Foregrounding the Freedmen’s Bureau: A Heterodox Welfare State History

ABSTRACT The Freedmen’s Bureau was the first national U.S. welfare institution. This fact has not, however, motivated scholars to draw duly substantive connections between the Bureau and the welfare state. This article traces empirical patterns of labor, gender, and race from their first nationalization under the Bureau to their formative influence on the evolution of what is considered to be the welfare state. The article goes on to show the Bureau to mark the first instance of an actual U.S. welfare state. More importantly, the resulting reconceptualization suggests the Bureau to represent the only historical instance of an actual U.S. welfare state, all subsequent formations comprising merely a performative welfare state for lack of their attempt, or even intention, to fully rectify the enduring racial injustice inherited from chattel slavery. The performative welfare state, as it were, has thereby only ever prescribed systemically inequitable normativity antithetical to the notion of welfare.