Before the New Deal: Social Welfare in the South, 1830-1930.

Edited by Elna C. Green. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, c. 1999. Pp. xxvi, 222. Paper, $18.00, ISBN 0-8203-2114-1; cloth, $36.00, ISBN 0-8203-2091-9.)

Before the New Deal is a useful addition to the field of social welfare history and general scholarship on the U.S. South. Green and the authors included in this volume relate a neglected history that points others to "some of the rich, untouched documentary sources" that help "firmly [link] social welfare history with southern history" (p. vii).

Green opens the book with a thoughtful overview of current scholarship related to the book's theme. She closes with a good bibliography citing the small collection of dissertations, master's theses, journal articles, and books on social welfare in the South. Green correctly notes that Elizabeth Wisner's "pioneering" book, Social Welfare in the South from Colonial Times to World War I (Baton Rouge, 1970), remains "the closest thing to a general history" of the subject (p. xxiv n. 15). She faults general works such as Clarke A. Chambers's Seedtime of Reform: American Social Service and Action, 1918-1933 (Minneapolis, 1963), Walter I. Trattner's From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America (New York, 1974), and Theda Skocpol's more recent Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1992) for paying little attention to regional distinctions or to the South. Green credits historians working on southern women's history with helping to fill this void.

The ten essays in Before the New Deal suggest that the South's social welfare history is, for the most part, unique. In Part One, "State Policies," Peter Wallenstein examines Georgia's lunatic asylums (1830s-1880s), Kathleen Gorman analyzes Confederate pensions as social welfare (1865-1952), James H. Tuten provides an overview of the residents living at Alabama's Jefferson County Poor Farm (1885-1945), and Susan Hamburger investigates the creation and operation of Richmond's home for destitute Confederate women (1898-1990).

In Part Two Elna Green provides an overview of social welfare policies in New Orleans by focusing on the city's Charity Organization Society (1870s-1920s). Mazie Hough emphasizes the importance of religion in the region's social welfare institutions by looking at Tennessee's treatment of unwed mothers (1872-1937). E. Susan Barber highlights the postwar South's white Civil War orphans living in Memphis (1861-1960s). Lee S. Polansky shows the complex interaction of southern clubwomen and municipal officials during the 1914 establishment and operation of Georgia's school for delinquent girls. The book's last two chapters strongly underscore the importance of race in the region's social welfare history. Joan Marie Johnson compares the activities of black and white clubwomen in the New South (1900-1930), while Georgina Hickey uses an analysis of Atlanta's social welfare agencies during the Progressive era as a window for viewing the importance of gender and racial stereotypes in the development of urban public health and welfare policies. Each of the volume's chapters is well written and provides new insights supporting the book's overall theme that region matters.

Rather than the common stereotype of the South as a place largely devoid of private and public social welfare, Before the New Deal shows a regional embrace of social welfare efforts carefully shaped by culture and demographics. This collection offers new perspectives on a neglected history. As Green notes, although these ten discrete essays "offer no firm consensus" on the uniqueness of southern social welfare history (p. xviii), Before the New Deal is still a step in the right direction that should inspire further scholarship sensitive to regional distinctiveness.

KRISTE LINDENMEYER
University of Maryland, Baltimore County