Introduction

Summary

Giving is the most dangerous thing in the world – unless, of course, it is well administered.

– William E. Royer, welfare director, Montgomery County, Maryland

The test of a free society will be found in the scope of right and privilege possessed by its weakest elements – those who are under the greatest pressure to surrender their independence.

– A. Delafield Smith, assistant general counsel, Federal Security Agency

When Senator John F. Kennedy declared in 1960 that the nation was entering a promising and perilous “New Frontier” – “a turning-point in history” – Newburgh, New York, seemed to belong in the proverbial dust heap. Once the headquarters for General George Washington and the Continental Army, and a century later a hub for industry and transportation, Newburgh was falling into ruin. Its population was declining, its housing stock decaying, and its economy failing. City Manager Joseph McDowell Mitchell claimed to know exactly whom to blame: the city's hundreds of “chiselers and loafers,” “freeload[ing]” migrants, “social parasites,” and “illegitimate children.” They burned through “taxpayer” dollars, he alleged, bringing in return only crime, blight, and immoral behavior. If Newburgh could simply reassert traditional, local controls over the poor, he insisted, the city would recover its former glory.

On May Day in 1961, Mitchell gave Newburgh's citizens their first glimpse of “home rule” reclaimed, when he summoned all “reliefers” to the police station. Some endured questions about their sexual behavior, drinking, and criminal records, while others waited hours in line. The real blitz, however, occurred on June 20, when Mitchell sent a thirteen-point memo to the city's commissioner of public welfare. Among the changes he ordered were the issuing of welfare “vouchers” rather than cash payments; a monthly review of all Aid to Dependent Children files; a cap on welfare expenditures; and the imposition of strict time limits on relief – strictest of all for those who were “new to the city,” such as Puerto Ricans and black migrants from the South. Mitchell also ordered the denial of relief to broad categories of applicants: “all able-bodied adult males” and other “physically capable” persons who refused employment; all applicants who had “left a job voluntarily”; and women who repeatedly bore children out of wedlock. And this, Mitchell promised, was to be “only the beginning.”