Dividing the Poor: Congressional Representation in Rhetoric and Policy during the New Deal

Diament, Sean Matthew

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-raj0-qh36

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Dividing the Poor: Congressional Representation in Rhetoric and Policy during the New Deal

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Existing scholarship documents the low levels of political power held by the American poor, and concomitant economic elite domination of Congress. Since the poor seldom elect lawmakers that share their descriptive traits, they necessarily rely on non-poor lawmakers virtually representing their interests. A key part of this virtual representation is how lawmakers conceptualize the poor, leading to two questions: how do lawmakers conceive of and politically construct the poor, and along what basis are the poor divided during the policymaking process? This dissertation answers these questions with a novel empirical assessment of poverty representation through rhetoric and policy in the high salience, path-breaking period of the long New Deal (1933-1946). Previous scholarship demonstrates the divisive nature of New Deal programs, but these works have not fully interrogated how the way in which the poor were represented contributed to such division. This dissertation finds lawmakers do not view the poor as a coherent economic class, but instead as an amalgam of groups with varied import across members, thereby shifting attention toward a fundamentally sociopolitical group-based analytical framework. The process of division provides mixed results, as Congress proves effective at gathering information and depicting the breadth of specific types of poverty across the country. However, lawmakers are much less successful at reconciling this awareness to materially address the deepest forms of poverty. Instead, lawmakers weigh the poor against one another, where only the most virtuous gain policy incorporation. In the critical moments when lawmakers are inclined to affirmatively construct antipoverty policy, myopia and ulterior motives—such as the needs of non-poor interest groups—inform the choice of policy design. Consequently, the perpetuation of poverty is a conscious political outcome of the praxis of poor representation, wherein expediently dividing the poor into stratified sub-groups is a central tendency in national politics.

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