Homelessness in American History

This research examines homelessness in two periods of American history: the Great Depression and the present day. The research will set forth the context and background for the subject and then compare the ways in which the state's role has changed (or not) over time with respect to the phenomenon, with reference to how social and political activists have functioned to shape the discourse of the issue.

In The Reluctant Welfare State, Jansson argues that "profound ambivalence toward the victims of social problems has existed in American society since the colonial period" (2000, p. 2). On one hand, Americans as a whole have historically tended to shape a society that reflects a good and wholesome life in general. In part that can be traced to the Preamble of the Constitution, which envisions a just, domestically tranquil society in which the general welfare is promoted and the blessings of liberty are secured for posterity. But that vision has been clouded by the harsh realities implicit in the limited access to resources that many people in America experience. In that regard, Jansson cites the economic and social problems of "immigrants, factory workers, displaced Native Americans and Spanish-speaking persons, and urban residents" (2000, p. 2). Individual and group advocacy efforts have emerged to counter the obstacles to the good life that the economically and socially disadvantaged experience, but the record of involvement and advocacy for the disadvantaged on the part of t

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opposed to the civil rights movement. On the eve of the civil rights movement, a racial fault line was embedded in the American welfare state (Brown, 1999, p. 5). Changing the picture somewhat during the 1930s was the Wagner Housing Act of 1937, which authorized the US Housing Authority and $500 million in low-cost-housing loans. Some 350 USHA projects were completed or under way by 1940--still modest in terms of meeting needs but far-reaching in implication relative to the structure of housing authority that had been deposited in the federal government. The Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenancy Act of 1937 authorized the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and "rehabilitation loans to farmers . . . low-interest, long-term loans to enable selected tenants [sharecroppers] to buy family-size farms, and aided migrants, especially by establishing chain of sanitary-well-run migratory labor camps" (Leuchtenburg, 1963, p. 141). However, large landowners and planters lobbied against benefiting tenant farmers, many of whom were black. This can be taken as an example of what Neubeck and Casenave (2001, p. 18) refer to as the practice of "dominant-class exploitation of the labor of impoverished African-Americans," which prevented their access to priva

Category: History - H