A Great Many Refugees: Progressive Era Assistance in the American West

Local communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries commonly addressed the needs of refugees, defined broadly during the Progressive Era to include internally displaced people and economic migrants. These communities’ efforts to assist people in need created a type of informal pop-up welfare system of short-term assistance that provided for hundreds, and often thousands of refugees.

In A Great Many Refugees Thomas A. Krainz examines how communities in the American West cared for refugees. The ten case studies include a range of different causes that forced people to flee, including revolution, war, genocide, environmental disaster, and economic recession. Communities tapped into their local resources to provide for refugees, and this informal welfare proved--in the short term--remarkably efficient, effective, and, at times, flexible and innovative. However, local communities simply could not sustain their widespread relief efforts for long and providing meaningful and comprehensive long-term aid proved a near-universal failure.

Krainz’s examination of how Progressive Era residents cared for refugees uncovers a significant segment of welfare policies and practices that have remained largely obscured. These examples of informal, short-term assistance efforts profoundly challenge our standard depiction of local Progressive Era welfare practices as anemic and unresponsive to those in crisis.

Thomas A. Krainz is an associate professor of history at DePaul University. He is the author of Delivering Aid: Implementing Progressive Era Welfare in the American West.