Socialist Progressives

to "work."

Poor relief and its successor programs are systems of assistance, but they are also systems of degradation. From the beginning, such programs gave meager assistance to those who turned to it, often conditioning rations of gruel on hard labor. And it also conditioned whatever assistance was provided on close monitoring of the behavior of the poor, and also on rituals of public humiliation. Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden, and learned to be ashamed of their nakedness; the recipients of poor relief were cast out of the self-respecting community and made into a public spectacle. In medieval England paupers were branded, put in the stocks, tied to carts on market day. In the 20th-century United States they were castigated as “welfare queens” and made to don orange DayGlo vests while they picked up trash in the parks. When Bill Clinton called on voters to “end welfare as we know it,” he was drawing on that popular antipathy to people who are “dependent.”