Joe Biden’s promise to wage a so-called second war on poverty met yet another setback last month when the federal government clawed back food stipends for low-income Americans. Expanded SNAP benefits, enacted as part of the first COVID relief bill in March 2020, had been widely popular. They were effective, too, keeping over four million people out of poverty and slashing child poverty rates by an estimated 14 percent. Their termination sent millions of Americans off the “hunger cliff,” all while food prices and food production profits soar.

Like the end of enhanced unemployment benefits and the Child Tax Credit (a credit which had cut child poverty in half), the food stipend rollback exposes the vulnerabilities of welfare programs as provisional or stopgap measures. It also highlights our woeful political choice between two parties fundamentally hostile to the welfare state: one that opposes seemingly any direct benefit to working people, and another committed to a version of public relief so technocratic that it threatens to render any social program both ineffective and politically unpopular.

This impasse has a history. A long one. In detailing the US government’s first large-scale experiments in public welfare after the Civil War, Dale Kretz’s Administering Freedom: The State of Emancipation After the Freedmen’s Bureau shows how dreams for a more comprehensive welfare state were supplanted by temporary and qualified entitlements. The result is an engrossing work of historical scholarship and an affirmation of universal social programs.