From the New Deal to the Great Society: The Role of the South in Opposing the Welfare State

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The government sector in the United States has grown significantly in the last fifty years, with much of the growth coming in the area of social welfare programs. In 1960, the government accounted for 30% of the goods and services produced in the U.S., while in 1932, it accounted for only 21%. This growth has been explained by theories based on the power of pressure groups, coalitions and bureaucracies. But these theories account more for the forces promoting rapid growth than the timing of that growth. The contribution of this project comes from studying the way in which growth of government can be restrained by powerful sectors of the economy that resist modernization. More specifically, the project shows how welfare programs were delayed in the South in the 1930s by Southern agricultural planters in order to keep labor costs low and how this resistance to federal welfare programs declined after World War II due to the mechanization of agriculture. Planters provided their agricultural workers with a wide array of paternalistic benefits in lieu of some monetary compensation. These benefits were used to elicit from workers both loyalty and a measure of deference which kept the costs of agricultural labor low and maintained the South's existing socio-economic system. Federal welfare programs made tying workers to specific plantations more expensive. With mechanization, planters no longer needed to tie workers to their plantation because of the dramatic reduction in labor demand.