger structure. And so I’m, I’m hopeful that this work can at least be a testament to the fact that you can do historical work about the 80s and 90s and have it be legible and useful. And also that ordinary people can make a difference in the like levers of power. I think I’ve been really inspired by the people I write about. That always feels a little corny to say, but I am trying to embrace saying it more. The many of the women I write about are no longer living, even though they are historical actors from the 90s, and they really take on the CDC, which is an enormously kind of obscure institution. You can’t, it’s not really an institution that people use to protest outside of it. And I guess we live in a post pandemic moment where that feels less ridiculous, but I do think that there’s something to be said about the value of individual actors thinking creatively about how to make political change. That is a through line in much of our work, too.

 

Bobby Cervantes  

I think one of the reasons why I think the colonias have evaded so much historical scrutiny is because they are in their place on the map and also their place in the historiography. I think scholars don’t know what to do with them, particularly historians. And so, you know, you’ve seen, like I said, social scientists and legal studies scholars and geographers have taken, have taken up these studies of these communities, and historians have largely not. And so I think the two takeaways I’d hope that someone would get from my essay is that US history has such a wealth of migration narratives, and urban history is such a top line subfield in the discipline. And so when we look at urban history and migration together, we are now getting wonderful studies of the ways that Latino migration has changed American cities in many ways, particularly at a time when we were reading about declension narratives in American cities, that Latinos really came in and revitalized them. So we can keep that sense of what migration has meant to the urban history of the United States, but also that it doesn’t have to be urban. That Latino migration is also a question about rural politics and rurality. These colonials are, are rural in many respects. They’re not urban. And so this sort of changes our notion about what American rurality looks like that’s not just agriculture. It’s not just white people. And so I think if we can have a more robust notion of what the rural aspect of American history is, and bring it along with a kind of hemispheric migration and the changing nature of American cities, then I think we can see the colonias rightly as a historical formation that needs to be, that needs to be written.

 

Daniel Story  

Well, Bobby, Salonee, Salem, thank you very much.

 

Salem Elzway  

Thank you.

 

Salonee Bhaman  

Thanks for having us. This was fun.

 

Bobby Cervantes

Thank you.

 

Salonee Bhaman  

I hope we sound smart.

 

Group laughter

 

Daniel Story  

That was my conversation with Salonee Bhaman, Bobby Cervantes, and Salem Elzway about their article, “A New Welfare History,” which you can find in the September 2024 issue of the AHR. History in Focus is a production of the American Historical Review, in partnership with the American Historical Association and the University Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This episode was produced by Syrus Jin and me, Daniel Story. You can find out more about this and other episodes at historians.org/ahr. That’s it for now. See you next time you.