This article reconsiders what is often seen as a defining feature of the mid-twentieth-century welfare state in the United States: its exclusion of agricultural workers and tenant farmers. It shows that in the cotton-producing regions of the Mississippi Valley, agricultural workers and tenants were not excluded from the welfare state but unequally incorporated into and disciplined by it. In the absence of other government protections, agricultural workers and tenant farmers leaned heavily on food assistance in the form of federal surplus commodities and, from the mid 1960s, food stamps. These food programmes mimicked older agrarian credit relations between black workers and tenants and their employers and landlords. In this way, they affirmed hierarchies of race and class even amidst the region’s rapid transformation toward mechanized and petrochemical-based agricultural production. Civil rights protests against the workings of food distribution programmes in the lower Mississippi Valley would eventually spark a national movement that instigated a massive expansion of federal food assistance programmes by the 1970s. And yet the paternalistic form of these programmes would not be fully broken.

中文翻译：

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农业工人、佃农和上世纪中叶的美国福利国家：密西西比河谷下游的视角


本文重新考虑了通常被视为 20 世纪中叶美国福利国家的决定性特征：它排斥农业工人和佃农。它表明，在密西西比河谷的棉花产区，农业工人和佃户并没有被排除在福利国家之外，而是不平等地融入福利国家并受到福利国家的纪律约束。在没有其他政府保护措施的情况下，农业工人和佃农严重依赖联邦剩余商品形式的食品援助，从 1960 年代中期开始，还依赖食品券。这些食品计划模仿了黑人工人和佃户与其雇主和房东之间旧的农业信贷关系。通过这种方式，他们肯定了种族和阶级的等级制度，即使在该地区迅速向机械化和以石化为基础的农业生产中也是如此。反对密西西比河谷下游食品分配计划运作的民权抗议最终引发了一场全国性运动，到 1970 年代引发了联邦食品援助计划的大规模扩张。然而，这些计划的家长式形式不会完全打破。