The decentralized character and anti-transfer bias of American social programmes are tied to the fundamental cleavage that continues to shape the politics of social policy in the United States, namely race(Piven and Cloward,1994;Skocpol,1988; Quadagno, 1988; 1994). The New Deal pilitics of the 1930s was driven and constrained by an unusual coalition inside the Democratic Party that included both northern labour and a southerm planter-merchant oligarchy struggling to preserve a pre-industrial plantation economy based on indentured black labour. As Jill Quadagno(1988) has shown,contral over key Congressional committees allowed the Southern wing of the Democratic Party to exclude southern blacks from the New Deal in the name of "state rights". Eligibility craiteria and benefit levels for Old Age Assistance,Unemployment Insurance,and Aid to Families with Dependent Children were left to the discretion of the states since programmes that created national standards would have undermined the southern economy.Agricultural workers were excluded from Old Age Insurance since even the meagre sum of $15 a month would provide more cash than a cropper family might see in a year.