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This chapter discusses the role of social work in disaster relief and management. Social workers need to be prepared in anticipation of disaster rather than waiting until disaster strikes. Social work curricula need to incorporate disaster management so that a new generation of social workers will be trained and prepared for disasters. Ongoing training must also be developed for practicing social workers. However, social work has not yet developed or prioritized disaster management as an integral part of curriculum and practice. The social work profession is highly grounded in the principles of social justice and human rights. Its active involvement in disaster management is pivotal to creating a plan that links vulnerable populations to required resources before, during, and after a disaster.

This chapter examines the implementation and institutionalization of the international disaster relief norm. Placing the emergence of this norm in the late nineteenth century with changing conceptions of natural disaster and a growing humanitarian ethos, international disaster relief was implemented and later institutionalized as a voluntary activity on the part of states, loosely coordinated through international mechanisms. Focusing on the establishment of the League of Red Cross Societies and the International Relief Union, this chapter argues that international institutionalization followed domestic implementation of international disaster relief in the United States, and thus was profoundly influenced by American power, both ideational and material. The chapter concludes that the basic tenets of international disaster relief, contested and largely settled in the inter-war period, continue to shape and limit the current international disaster relief regime.

This chapter shows how La Follette and later advocates for the New Deal called upon the history of social provision for disaster victims to make an argument that the Depression was a disaster that deserved, even mandated, federal relief. The Democrats' indictment of Hoover was not that he was too bound by tradition to respond to the economic disaster before him, but that he refused to take up the tools that were already at hand. A central element in the political mobilization of the New Deal was the disaster narrative writ large: the entire country was the victim of a pervasive disaster, the Depression. La Follette devoted his time on the floor of the Senate to reading hundreds of letters from public officials and businessmen from across the country to establish the point that the economic downturn was both severe and national in scope.

This chapter details the growth of disaster relief appropriations, both in number and in scale, over the course of the century leading up to the New Deal. This occurred during precisely the period now associated most closely with the dominance of laissez-faire ideology and the decided lack of any federal welfare state. Significantly, constitutional objections to disaster relief spending were infrequently raised in Congress, and were often quickly brushed aside as irrelevant in the face of the imperative to respond to blameless suffering.

This introductory chapter begins with a review of the history of federal disaster relief. This is followed by an overview of the subsequent chapters. It then addresses the question of why scholars have missed the importance of disaster relief, given its importance to the American welfare state.

This chapter studies how, after his landslide reelection in 1972, Richard Nixon began his campaign to change the trajectory of American disaster policy and create a new era in which preparation and mitigation at the local level of government was a requirement to receive any assistance from the federal government. In signing the Disaster Relief Act of 1974 on May 22 of that year, Nixon remarked that this bill “truly brings the new federalism to our disaster preparedness and assistance activities.” The significance of the Disaster Relief Act of 1974 is debatable; some analysts see it as a continuation of practices set into motion by the Disaster Relief Act of 1950, whereas others see it as a significant departure from prior disaster legislation. The Disaster Relief Act of 1974 marked the beginning of the regulatory phase of disaster assistance, an era in which the federal government limited federal costs and forced individuals and communities to assume some of the responsibility of living in disaster-prone areas. The legislation contained the provisions requiring states and localities to take steps to mitigate future disasters. Moreover, it required communities to have plans and contingencies for disaster, which laid the foundation of the professionalization of emergency management. The chapter then considers the creation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

This chapter traces the history and expansion of federal disaster aid, beginning with the Disaster Relief Act of 1950. Under the Disaster Relief Act of 1950, the federal government assumed a permanent role and new responsibility for assisting local communities and state governments after a disaster. Between the 1950 legislation and the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, U.S. Congress allocated an ever-increasing amount of money toward disaster relief and added new benefits for disaster victims. As a consequence, the number of executive agencies and civil servants involved in dealing with disaster recovery multiplied. Disaster assistance, which was once aimed exclusively at state and local governments, now included direct payments to private citizens affected by natural disaster. This pattern of adding new benefits to disaster legislation culminated in the Disaster Relief Act of 1970, which made permanent all the benefits and programs found in previous acts, making these programs tantamount to a new entitlement. President Nixon was not pleased with the existing entitlement programs and tried to reduce the role of the federal government by empowering the states to prepare for, and deal with, a disaster on their own.

This book offers a social history of the tension between the state's often bumbling attempts to help and control, on one hand, and citizens' work to receive that help and reject control during disasters, on the other. Focusing on the Salem fire of 1914 and the Halifax explosion of 1917, it examines issues of power and politics that accompanied disaster citizenship during the Progressive Era that saw survivors develop networks of solidarity and obligation to help each other. The book is divided into three sections: the first is about individuals in the first hours and days of each of the Salem and Halifax disasters; the second explores how informal communities like families and neighborhoods responded to the disasters and to the state over the span of weeks and months; and the third section looks at how Salemites and Haligonians created formal, explicit political demands and institutions from the informal and implicit politics of disaster relief and aid. The last section also considers how churches and unions responded to the disasters and to the growth of the state.

This chapter shows that deference to precedent and the early crystallization of the basic structure of the disaster narrative did not preclude innovation in what counted as a “disaster.” Instead, it defined the hurdles that a claimant had to overcome in order to be compensated as others had been in the past. In particular, a successful disaster story had to identify an entity or event that was wholly outside the control of the would-be victim, yet which was causally linked to an outcome intimately affecting his material condition. The chapter traces efforts to expand the role of the disaster relief precedent, beginning with its use to authorize the Freedmen's Bureau in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War through measures such as the effort to secure federal aid to education in the 1880, unemployment relief during the Depression of 1893, and federal farm loans during the first decades of the twentieth century.

This chapter draws on a wide variety of government and private-sector data sources to document the size and causes of various expenditures from 1989 to 2008. The analysis suggests that these expenses, which have been escalating rapidly, are to a large extent predictable and therefore could be better accounted for and controlled. The chapter makes a case for the likely continuing high rate of federal spending growth for catastrophes. One reason for the steady and protracted cost growth is the increasing value of infrastructure exposed to catastrophe. Disaster relief expenditures have been the most significant component of federal catastrophe exposure. Another driver of cost growth is the political process. While some of these obligations are explicit in the law, much of the assistance that is provided is “discretionary.”

This chapter moves beyond the induced changes in social environments and focuses on villagers' choices among institutional solutions for handling issues as well as on their assessment of institutions for monitoring village cadres and holding them accountable. Villagers' evaluations of imposed rule-based institutions for conflict resolution, disaster/crisis relief, modest credit and small loans, and regulating village cadres' behaviors are systematically examined using discrete choice models that combine the 2008 Asian Barometer Survey Mainland China Survey and the 2008 National Village Survey. As expected, in loosely coupled villages characterized by a medium level of outward migration, imposed rule-based institutions are more likely to attract villagers' attention and become their choice for addressing local governance issues. Imposed rule-based institutions are also more likely to be used for supervising village cadres and holding them accountable. These findings highlight the influence of structural features on villagers' choice to use imposed rule-based institutions.

This chapter examines how Richard Nixon mixed politics and policy in his response to Hurricane Agnes. To aid in winning his reelection bid in 1972, Nixon was determined to play politics with disaster relief legislation, mainly as it applied to New York and Pennsylvania. In order to gain Nixon as many votes as possible from the disaster, the Nixon White House wrote, and Congress enacted, the most generous disaster aid package in American history to that time: the Agnes Recovery Act of 1972. The relationship between disasters and elections has generated a body of research that shows a strong correlation between when and where presidents issue a disaster declaration. Disaster declarations are more frequent in highly competitive swing states during presidential election years, and presidents favor those states that may benefit them or their party in the election, as Nixon did in response to Hurricane Agnes.

This chapter examines how the Halifax explosion changed local churches and unions, as well as the ways that membership in a church or union altered the individuals' and families' experiences of the disaster. In applying for and receiving disaster relief, disaster survivors were sorted by organizational membership—in churches, in clubs, and in other formal institutions. When Haligonians applied for aid from the Halifax and Dartmouth Relief Committees and their successor, the Halifax Relief Commission, they were asked, among other things, what organizations they belonged to, including their church, their union, and their fraternal societies. This chapter compares the Halifax Relief Commission's instrumental use of churches, which emphasized clerical authority, with the ways that lay congregants chose to use churches to come to terms with their grief. It also considers how unions responded to the considerable growth of the technocratic, interventionist, progressive state during World War I.

This chapter examines the role of disaster relief in the development of constitutional doctrines regarding the powers of Congress during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning in the 1890s, with the Sugar Bounty Cases, the history of congressional appropriation for disaster relief was repeatedly cited in Supreme Court briefs and opinions and in policy debates as conclusive proof that Congress had virtually unlimited power not only to spend for the general welfare, but also to define what the “general welfare” consisted of. By the 1920, the notion that Congress' power to tax and appropriate was unconstrained by the enumerated powers, and not subject to judicial review was widely accepted as settled doctrine. The few opponents of an unfettered Congressional spending power, notably southern advocates of state's rights, were increasingly marginalized in discussions about national power in the decades leading up to the New Deal.

This chapter examines how the people of Halifax integrated disaster relief aid into their complex family economies following the explosion. Relief workers and managers offered aid that seemed obvious after the Halifax explosion destroyed houses and rendered them uninhabitable. However, only a few people availed themselves of the help extended by the army, people, and institutions of Halifax, often preferring to stay in their ruined houses, in the overcrowded homes of their friends and relatives, or even in hastily jerry-rigged shacks. Drawing on a random sample of 739 case files of the Halifax Relief Commission, this chapter considers how survivors and other Haligonians engaged in delicate, subtle, and often tacit negotiations as they sought to maximize the material aid they claimed from the state while minimizing the autonomy and privacy the state took from them in return. It shows that many Haligonians rejected, or tried to reject, the new bureaucratic machine that offered them money and other material aid, and instead turned to the reciprocal solidarity of people they knew.

This book has explored the tensions generated by disasters over issues of power and politics as well as the growth of the interventionist state during the Progressive Era. It has shown how Salemites and Haligonians crafted their disaster citizenship in response to the fire and explosion, respectively. Salem and Halifax were both cities of comrades before their disasters; in the wake of the fire and explosion, families, neighbors, friends, and coworkers had to rely on patterns and traditions of self-help, informal organization, and solidarity that they developed before crisis hit their cities. Survivors and their relievers differed in their experiences of order and disorder after each disaster. This conclusion first reflects on the movie The City of Comrades, and the three key insights it provides: the very existence of everyday solidarity practiced by ordinary people; this solidarity waits latently; the value of solidarity is not only material but also spiritual and emotional. It then discusses some lessons that the Salem and Halifax disasters offer for contemporary disaster relief.

This chapter considers the importance of disaster relief to the American state. It discusses how relief programs become more vulnerable to criticism the longer they last, and argues that permanent relief programs require constant political protection and renewal in order to survive.

Disappointed with ASA's program of social action, and fearing that his donors would desert him, Choudhury turned ASA into a more conventional NGO that delivered services in the countryside, mostly in health, education, legal aid, and postdisaster relief and rehabilitation. But meanwhile, other NGOs were having success with microcredit, and members of ASA groups increasingly demanded that ASA move in the same direction. For the time being, ASA resisted. This was in the 1980s, a period of army rule during which Bangladesh slowly began to grow economically, especially after the introduction of a new industry, the manufacture of garments for export.