The Origins of Means-Testing

With the demise of Reconstruction, African Americans shifted from federal allies to federal claimants. The grossly understudied Freedmen’s Branch, established in 1872, continued the bureau’s work of settling bounties and shifted the welfare system from “a potential vehicle to deliver collective justice” toward handling freedpeoples’ petitions for back pay, unpaid enlistment bounties, and federal pensions.

Navigating a new, more constricted bureaucracy required black families to marshal an incredible amount of evidence and testimony in support of their claims, often in collaboration with other soldiers, families, and communities. Kretz calls this mobilization to secure military benefits “the most underappreciated achievement” of the Reconstruction era.

But freedpeoples’ vestigial connection to federal power was hard and often humiliating. Postwar entitlements were “inherently exclusionary, conceived and defended as a deliberate rejection of egalitarian programs based in social citizenship.” Unreasonable burdens of proof and credibility fell disproportionately on freedwomen: widows, mothers, and daughters. In callous, routinized medical examinations, formerly enslaved people were often forced to recount the horrors they’d experienced in front of racist physicians and former enslavers. This bureaucratic hoop-jumping “set a precedent for federal endeavors in welfare that were at once invasive in their means and limited in their benefits, an insidious way to discourage participation.”

The struggle for federal pensions required even more of black claimants. With the demise of the Freedmen’s Branch in 1879, the pension claims of freedpeople flowed exclusively through the US Pension Bureau. The agency, however, relied on a byzantine system of procedural divisions, special investigators and examiners, and obstacles of documentation, legibility, and physical mobility, as “health” became synonymous with the ability to perform manual labor. Semi-privatized and corrupt examining boards didn’t merely diagnose disability; they also quantified and commodified it by speculating “how much an impairment inhibited one’s theoretical wage-earning potential.” Thousands of outsourced physicians assigned inconsistent proportional disability ratings that deemed certain claimants as “worthy” and others as “lazy” or fraudulent. Although the Dependent and Disability Pension Act of 1890 streamlined the claims process, the Pension Bureau would “always be more concerned about nefarious individuals bluffing their way into a pension than they were about crooked agencies cheating Black pensioners en masse.”

Nor did racial representation solve the bureau’s ills. Although the integrated and statutorily race-neutral Pension Bureau elevated a black professional class of aspiring clerks, accountants, attorneys, and physicians, black employment in the bureau did not wipe out the glaring racial disparities. In fact, many of these respectability-minded African Americans, by virtue of their class position, regularly pooh-poohed calls for broader redistributive measures in favor of more “realistic” solutions.