How Today’s White Middle Class Was Made Possible By Welfare

Between 2001 and 2010, West­more­land Coun­ty, Pa., lost at least 8,000 man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs. That’s one expla­na­tion for why this once-blue region gave more votes to Don­ald Trump than did any oth­er Penn­syl­va­nia coun­ty, help­ing swing the state in his favor and pro­pelling him to a sur­prise victory.

We want our jobs back,” John Golomb, a retired steel­work­er in West­more­land Coun­ty and life­long Demo­c­rat who vot­ed for Trump, told the Wall Street Jour­nal, adding that pre­vi­ous pres­i­dents from both par­ties ​“for­got us.”

A form of his­tor­i­cal amne­sia also afflicts West­more­land Coun­ty. Large­ly absent from dis­cus­sions of its decline are the ambi­tious social wel­fare pro­grams that once helped its res­i­dents climb out of pover­ty. Two gen­er­a­tions ago, this area of rur­al Penn­syl­va­nia was the site of a sweep­ing — and suc­cess­ful — fed­er­al hous­ing pro­gram. The New Deal sub­sis­tence home­stead pro­gram, launched in 1933 with $25 mil­lion, built mod­ern homes for low-wage indus­tri­al work­ers and gave them plots of land for sub­sis­tence farm­ing. In this cor­ner of coal coun­try dev­as­tat­ed by dan­ger­ous labor prac­tices and low wages, fed­er­al offi­cials con­struct­ed a new com­mu­ni­ty that gave poor white fam­i­lies a step­ping-stone to home own­er­ship and the mid­dle class.

Continue reading here at In These Times, courtesy of Margaret Garb.