Across the early years of the twenty-first century, as masses of migrants—displaced by war, persecution, ecological crisis, and political and economic instability—have departed from their homes and traveled across borders in search of refuge, public officials and the communities they serve have been called upon to make choices about how to respond to the presence of the stranger in need. At the heart of Thomas Krainz’s fascinating and meticulously researched study, A Great Many Refugees: Progressive Era Assistance in the American West, is a reminder that we are not alone in grappling with these concerns. As Krainz demonstrates, communities across the early twentieth-century American West faced similar questions about how to address the need and suffering of those displaced by natural and human-made crises.

To make these comparisons legible, Krainz follows the lead of his early twentieth-century counterparts and adopts an expansive definition of who can be considered a refugee. Long before the definition of refugee was precisely codified in international law, in the highly mobile American West of the early twentieth century, mass numbers of people faced sudden and forcible displacement as a consequence of war, genocide, ecological disaster, and socioeconomic instability. Through a series of ten illustrative case studies, A Great Many Refugees interrogates how these displaced persons were treated in the places they fled to and, in turn, seeks out explanations for the differential kinds of treatment they received.

The explanations Krainz presents are complex. The way that any given community responded to an influx of destitute newcomers was shaped by countless variables, in terms of the community’s sentiments and resources, the pace and scale of the migration, and the identity of the refugees themselves. Consider, for example, the stark difference between the warm reception given to the small groups of Anglo-Mormon migrants who fled to El Paso during the Mexican Revolution’s early years (circa 1911–1912) versus the cold antagonism that greeted larger groups of impoverished Mexican migrants who sought safety on the U.S. side of the border as the conflict persisted into the 1914–1916 period. In yet another instance, Krainz shows that survivors of the same natural disaster—a massive 1910 forest fire that destroyed settlements across the northwest—received starkly differential treatment based on the community where they sought refuge. Whereas business and civic leaders in Missoula, Montana, quickly sprang into action to aid the survivors in their midst, city leaders in Spokane, Washington, were more suspicious of the newcomers and, accordingly, took much less initiative when it came to addressing their needs. Among all groups of displaced people, viewed with perhaps the most ambivalence of all were the jobless workers who, at the onset of economic crisis, congregated in large numbers within western cities. Community leaders often discounted arguments that the migrant unemployed were victims of economic processes beyond their control and tended to view them, instead, as having had a hand in causing their own suffering and as posing a threat to the community. Attempts to meet the needs of economically displaced migrants were, oftentimes, correspondingly limited and controversial.

Krainz’s study, in short, highlights that Progressive Era communities in the American West responded to the arrival of groups of needy and displaced migrants in ways that defy easy characterization. Indeed, across the case studies that Krainz features, the overall picture is one of heterogeneity and a decidedly mixed record when it came to robustly and effectively providing for the needs of displaced persons. While communities occasionally implemented innovative and responsive ways of addressing the needs of the destitute newcomers they hosted (Krainz consistently uses the term pop-up welfare to describe how local relief committees could, as if overnight, dramatically expand to serve a wide range of needs presented by a vastly increased ground of people), just as often community leaders attempted to put their existing public aid machinery to work on behalf of refugees and did so in a slow, reluctant, and short-lived fashion.

For scholars of the American welfare state, Krainz’s study yields numerous instructive insights. Progressive Era scholars, as Krainz notes, have tended to give their attention to the innovations in governance that developed during the era. In other words, scholars have generally focused on the way that—in order to address the emergent conflicts growing out of industrialization, urbanization, and mass migration—reformers launched the initiatives that, over time, grew into what we would recognize today as the modern liberal state. As a consequence, the way that local communities utilized the antiquated architecture of localized American poor relief—a holdover from the seventeenth century—to respond to the need of masses of displaced persons has largely slipped under the proverbial radar, despite being so highly resonant of contemporary concerns. Krainz’s study highlights, in other words, that during the Progressive Era local communities regularly wrestled with questions about how to address the needs presented by displaced persons. Perhaps surprisingly, though, he finds that to do so they often relied on the centuries-old machinery of local poor relief.

Part of what makes this finding so interesting is not just the durability of localized poor relief amidst an era of dynamic change but also the way that local business elites—with the relative strength of their fiscal and logistical resources and the power of their political pull—dominated how these systems operated. It was, as these episodes demonstrate, the sentiments of local business elites that often determined who would receive what kind of relief and for how long. For scholars who study the development of the welfare state in later eras, Krainz’s work offers insight into the reasons why—as Progressive Era innovations cleared the way for more federal social welfare policy—these local elites felt so much alarm at the dwindling of their local power. This is an insight that especially, and perhaps only, emerges from Krainz’s careful attention to grassroots governance at work.

A Great Many Refugees makes, in sum, a well-researched, original, and valuable contribution to the literature on the evolution of social policy in the United States. Providing us with extraordinarily rich and complex snapshots of Progressive Era local governments at work, this book deepens our understanding of how the turn-of-the-century state worked and who it did (and did not) serve. It does so, as Krainz foregrounds, with an aim of reminding us that better understanding of our past can anchor and inform our approach to the troubling concerns of our present.