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The Making of an Enemy: How Welfare Policies Construct the Poor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Evelyn Z. Brodkin
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Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , Fall 1993 , pp. 647 - 670
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Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1993 

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References

1 Gergen's reply neatly evaded the question of how “truth” and “symbolic truth” differ and the terms on which the latter could be made “defensible.” This interchange was reported in an article that dealt with the difficulties faced by Lani Guinier when her scholarly reputation was debated in Congress, at times, without apparent regard for available evidence. In the furor over her nomination to the Justice Department, critics dubbed her a “quota queen,” evoking the epithet “welfare queen” used in attacks on welfare recipients. Michael Kelly, “The Guinier Affair Aggravates Clinton's Credibility Problem,”N.Y. Times, 6 June 1993, sec. 4, p. 1.Google Scholar

2 Consider for a moment that the most familiar phenomena may be the most difficult to see with any accuracy. For example, there is a simple test of perception in which a broken line is seen by the observer as a continuous one, demonstrating the power of expectation in shaping perception. In social science as well, familiarity with a given phenomenon may influence one's vision, making it relatively easy to track the expected but difficult to perceive the unknown.Google Scholar

3 Among the notable exceptions from the 1970s are Gilbert Steiner, The State of Welfare (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1971); F. Piven & R. Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York: Vintage Books, 1971) (“Piven & Cloward, Regulating the Poor”); M. Rein & H. Heclo, “What Welfare Crisis? A Comparison among the United States, Britain, and Sweden,” 33 Pub. Interest 61 (1973). More recently, see P. Peterson & M. Rom, “American Federalism, Welfare Policy, and Residential Choices,” 83 Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 711 (189); and Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992) (“Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers”).Google Scholar

4 Theory suggests that social categorization can function either to vilify or to vindicate targeted subgroups of the population. See, e.g., Murray J. Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Schneider, A. & Ingram, H., “Social Construction of Target Populations: Implications for Politics and Policy,” 87 Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 334 (1993); and Stone, D., “Causal Stories and the Formation of Policy Agendas,” 104 Pol. Sci. Q. 281 (1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Thomas Ross, in an insightful article, spells out some of the implications of this categorization process for “the poor.” According to Ross, “The first rhetorical step, the creation of the abstraction of the ‘poor,’ is an easily overlooked yet powerful part of the rhetoric of poverty. We are so used to speaking of the poor as a distinct class that we overlook the rhetorical significance of speaking this way. By focusing on the single variable of economic wealth and then drawing a line on the wealth continuum, we create a class of people who are them not us.”Ross, Thomas, “The Rhetoric of Poverty: Their Immorality, Our Helplessness,” 79 Geo. L.J. 1499 (1991).Google Scholar

5 Stone, 104 Pol. Sci. Q., describes the strategic uses of causal stories in defining public problems and assigning blame. As she explains, “Problem definition is a process of image making, where the images have to do fundamentally with attributing cause, blame, and responsibilities. Conditions, difficulties, or issues thus do not have inherent properties that make them more or less likely to be seen as problems or to be expanded. Rather, political actors deliberately portray them in ways calculated to gain support for their side.”Id. at 282.Google Scholar

6 Handler and Hasenfeld criticize so-called moralist views of poverty, contending that “the analysis of welfare policy is colored by the morally prescribed lenses through which the moralists view the world” (at 11). As they and others have pointed out, analysis pursued from this perspective may marshal social science evidence to make a case but without necessarily subscribing to its rules of analytic rigor. For a fascinating critical exchange concerning this type of argumentation, see Michael Sosin's debate with Lawrence Mead in 61 Soc. Serv. Rev. 156 & 373 (1987). In his careful critique, Sosin details problems with a “style” in which “Mead cites many studies without taking their implications into account” (Sosin at 378). For critiques that highlight similar problems elsewhere in the “moralist” literature, see William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged 16–17 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) (“Wilson, Truly Disadvantaged”); Michael Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare 137–65 (New York: Pantheon, 1989).Google Scholar

7 New York: Basic Books, 1992 (“Kaus, End of Equality”).Google Scholar

8 Id. at 105.Google Scholar

9 The specific attributes that define the underclass are a matter of considerable scholarly debate. For an excellent review of the issues, see C. Jencks & P. Peterson, eds., The Urban Underclass (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1991).Google Scholar

10 Kaus, End of Equality 106.Google Scholar

11 Id at 109.Google Scholar

12 Mead asserts that “in dependency politics … the question is how to deal with problems of basic functioning among the seriously poor. The social, more than the economic, structure of society is at issue.” Lawrence M. Mead, The New Politics of Poverty: The Nonworking Poor in America 211 (New York: Basic Books, 1992) (“Mead, New Politics”).Google Scholar

13 Id. at 219.Google Scholar

14 Mead's solution to the problem, thus constructed, is to use government authority to enforce work. Kaus's solution is to enforce work by eliminating welfare altogether.Google Scholar

15 New York: Basic Books, 1981.Google Scholar

16 Id. at 114-15.Google Scholar

17 For example, Lawrence Mead argues that poor women exhibit nonrational preferences for creating independent households and for rejecting menial, low-wage work. This leads him to conclude that they lack the “competence” necessary for full social citizenship. See Mead, New Politics ch. 7.Google Scholar

18 For an introduction to the growing debate over the causal significance of various structural conditions (i.e., the economy, race and gender), see Wilson, Truly Disadvantaged; D. Massey & N. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); and Jane Bayes, “Labor Markets and the Feminization of Poverty,” in H. Rogers, Jr., ed., Beyond Welfare: New Approaches to the Problem of Poverty in America (Armonk, N.Y: M. E. Sharpe, 1988). For evidence specifically debunking the presumption that marriage constitutes a solution to chronic family poverty, see Mary Jo Bane, “Household Composition and Poverty,”in S. Danzinger & D. Weinberg, eds. Fighting Poverty: What Works and What Doesn't (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986). A concise summary of evidence regarding the failure of the economy to produce jobs with wages, benefits, and security sufficient to enable poor women to bring their families out of poverty can be found in Lawrence E. Lynn, Jr., “Ending Welfare Reform as We Know It,” 15, American Prospect 83 (1993).Google Scholar

19 Once again, Kaus's approach is illustrative. He is evidently unfazed by the fact that the relatively modest size of public welfare expenditures would seem to be disproportionate to the public controversy concerning them. He dismisses critics who point out that declarations of a “welfare crisis” are overblown given that AFDC represents less than 1% percent of the federal budget. Kaus replies: “But what does that prove? Mainly, it proves that through a relatively small expenditure, Money Liberals have managed to poison voters against government spending in general. Quite an accomplishment.” Echoing Gergen's position that, when it comes to welfare, symbols speak louder than substantive facts, Kaus asserts: “Welfare is, yes, another Willie Horton, a synecdoche, a test of values.” Kaus, End of Equality 177 (cited in note 7).Google Scholar

20 An illustration of the joining of analytic and affective modes of argument is provided by Charles Murray's caricature of alternative views on poverty and their proponents. He neatly divides analysts into two opposed camps labeled “elite” or “democratic.” According to this characterization, “elite wisdom” that explains poverty as a resultant of complex social causes is overly sophisticated and out of touch. In contrast, “the vox populi”, while admittedly embedded in social prejudice, nevertheless offers a more realistic view of poverty built on the grounded understanding of the “common man.” In proceeding to articulate this understanding, Murray apparently assumes for himself the role of “democratic” spokesperson. See Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980, at 146 (New York: Basic Books, 1984).Google Scholar

21 Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary 2038 (2d ed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983).Google Scholar

22 For discussion of the relationship between socioeconomic status and political influence, see W. Gamson, “Stable Unrepresentation in American Society,” 12 Am. Behav. Sci. 18 (1968); T. H. Marshall, Class, Citizenship and Social Development (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965); Carole Pateman, “The Patriarchal Welfare State,”in Amy Gutman, ed., Democracy and the Welfare State 231 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton- University Press, 1988) (“Gutman, Democracy”); and E. E. Schattschneider, Semi-Sovereign People (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1960).Google Scholar

23 See Piven & Cloward, Regulating the Poor 14–17 (cited in note 3); S. Webb & B. Webb, The English Poor Law History Part I (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1963).Google Scholar

24 For a more recent effort at classification, see Ken Auletta, The Underclass 43–44 (New York: Vintage Books, 1983). According to Auletta, the modern day “underclass” can be grouped into four distinct categories: (a) the passive poor, usually long-term welfare recipients; (b) the hostile street criminals who terrorize most cities and who are often school dropouts and drug addicts; (c) the hustlers, who, like street criminals, may not be poor and who earn their livelihood in an underground economy but rarely commit violent crimes; and (d) “those whose minds have snapped,” among them the traumatized drunks, drifters, homeless shopping-bag ladies, derelicts, and “sadistic slashers.”Google Scholar

25 When the poorhouse was filled to capacity or resisted by displaced working men, who refused to leave their families, other “workfare” arrangements would be used to supplement poorhouse relief. Examples include the “roundsman” system in which parishes subsidized local households and employers who would use pauper labor. Piven & Cloward, Regulating the Poor 24-31.Google Scholar

26 Although I am persuaded that the disabled poor may have occupied a somewhat higher social status than the so-called able-bodied poor, I am cautious about giving too much weight to this distinction, at least historically. Given the dubious quality of public institutions serving the disabled, one might reasonably infer that the moral status of impoverished disabled persons was more ambiguous than the authors imply. At least, one needs to explain why those deemed deserving apparently received less than they deserved. Alternatively, it may be that “wards of the state,” even though disabled, were socially distinguished more by the fact of their poverty than by their apparent blamelessness.Google Scholar

27 For accounts of the jailhouse as shelter, see C. Hoch & R. Slayton, New Homeless and Old: Community and the Skid Row Hotel (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); and Jacqueline P. Wiseman, Stations of the Lost: The Treatment of Skid Row Alcoholics (Engle-wood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970). Practices currently used to physically exclude the poor and disabled from some communities include “ferry boat diplomacy” and “Greyhound therapy.” The former refers to a practice in which officials outside Seattle are reported to have shipped individuals deemed mentally ill to the central city on the grounds that more services were available there. The latter, more useful to inland communities, offers homeless men a bus ticket out of town as an alternative to jail. I am grateful to Professor Richard Weatherly, at the University of Washington School of Social Work, for these examples (personal correspondence, 30 June 1993).Google Scholar

28 Russell B. Long, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee in the early 1970s, used this expression to describe the “welfare crisis” of that period. In contrast to responses to the growth of veterans' pensions in the 19th century, the sense of crisis provoked by AFDC's growth in the 1970s was fueled by a causal story attributing it to “malingerers, cheats and frauds.” See U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Finance, Welfare Cheating: Address of Hon. Russell B. Long 3 (1972). For a discussion of the origins and consequences of that causal story, see Evelyn Z. Brodkin, The False Promise of Administrative Reform: Implementing Quality Control in Welfare (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986) (“Brodkin, False Promise”). For a detailed empirical critique of that causal story, see Rein & Heclo, 33 Pub. Interest (cited in note 3).Google Scholar

29 For a historical account of veterans' pensions, see Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers (cited at note 3).Google Scholar

30 Direct work relief for able-bodied males went through several programmatic changes during the Depression and by 1934 had been substantially restricted by means testing, limited funding, and local administrative discretion (at 85-91). If, as the authors argue, means testing is, among other things, a symbolic instrument of social degradation, then the introduction of means testing in work relief programs signaled the post-Depression reconstruction of pauperism as a debased status.Google Scholar

31 Even with those restrictions in place, social security for the “improvident elderly” provoked opposition. Conflict over the moral status of unemployed minorities was temporarily averted by excluding agricultural workers (hence most southern black workers) from the protection of unemployment insurance and by lodging at the state level the administrative discretion to determine eligibility (at 91–97).Google Scholar

32 Notably, the debate about nonwork as a social pathology focuses almost exclusively on the poor, virtually without reference to similar behaviors among, or various forms of government subsidies to, the middle or upper class. For a typical rendering of the case made against the nonworking poor, see Mead, New Politics, esp. ch. 3 (cited in note 12), in which he elaborates a psychological explanation for poverty. According to Mead, “In the absence of prohibitive barriers to employment, the question of the personality of the poor emerges as the key to understanding and overcoming poverty…. Opportunities to avoid poverty and dependency seem abundant in America. Why do the poor not seize them as assiduously as the culture assumes they will?Who exactly are they?” (emphasis in original) (at 133). For evidence contradicting this case, see Leonard Goodwin, Do the Poor Want to Work? A Social-psychological Study of Work Orientations (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1972), and id., Causes and Cures of Welfare: New Evidence on the Social Psychology of the Poor (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1982). Regarding structural barriers, see note 18.Google Scholar

33 For interesting and varied perspectives on the political divide between those who have little and those who have less, see Paul Blumberg, Inequality in an Age of Decline 215–38 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); John Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980); J. Donald Moon, “The Moral Basis of the Democratic Welfare State,” and Jennifer Hochschild, “Race, Class, Power and the Welfare State,”in Gutman, Democracy (cited in note 22); James O'Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973); Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985); and Lester Thurow, The Zero-Sum Society (New York: Penguin Books, 1981).Google Scholar

34 Handler and Hasenfeld speak only indirectly to this point. For interesting perspectives on this issue, see Peter D. Anthony, The Ideology of Work (London: Tavistock, 1977); Eliot Friedson, “Labors of Love in Theory and Practice: A Prospectus,” in K. Erikson & S. P. Vallas, eds., The Nature of Work (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990); and Raymond Edward Pahl, Divisions of Labour (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1984).Google Scholar

35 Currently, poor women who perform volunteer work in their child's school or community are not credited with working under the terms of welfare policy's work requirements.Google Scholar

36 See M. Leff, “Consensus for Reform: The Mothers' Pension Movement in the Progressive Era,” 47 Soc. Serv. Rev. 397; and Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers (cited in note 3).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37 Handler and Hasenfeld contend that welfare administration is decoupled from policy. Although I agree that the relationship between them is complex and problematic, I do not think a case can be made for bureaucratic autonomy. In fact, the authors' own analysis indicates that administrative practices have been hostile, at worst (at times involving late-night sweeps for a “man-in-the-house”), and, at best, of limited effectiveness, especially in providing useful services. In this sense, welfare administration helps sustain myths about the moral inferiority of the poor. Handler's seminal book (with Ellen Jane Hollingsworth) The “Deserving Poor”: A Study of Welfare Administration (Chicago: Markham Press, 1971) makes this point most powerfully.Google Scholar

An alternative view, one that I believe strengthens Handler and Hasenfeld's central argument, regards welfare administration as an expression of and battleground for welfare politics. Issues too contentious and complex to be fully resolved by formal statute are indirectly addressed within the boundaries of bureaucratic structure and practice. In this “loosely coupled” system that I have described in detail elsewhere, policy ambiguity and bureaucratic discretion provide ample opportunities for policy to be defined and the poor “morally constructed” at the point of welfare provision. See Brodkin, False Promise (cited in note 28); id., “Implementation as Policy Politics,”in D. Palumbo & D. Calista, eds., Implementation and the Policy Process: Opening up the Black Box (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990); and id., “The Organization of Disputes: The Bureaucratic Construction of Welfare Rights and Wrongs,” in S. Silbey & A. Sarat, eds., 12 Studies in Law, Politics, and Society (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1992).Google Scholar

38 See Piven & Cloward, Regulating the Poor; Rein & Heclo, 33 Pub. Interest (cited in note 3).Google Scholar

39 WIN had been preceded in 1962 by policies stressing rehabilitation. Although ostensibly more sympathetic to the poor, these policies also implied social deviance.Google Scholar

40 The toughened WIN statute was enacted after the Nixon administration's Family Assistance Plan (FAP) was twice defeated in Congress. Handler and Hasenfeld view FAP as an opportunity lost for radical reform through a guaranteed minimum income. Whether such a guarantee might have been allowed to decline to levels low enough to make it substantively meaningless to most families is a matter for conjecture. More certain were the fears of conservative opponents such as Georgia Governor Lester Maddox, who warned: “You're not going to be able to find anyone willing to work as maids or janitors or housekeepers if this bill gets through, that I promise you” (quoted at 152).Google Scholar

41 Handler and Hasenfeld at 154-56. Also see Hasenfeld's insightful study of WIN administration in Detroit, which indicated that business needs, rather than client needs, guided the exercise of discretion in distributing job opportunities. While men were favored over women, they were generally steered into occupational groups consistent with their prior status. For many, this meant confinement in the secondary labor market of relatively menial, low-wage work. See Hasenfeld, Yeheskel, “The Role of Employment Placement Services in Maintaining Poverty,” 49 Soc. Sen. Rev. 569 (1975). As in the earlier example of the categorization of the disabled, it may be that poor men are privileged only relative to poor women. But their position in the larger society is essentially determined by their poverty.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

42 See discussion in note 37.Google Scholar

43 See J. Bayes, “Labor Markets and the Feminization of Poverty,”in H. Rodgers, Jr., ed., Beyond Welfare: New Approaches to the Problem of Poverty in America (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1988). Although my interpretation differs on this point from Handler and Hasenfeld's, it does not undermine their central argument. In fact, I believe it strengthens the case for asserting that welfare symbolically and, at times materially, affirms the domestic code and adapts to changes in it.Google Scholar

44 The Family Support Act ties federal payments to states to their compliance with participation quotas requiring 20% of nonexempt AFDC adult recipients and 50% of AFDC-unemployed parents to be enrolled in job activities by fiscal year 1995. By 1998, 75% of the latter group must be enrolled to reach the quota. To receive the maximum allowable federal payments, states must also spend 55% of their funds on three targeted recipient groups: (1) those receiving AFDC for 36 of the prior 60 months, (2) parents under age 24 lacking a high school diploma or recent work experience, and (3) adults in families whose youngest child is two years away from being too old to qualify for AFDC.Google Scholar

45 As with other program targets, the rules are manifestly aimed at providing services to groups of the poor considered most “at risk” of prolonged poverty. While the intent may be benign, the social classification of policy targets as deviant or deficient carries a negative symbolic message that arguably is more significant than any services provided. In part, the targeting of young mothers was legitimated by a perceived “epidemic” of teen pregnancy. Like earlier causal stories that attributed welfare use to an epidemic of malingering and cheating, there is evidence that this new crisis is built more from myth than reality. For a review of the evidence see M. Vinovskis, “Historical Perspectives on Adolescent Pregnancy,” and E. Brodkin, “Teen Pregnancy and the Dilemmas of Social Policymaking,”in M. Rosenheim & M. Testa, eds., Early Parenthood and Coming of Age in the 1990s (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992).Google Scholar

46 By mid-1993 three states had officially received federal waivers from welfare statutes that would permit them to implement family cap legislation, which allows states to limit assistance to welfare families who have additional children. Waivers requested by California, Wisconsin, and New Jersey varied in their specifics. At this writing only New Jersey has implemented a family cap that denies assistance to a child born to a parent receiving AFDC for 10 months or more. A wedfare proposal favored by Wisconsin's Governor Tommy Thompson would provide a bonus to teenaged mothers who married. Various schemes to require or reward poor women for accepting contraceptive implants have been proposed in several states but as yet not adopted.Google Scholar

47 I draw here on reports and my own research in progress documenting work programs implemented under the terms of the Family Support Act. For the most extensive evaluations of selected sites across the country, see reports produced by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation. Other evidence comes from a New York State study by the Rockefeller Institute of Government at the State University of New York at Albany.Google Scholar

48 As Handler and Hasenfeld aptly point out, “the market or paid labor work requirement is much more common than the administrative work test. Most of the poor throughout history, including the present, have received no cash assistance at all” (at 47). State elimination of general relief for single adults and proposals for time-limited AFDC are indicative of the new social Darwinism.Google Scholar

49 For a discussion of the importance of “windows” in opening opportunities for reconstructing political agendas, see John W. Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies 173–204 (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1984).Google Scholar