ABSTRACT
Historians hold that a great arc of social justice was constructed in 1935 with passage of the Social Security Act, which established the American welfare state. This chapter documents that the exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers, predominantly African Americans in the South and Latinos in the Southwest, has rippled through subsequent policy, undermining income and wealth accumulation for minorities of color. Although America’s social infrastructure would fail to replicate the universalism of the Scandinavian countries, it nonetheless afforded unprecedented securities for the unemployed, the elderly, the poor, the homeless, the ill, the disabled, and the victims of discrimination. Slavery and Reconstruction provide the backstory to the exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers from Social Security. The presumption that industrialized workers would benefit from a government pension was a logical extension of “welfare capitalism” as it evolved during the Progressive Era.
