The Decision to Exclude Agricultural and Domestic Workers from the 1935 Social Security Act

The Social Security Act of 1935 excluded from coverage about half the workers in the American economy. Among the excluded groups were agricultural and domestic workers--a large percentage of whom were African Americans. This has led some scholars to conclude that policymakers in 1935 deliberately excluded African Americans from the Social Security system because of prevailing racial biases during that period. This article examines both the logic of this thesis and the available empirical evidence on the origins of the coverage exclusions. The author concludes that the racial-bias thesis is both conceptually flawed and unsupported by the existing empirical evidence. The exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers from the early program was due to considerations of administrative feasibility involving tax-collection procedures. The author finds no evidence of any other policy motive involving racial bias. Introduction In recent years, some scholars have argued that the U.S. Social Security program--like some other social institutions--is biased against women and African Americans. One major contention along these lines involves the original coverage exclusions of the Social Security Act of 1935. The 1935 act limited its provisions to workers in commerce and industry (this is what is known as the program's "coverage"). This meant that the new social insurance program applied to about half the jobs in the economy. Among those left out were farm and domestic workers. Contemporary scholars have looked at this provision of the 1935 act, realized that a disproportionate number of African Americans were in these two occupational groups, and concluded that the disproportionate impact is evidence of a racial bias as the motive for this coverage exclusion. An important key to the argument is the additional assumption that Southern Democrats in Congress were the agents who engineered this restrictive coverage policy. Thus, the full argument is that Southern Democrats in Congress--motivated by racial animus--moved to block African Americans from participation in the new Social Security program and that this was the reason for the provision excluding farm and domestic labor (Gordon 1994; Brown 1999; Lieberman 1995; Williams 2003; Poole 2006). The Race Explanation The description of Social Security's restrictive coverage policy has become so epigrammatic that it has passed over from historical narrative to background historical fact; it has been assumed and repeated as a basic datum about the program's origin. For example, one recent labor-history text summed up the issue of Social Security and race this way: The Social Security Act was also racially coded--in part because of the power of Southern Democrats in the New Deal coalition. Southern politicians, reported one architect of the new law, were determined to block any 'entering wedge' for federal interference with the handling of the Negro question. Southern employers worried that federal benefits would discourage black workers from taking low-paying jobs in their fields, factories, and kitchens. Thus neither agricultural laborers nor domestic servants--a pool of workers that included at least 60 percent of the nation's black population--were covered by old-age insurance. (Lichtenstein and others 2000, 429) One of the strongest early statements of the thesis was given by Robert C. Lieberman (1995, 514-515), who asserted, "The Old Age Insurance provisions of the Social Security Act were founded on racial exclusion. In order to make a national program of old-age benefits palatable to powerful Southern congressional barons, the Roosevelt administration acceded to a Southern amendment excluding agricultural and domestic employees from OAI coverage." Linda Gordon (1994, 514-515) in her influential study of the welfare state, merged a discussion of the public assistance titles of the 1935 Social Security Act with the contributory social insurance title and offered a misleading critique of both: "Social Security excluded the most needy groups from all its programs, even the inferior ones. …