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The Institutional Origins of “Workfarist” Social Policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2007

Eva C. Bertram
Eva C. Bertram
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Cruz
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Extract

Between 1971 and 1975, congressional leaders quietly transformed the character and politics of public assistance in the United States. Three legislative initiatives were passed in quick succession and with little debate—the Talmadge Work Incentive amendments (WIN II), Supplemental Security Income (SSI), and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). Although they drew little attention at the time, their combined impact was significant in two respects. First, by redefining the terms and target populations of income assistance, they established the elements of a workfarist approach to federal antipoverty policy, one that turned the ends and means of federal assistance away from traditional needs-based New Deal welfarism and toward the principle of rewarding, encouraging, and enforcing work. In addition, the initiatives helped to create the political capacity for subsequent retrenchment of traditional welfare programs, notably Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC).

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in American Political Development , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , Fall 2007 , pp. 203 - 229
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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References

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6. From the outset, New Deal social insurance programs were designed to reward and reinforce employment: eligibility and benefits for programs such as Old Age Insurance and Unemployment Insurance were pegged to one's position in the labor market.

7. See Abbott, Grace, From Relief to Social Security: The Development of the New Public Welfare Services and their Administration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941), 260–61Google Scholar, 289, 299–301.

8. This typology is set out by Salamon, Lester M., Welfare: The Elusive Consensus (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1978), 104–5Google Scholar.

9. New Deal initiatives such as the labor standards of the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933), the Wagner Act (1935), and the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) were intended in part to address the conditions of the working poor; however, they were not income support programs.

10. See for example, Peck, Jamie, Workfare States (New York: The Guilford Press, 2001)Google Scholar, and Work-Place: The Social Regulation of Labor Markets (New York: The Guilford Press, 1996); Jessop, Bob, “Post-Fordism and the State,” in Post-Fordism: A Reader, ed. Amin, Ash (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1994)Google Scholar; Gilbert, Neil and Van Voorhis, Rebecca A., eds., Activating the Unemployed: A Comparative Appraisal of Work-Oriented Policies (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001)Google Scholar; and Handler, Joel F., Social Citizenship and Workfare in the United States and Western Europe: The Paradox of Inclusion (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004)Google Scholar. See also Quaid, Maeve, Workfare: Why Good Policy Ideas Go Bad (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Dolowitz, David P., Learning from America: Policy Transfer and the Development of the British Workfare State (Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 1998), esp. chap. 2Google Scholar, on the 1988 Family Support Act; Standing, Guy, Global Labour Flexibility: Seeking Distributive Justice (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), esp. chap. 10Google Scholar, “The Road to Workfare”; Rose, Nancy E., Workfare or Fair Work: Women, Welfare and Government Work Programs (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Cebulla, Andreas, Ashworth, Karl, Greenberg, David, and Walker, Robert, Welfare-to-Work: New Labour and the U.S. Experience (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2005)Google Scholar; and Schram, Sanford F., Welfare Discipline: Discourse, Governance and Globalization (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006)Google Scholar. For a longer view on the political economy of workfare, see Piven, Frances Fox and Cloward, Richard A., Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Assistance (New York: Vintage Books, 1993)Google Scholar.

11. Pierson, Paul, Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher and the Politics of Retrenchment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) focuses on the 1980sGoogle Scholar; Katz, The Price of Citizenship; and Pierson, Paul, ed., The New Politics of the Welfare State (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar examine the 1980s and 1990s. For a detailed examination of the 1996 welfare reform in the United States., see Weaver, R. Kent, Ending Welfare As We Know It (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

12. Howard, Christopher, “Is the American Welfare State Unusually Small?” PS 36, 3 (2003): 411–16Google Scholar; and The Welfare State Nobody Knows: Debunking Myths About U.S. Social Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Myles, John and Quadagno, Jill, “Envisioning a Third Way: The Welfare State in the Twenty-First Century,” Contemporary Sociology 29 (2000): 156–67Google Scholar; Hacker, Jacob S., The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006)Google Scholar, and “Privatizing Risk without Privatizing the Welfare State: The Hidden Politics of Social Policy Retrenchment in the United States,” American Political Science Review 98, 2 (May 2004): 243-60; and Quadagno, Jill and Street, Debra, “Recent Trends in U.S. Social Welfare Policy: Minor Retrenchment or Major Transformation?” Research on Aging 28 (2006): 303–16Google Scholar.

13. See Weaver, Ending Welfare As We Know It, chap. 4; and Pierson, Dismantling the Welfare State, 125–26.

14. In some cases (such as WIN II), their actions reflected attempts to defend longstanding views; in others (such as SSI), they were shaped by changing regional interests; and in still others (such as EITC), they reflected efforts to stave off change. The actions of these key leaders were also shaped by their institutional positions—Long had a great deal of autonomy as a result of his seniority and position in the Senate; Mills was influenced by the culture of professionalism on fiscal matters that characterized the House Ways and Means Committee on which he had served for decades—as well as by their family legacies. See Mann, Robert, Legacy to Power: Senator Russell Long of Louisiana (New York: Paragon House, 1992)Google Scholar; Talmadge, Herman E., with Winchell, Mark Royden, Talmadge: A Political Legacy, A Politician's Life (Atlanta, GA: Peachtree Publishers, 1987)Google Scholar; and, for a discussion of the Long and Talmadge family legacies, Key, V. O. Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949)Google Scholar.

15. The debate over the role and motives of southern leaders in crafting social welfare policy is part of a larger scholarly discussion over the role of race in shaping American social policy. A number of scholars have addressed the Social Security Act's exclusion of black workers from social insurance programs, and the elimination of national standards for eligibility, benefits and program administration from public assistance programs. Jill Quadagno, for example, argues that southern congressional leaders were decisive in these outcomes, and that defense of racial hierarchies was a primary motivation (The Transformation of Old Age Security: Class and Politics in the American Welfare State [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988], and The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty [New York: Oxford University Press, 1994]). Robert Lieberman and Michael Brown underscore the role of race and also point to other factors that weighed against fully federal and universal programs, including FDR's political pragmatism and fiscal concerns (Lieberman, , Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998Google Scholar; and Brown, , Race, Money, and the American Welfare State [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999]Google Scholar). Scholars such as Berkowitz, Edward D., America's Welfare State from Roosevelt to Reagan (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991)Google Scholar, and Mettler, Suzanne, Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New dddDeal Public Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998)Google Scholar, argue for attention to the role of “old guard” New Deal policymakers, particularly from Wisconsin and New York, who were inclined to leave the states with substantial autonomy. Mettler, noting the key role of southern and western congressional leaders, also argues that the measure reinforced both gender and racial hierarchies. Davies and Derthick, on the other hand, challenge what they call “race-based explanations.” Limited administrative capacity and questions of constitutional authority were decisive in the exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers from social insurance, they argue, and concerns about costs rather than race drove southern opposition to higher benefit levels for public assistance (Davies, Gareth and Derthick, Martha, “Race and Social Welfare Policy: The Social Security Act of 1935,” Political Science Quarterly 11 [1997]: 217–35Google Scholar). Alston, Lee J. and Ferrie, Joseph P., “Labor Costs, Paternalism, and Loyalty in Southern Agriculture: A Constraint on the Growth of the Welfare State,” Journal of Economic History 45 (1985): 95–117Google Scholar, argue that southern legislators' actions were crucial, but that they were motivated by defense of regional economic interests rather than by racial considerations. For recent contributions to the debate on the historical role of race in social policy, see also Katznelson, Ira, When Affirmative Action was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005)Google Scholar; Poole, Mary, The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006)Google Scholar; and Ward, Deborah E., The White Welfare State: The Racialization of U.S. Welfare Policy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

16. Abbott, From Relief to Social Security, 279. Likewise, in the debate over OAA, southern senators' concerns that the “measure might serve as an entering wedge for federal interference with the handling of the Negro question” made it clear to the administration that “the bill could not be passed as it stood and that it would be necessary to tone down all the clauses relating to supervisory control by the federal government,” according to the Executive Director of the Committee on Economic Security (Witte, Edwin E., The Development of the Social Security Act [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963], 143–44Google Scholar).

17. See, for example, the comments of Jane Hoey, who directed the Bureau of Public Assistance of the Social Security Board, in Hoey, Jane M., “Aid to Families with Dependent Children,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 202 (1939): 75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18. For more extensive discussions of southern politics and of the political economy of the south, including its relation to federal welfare policy, see Katznelson, Ira, Geiger, Kim, and Kryder, Daniel, “Limiting Liberalism: The Southern Veto in Congress, 1933–1950,” Political Science Quarterly 108 (1993): 283–306Google Scholar; Shulman, Bruce J., From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Bensel, Richard Franklin, Sectionalism and American Political Development, 1880–1980 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Cobb, James C. and Namorato, Michael V., eds., The New Deal and the South (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1984)Google Scholar; and Key, Southern Politics in State and Nation.

19. See Mettler, Dividing Citizens, 86–93 on the implementation of state OAA programs, and 158–66 on the more limited ADC programs.

20. For evidence of the attitudes of local aid officials toward black ADC recipients, see Bell, Winifred, Aid to Dependent Children (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 34–35Google Scholar. Bell also offers evidence that local “farm policies” requiring recipients to accept work during harvest time were responsible for a significant number of ADC case closings (sometimes a majority) in certain jurisdictions (Bell, Aid to Dependent Children, 107). In the case of OAA, Jill Quadagno argues that southern economic elites worried that any federal cash grants to members of poor families (including the elderly) enabled workers in these families to opt out of the labor market. She cites a letter to federal relief officials from a woman in Alabama reporting concerns with,

the Old Age Pension because if they paid them, why the negroes getting them, the entire family would live off the money, and they could not get them to work on our farms. They would be worse about working for us than they have been since the government started to hand out to them. They would be too independent if they should get a Federal old age pension. (Quadagno, Transformation of Old Age Security, 134).

For a detailed case study of attempts to restrict welfare eligibility and benefits in two southern states in the 1950s, see Reese, Backlash Against Welfare Mothers. For a discussion of the role of public assistance policies in maintaining local low-wage labor markets in the South in the years after the Social Security Act, including the racialized character of the labor market in the region, see Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, 130–46.

21. See Brown, Race, Money and the American Welfare State, 44–45.

22. See Mink, Gwendolyn, Welfare's End (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 50–60Google Scholar. Mink traces actions by federal courts and the Supreme Court between 1968 and 1975 that reduced the discretion of state and local aid programs to set their own restrictive eligibility criteria. This loss of state discretion had the effect of making the entitlement to assistance available to a significantly increased percentage of the families for whom the program was intended. She also discusses Long's failed attempt in 1970 to legislate at the federal level a number of restrictive practices that had been struck down at the state level.

23. See, for example, U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Finance, Proposed Cutoff of Welfare Funds to the State of Alabama: Hearings Before the Committee on Finance, 90th Cong., 1st sess., 25 Jan. and 23 Feb. 1967. From the outset, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations signaled an intent to be more assertive than their predecessors, within the broad parameters of federalism, in challenging state restrictions on ADC/AFDC. Within days of Kennedy's inauguration, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare set a deadline for cutting federal ADC funds to seven states (including six in the South) that did not make revisions in their restrictive policies. The relevant congressional committees, chaired by senior legislators from states on the cut-off list, delayed implementation of the cutoff (Congressional Quarterly Almanac [1961]: 281).

24. See Congressional Record–Senate, 6 Aug. 1971, 30544.

25. In mid-1971, drawing on extended interviews with newly-elected officials and a study of voting records, Congressional Quarterly reached this conclusion, captured effectively in its headline: “The ‘New South’: Changing But Still Conservative.” Newer members were attuned to the changing political economy of the region and the new political culture of television-based campaigning. Their votes in Congress, however, differed little from those of their senior colleagues. The voting divide between southern and northern Democrats, on the other hand, remained pronounced. (Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, 11 Jun. 1971: 1280–83). For a broader view of changes in the South and their impact on politics in this period, see Glaser, James M., Race, Campaign Politics, and the Realignment in the South (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), esp. chap. 1Google Scholar. For a pointed analysis of the relationships between race, low-wage labor and welfare in the South, see “Welfare Reform: The Southern View,” Wall Street Journal, 15 Dec. 1970, 22.

26. U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Ways and Means, The President's Proposals for Welfare Reform and Social Security Amendments, 1969, 91st Cong., 1st sess., Committee Print, Oct. 1969, 44–45. Although FAP's principle of providing a guaranteed income marked an expansionary challenge to existing policy, its proposed aid levels were quite low, promising benefits no higher than current AFDC levels in most northeastern states. These and other provisions, including the work requirement, produced heated opposition from the National Welfare Rights Organization, organized labor, and others. See Piven, Frances Fox and Cloward, Richard A., Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage Press, 1979), 264–361Google Scholar; and Quadagno, Jill, “Race, Class, and Gender in the U.S. Welfare State: Nixon's Failed Family Assistance Plan,” American Sociological Review 55 (1990): 11–28Google Scholar.

27. Moynihan, Daniel P., The Politics of A Guaranteed Income: The Nixon Administration and the Family Assistance Plan (New York: Random House, 1973), 375–77Google Scholar.

28. “Family Security System,” Draft Report of the Committee on Welfare of the Council for Urban Affairs, (undated; stamped as received by White House on 27 Apr. 1969), esp. 8–9, Richard M. Nixon Presidential Materials Staff at Archives II, White House Central Files, Subject: Welfare, Box 60, National Archives (hereafter Nixon Presidential Materials). Moynihan was in a complicated position to make this case publicly. His 1965 report on the black family was seen by many as a turning point in the racialization of the debate over welfare, and liberals distrusted him. See, for example, Piven and Cloward, Poor People's Movements, 338–39. On the other hand, in 1968, he attacked conservatives by condemning the 1967 WIN amendments as not only the “first purposively punitive welfare legislation in the history of the American national government,” but racially motivated; blatantly “designed to halt the rise in Negro dependence on the AFDC program” (Moynihan, , “The Crises in Welfare,” The Public Interest [1968]: 3Google Scholar). As the FAP debate unfolded, congressional Republicans worried that Moynihan, a former Kennedy and Johnson administration official, had misled Nixon into supporting FAP. In preparing for a meeting between Nixon and Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee, a White House adviser wrote: “I would specifically exclude Pat Moynihan. These senators fear that Moynihan sold the program to the president without the president fully understanding it, and I think his presence and handling of questions would only confirm that to them” (Edward L. Morgan, Memorandum for John Ehrlichman, “Family Assistance Plan: President's meeting with the Senate Finance Republicans, 20 Jul. 1970,” 16 Jul. 1970, 1, Nixon Presidential Materials, White House Central Files, Subject: Welfare, Box 61).

29. “This exclusion [of the working poor] also has begun to take on ominous and socially polarizing racial overtones, for AFDC recipients, those who are helped, are about 50-percent nonwhite while the working poor, those who are excluded, are 70-percent white” (Testimony of Robert H. Finch, Secretary, Department of Health, Education and Welfare, U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Ways and Means, Social Security and Welfare Proposals: Hearings Before the Committee on Ways and Means, 91st Cong., 1st sess., pt. 1 of 7, 15–16 Oct. 1969, 121).

30. As Moynihan noted, in retrospect, “It was to be the complex fate of Family Assistance, a program that would have its single largest impact in raising the income of the South, to receive less support there than from any other region” (Moynihan, Politics of a Guaranteed Income, 376).

31. Administration officials understood that FAP's aid to the working poor was a central point of contention, and considered backing a delay in implementing this component in order to win conservative support. John G. Veneman, Memorandum for the President, 3 September 1970, 2, Nixon Presidential Materials, White House Central Files, Subject: Welfare, Box 61.

32. Cited in Moynihan, Politics of A Guaranteed Income, 377. Despite Moynihan's criticism of Phillips and other political strategists identified with Nixon's “southern strategy” to win conservative white votes and break the electoral dominance of the Democratic Party in the South, it is clear that some of the White House officials who favored FAP were familiar with the arguments that it would boost black political power in the South. See points excerpted by Assistant to the President John Ehrlichman from Richard Armstrong's article in Fortune. John D. Ehrlichman, Memorandum for the President, 7 Jul. 1970, 1–2, Nixon Presidential Materials, White House Central Files, Subject: Welfare, Box 61. Many observers shared Phillips' expectation that this trend “cannot help but push whites into the alternative major party structure—that of the GOP” (Phillips, Kevin P., The Emerging Republican Majority [New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1969], 287Google Scholar).

33. Vincent, J. and Burke, Vee, Nixon's Good Deed: Welfare Reform (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 146–47Google Scholar.

34. Writing at the time of the FAP debate, Richard Armstrong cited census figures showing that 52 percent of the beneficiaries would be in the South (Armstrong, , “The Looming Money Revolution Down South,” Fortune 81 (1970): 66Google Scholar). See also John F. Kain and Robert Schafer's study cited in Moynihan, Politics of A Guaranteed Income, 385–86.

35. There were discrepancies and variations in estimates of the impact of FAP over time. See, for example, Congressional Quarterly Almanac 25 (1970): 1037; and U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Finance, Family Assistance Act of 1970: Hearings before the Committee on Finance, United States Senate, 91st Cong., 2nd sess., pt. 2, 21 Jul.–18 Aug. 1970, 1077–78. Administration officials did not dispute that FAP benefits would both reach more people and be more costly than the existing system; however, they compared the numbers of individuals or families actually receiving benefits under the AFDC program with those who would be eligible under FAP to argue that congressional critics overestimated the increases. Eliot Richardson, who took over as Secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in spring 1970, argued that about half of those eligible for AFDC actually benefited from the program. If that same rate of participation applied under FAP, then states which appeared on paper to face a tripling of their rolls, were more likely to see an increase of half that amount. For his exchange on these estimates with Sen. Harry Byrd, Jr. (D–VA), see U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Finance, Family Assistance Act of 1970, 21 Jul.–18 Aug. 1970, 627–28.

36. U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Finance, Committee Print: H.R. 16211: The Family Assistance Act of 1970 (Revised and Resubmitted), 91st Cong., 2nd sess., Jun. 1970, 25.

37. Burke and Burke, Nixon's Good Deed, 146–47. In the words of one black field coordinator for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives in Atlanta, “I know a lot of white people who will get told to go to hell” if FAP raised all incomes to the proposed floor (Armstrong, “Looming Money Revolution Down South,” 67).

38. “Welfare Reform: The Southern View,” Wall Street Journal, 15 Dec. 1970, 22.

39. Cited in Burke and Burke, Nixon's Good Deed, 149–50.

40. One of the primary worries of opponents, the article added, “is what all that money would do to the low-cost domestic labor supply.” Georgia Governor Lester G. Maddox was characteristically blunt: “You're not going to be able to find anyone willing to work as maids or janitors or housekeepers if this bill goes through, that I promise you” (“Welfare Reform,” Wall Street Journal, 15 Dec. 1970, 22).

41. Burke and Burke, Nixon's Good Deed, 147.

42. Congressional Record–Senate 4 Oct. 1972, 33676.

43. U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Ways and Means, Committee Print: The President's Proposals for Welfare Reform and Social Security Amendments, 104.

44. Cited in Bowler, Kenneth M., The Nixon Guaranteed Income Proposal: Substance and Process in Policy Change (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger Publishing Company, 1974), 89Google Scholar.

45. Cited in Bowler, Nixon Guaranteed Income Proposal, 97. The “suitable employment” provision was stripped from the FAP bill immediately before it was passed in the House in April 1970.

46. U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Ways and Means, Social Security and Welfare Proposals, 321; and Burke and Burke, Nixon's Good Deed, 149.

47. Ibid. Government surveys showed that, of the thirteen states that had no minimum wage, more than half (seven) were in the South, and in southern states where there were minimum wage rates, they were comparatively low (U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Ways and Means, Social Security and Welfare Proposals, 320).

48. The first vote on FAP was taken in April 1970; the measure, HR 16311, passed in the House by a vote of 243–155. (Congressional Quarterly Almanac 25 [1970]: 16-H). FAP was before the House for a second time in June 1971 when the revised version, HR 1, passed again. The key vote came when FAP supporters defeated a move by Representative Al Ullman (D–OR) to strip the FAP provisions from the social security amendments legislation before the House. Ullman's proposal was rejected, 187–234 (Congressional Quarterly Almanac 26 [1971]: 35-H). For a breakdown of the Senate votes in October 1972, see Congressional Quarterly Almanac 27 (1972): 72–73-S. On the three key votes examined here, Sen. Long was victorious—first in defeating a liberal version of FAP proposed by Sen. Abraham Ribicoff (D–CT); second, in defeating a Ribicoff proposal to send a more streamlined version of the bill to conference with the House; and, third, in winning passage of the pilot-test proposal, which signaled lack of Senate consensus on the issue.

49. Burke and Burke, Nixon's Good Deed, 147–48.

50. Nixon to Rep. George Bush (unsigned), 23 Oct. 1970, 1, Nixon Presidential Materials, White House Central Files, Subject: Welfare, Box 61.

51. Burke and Burke, Nixon's Good Deed, 147.

52. Lester M. Salamon's study of the FAP votes, Welfare: The Elusive Consensus, 95-96, demonstrates the critical role of moderates and conservatives in FAP's defeat. Salamon suggests that the liberal “defectors” from FAP were less important to its collapse. For a recent statement of the role of liberal opposition, see Teles, Whose Welfare?, 89–97. For extensive analysis of the defeat of FAP, see Moynihan, Politics of a Guaranteed Income, and Burke and Burke, Nixon's Good Deed. For a timeline, see “The Family Assistance Plan: A Chronology,” The Social Service Review 46 (1972): 603–8.

53. U.S. Committee on Economic Security, Report to the President (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1935), 36Google ScholarPubMed. Grace Abbott expanded on this view in testimony to the Senate:

[because a] mother's services are worth more in the home than they are in the outside labor market … [she] should be enabled to stay home and take care of the children, and we expect she will have to do so until the children reach working age. (Abbott, From Relief to Social Security, 211).

54. The opening wedge for work requirements was the Kennedy administration's 1962 Public Welfare Amendments. The Kennedy amendments included a provision that allowed federal support for state or local governments that created community work and training (CWT) programs, in which welfare recipients judged to be employable could be required to work in exchange for their payments. The primary targets were unemployed fathers (who were a particular concern because the 1961 Kennedy initiative to create the ADC-UP program made two-parent families eligible to receive AFDC assistance), though the program was also designed to serve mothers on AFDC, on a voluntary basis and with adequate child care support. See Rose, Nancy E., Workfare or Fair Work: Women, Welfare, and Government Work Programs (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 89–90Google Scholar; Coll, Safety Net, 224; and “Special Message to the Congress on Public Welfare Programs, 1 Feb. 1962,” Public Papers of the Presidents, John F. Kennedy, 1962 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1963), 100. For a more thorough discussion of debates over strategies to support and promote work in the Kennedy and early Johnson administrations, see Mittelstadt, From Welfare to Workfare.

55. U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Finance, Family Assistance Act of 1970: Hearings before the Committee on Finance, 91st Cong., 2nd sess., pt. 1, 29–30 Apr.–1 May 1970. Talmadge suggested changing FAP's name to “Welfare Expansion Bill” (Wall Street Journal, 9 Jun. 1970, 6).

56. Cited in Moynihan, Politics of A Guaranteed Income, 473.

57. This point is captured succinctly in this exchange between Talmadge and Veneman:

Sen Talmadge: So he could do a little casual labor on somebody's yard from time-to-time and maybe sell a little heroin or do a little burglary and he would be in pretty good shape, wouldn't he?

Mr. Veneman: He would be in about the same shape as under the present program. (U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Finance, Family Assistance Act of 1970: Hearings, 29–30 Apr.–1 May 1970, 223).

58. Ibid., 228.

59. Ibid., 230.

60. Congressional Quarterly Almanac 26 (1971): 865.

61. Cited in Leman, Christopher, The Collapse of Welfare Reform: Political Institutions, Policy and the Poor in Canada and the United States (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980), 85–86Google Scholar.

62. Burke and Burke, Nixon's Good Deed, 164–65.

63. Even in the 1960s, the Bureau of Public Assistance's “Handbook of Public Assistance” stated clearly that the program should “make it possible for a mother to choose between staying at home to care for her children and taking a job.” For a more thorough discussion, see Coll, Safety Net, 190.

64. Leman, Collapse of Welfare Reform, 71–72, 85–86. The Ways and Means Committee, authors of WIN I, specified that appropriate candidates would include fathers in two-parent AFDC families, children over 16 who were not in school, and some mothers, at state option.

65. To compare WIN II with the work requirement provisions of the administration's original FAP proposal, see U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Ways and Means, Committee Print: The President's Proposals for Welfare Reform and Social Security Amendments, 1969, 63–65.

66. See Congressional Quarterly Almanac 26 (1971): 865.

67. WIN's unimpressive results were on the minds of many lawmakers as the FAP debate began. In a special report on WIN, the Senate Finance Committee concluded, “Although the Work Incentive Program was created in the hope that it would be an effective tool in helping welfare recipients to achieve greater economic independence, it has in fact had very little impact on welfare rolls” (U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Finance, Committee Print: Material Related to Work and Training Provisions of Administration Revision of H.R. 16311, 91st Cong., 2nd sess., Aug. 1970, 10).

68. Coll, Safety Net, 249; Rose, Workfare or Fair Work, 103.

69. For more on the pattern of responding to policy failure through escalation rather than reevaluation, see Bertram, Eva, Blachman, Morris, Sharpe, Kenneth, and Andreas, Peter, Drug War Politics: The Price of Denial (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

70. Patterson, America's Struggle Against Poverty, 170.

71. For a summary, see Gilbert Steiner, “Reform Follows Reality: the Growth of Welfare,” The Public Interest 34 (1974).

72. By the 1990s, AFDC's critics increasingly condemned both the failure of anti-poverty programs (including, but not limited to AFDC) to reduce poverty rates, and AFDC's failure to move recipients from welfare “dependence” to work. For examples of the changing debate, see “Welfare Reform: The Next Domestic Priority,” Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, 27 Sept. 1986, 2281–86; and the statements of moderate lawmakers during the floor debates over the 1996 welfare reform, such as those by Sens. Charles Grassley (R–IA), James Jeffords (R–VT), and William Cohen (R–ME) (Congressional Record—Senate, 1 Aug. 1996, S9391–92, S9397–98, and S9399, respectively).

73. Clinton said of the Republican reform bill in 1996, “I will sign this bill, first and foremost, because the current system is broken” (Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, 3 Aug. 1996, 2190).

74. “Presidential Veto Message: Welfare-to-Work Provisions Cited in Veto of Overhaul,” Congressional Quarterly Almanac 51 (1996): D-4. “For 12 years,” he said in the 1992 presidential campaign, “Republicans in Washington…have pledged to reform welfare, but they have no plan to put people back to work” (Clinton, Bill and Gore, Al, Putting People First: How We Can All Change America [New York: Times Books, 1992], 164Google Scholar). Prior to signing the 1996 reform, Clinton repeatedly condemned Republican proposals as “weak on work” (“Clinton's Changing Welfare Views,” Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, 27 Jul. 1996, 2116).

75. Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, 3 Aug. 1996, 2195.

76. Title XIV, Aid to the Permanently and Totally Disabled, was added in 1950. Regarding the major expansions in 1956 and 1958, for example, Blanche Coll notes that,

[the] liberalizing amendments found their greatest justification in the group of needy adults who could not work because they were old or disabled, a group that would be cared for eventually by OASDI. Long would just as soon have left the ADC program off his list of increases, and he certainly wasn't alone (Coll, Safety Net, 181–82).

77. Notable exceptions include the works by Erkulwater, Derthick, and Berkowitz mentioned earlier. For an excellent recent account of the politics leading to SSI's passage, see Erkulwater, Disability Politics; esp. chap.3; this discussion draws in part on her detailed study.

78. For example, in 1970, the year FAP first passed the House, there were approximately 9,659,000 AFDC recipients; the three programs that would later be combined into SSI covered less than a third of that number of recipients, a total of some 3,098,000 (Author's calculation of data provided in Coll, Safety Net, 172). For a broader discussion of the political development of disability benefits (through both SSI and Disability Insurance), see Erkulwater's argument about the mobilization and role of disability advocates in advancing a rights-based understanding of disability and driving program change and expansion.

79. Their different interests in pursuing the measure are examined in Erkulwater, “Forgotten Safety Net: Expansion of Supplemental Security Income,” Doctoral Dissertation, Department of Political Science, Boston College, May 2001, 168–83.

80. U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Rules, Hearings on the Family Assistance Act of 1970, 91st Cong., 2nd sess., 7 and 13–14 Apr. 1970, 104. For Talmadge's views on the issue, see U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Finance, Family Assistance Act of 1970: Hearings, 29–30 Apr.–1 May 1970, 221–21. The April 1970 House action in favor of FAP included an income floor for these groups. The Senate Finance Committee in 1970 reported out a bill covering the adult categories, even as it rejected Nixon's family assistance measures. The House and Senate proposals were not reconciled in conference that year, however.

81. In 1962, Mills' Ways and Means Committee added to Kennedy's proposed Public Welfare amendments an increase in the federal share of the programs for the poor elderly, blind, and disabled; the increase was opposed by the administration, but passed both chambers and was included in the final legislation. Long's commitment to OAA, meanwhile, was legendary, in the assessment of one historian, “even to the extent of posing a threat to the supremacy of social insurance” (Coll, Safety Net, 271).

82. Congressional Record—Senate 6 Aug. 1971, 30543–44.

83. Leman, Collapse of Welfare Reform, 89.

84. For the argument that Mills and Byrnes favored federal administration of the family program as a way to control costs, and that this set the pattern for SSI, see Derthick, Agency Under Stress, 90–91.

85. Zelizer, Julian E., Taxing America: Wilbur D. Mills, Congress, and the State, 1945–1975 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 315–17Google Scholar.

86. See Bowler, Nixon Guaranteed Income Proposal, 109–114.

87. U.S. News and World Report, 15 Mar. 1971, 44.

88. U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Rules, Hearings on the Family Assistance Act of 1970, 7 and 13–14 Apr. 1970, 106–9, 134–37.

89. Cited in Bowler, Nixon Guaranteed Income Proposal, 112.

90. U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Rules, Hearings on the Family Assistance Act of 1970, 7 and 13–14 Apr. 1970, 157, 16.

91. U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Ways and Means, Report on H.R. 1, Social Security Amendments of 1971, 92nd Cong., 1st sess., House Report 92-231, 26 May 1971, 4.

92. Cited in Bowler, Nixon Guaranteed Income Proposal, 142.

93. U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Finance, Hearings on Tax Credits to Stimulate Job Opportunities in Rural America, 91st Cong., 1st sess., 21–22 May 1969, 1.

94. For a full analysis of these developments, see Jill Quadagno, “From Old-Age Assistance to Supplemental Security Income: The Political Economy of Relief in the South, 1935–1972,” in Politics of Social Policy, 243.

95. Burke and Burke, Nixon's Good Deed, 197.

96. In mid-1939, Louisiana had 30,045 OAA recipients, with 4,877 applications pending. With a recipient rate of 371 per thousand of those sixty-five and older, this program ranked twentieth in the nation in terms of recipients (United States Federal Security Agency, Fourth Annual Report of the Social Security Board [Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1940], 290Google Scholar). By early 1972, Louisiana had 114,836 on the OAA rolls (excluding those receiving both OAA and OASDI). Although the percentage of elderly receiving OAA remained largely unchanged (360 per 1,000), Louisiana's OAA program had grown into the third largest in the nation (behind only California and Texas)—a level it maintained for more than a decade. Despite their relatively modest populations, a number of other southern states ranked high as well: Alabama was fourth, Georgia seventh, Mississippi eighth, Arkansas tenth, Kentucky eleventh and Florida thirteenth (U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Finance, Social Security Amendments of 1972. Report to Accompany H.R. 1, 92nd Cong., 2nd sess., 26 Sept. 1972, 400–403). For figures from the early 1960s, see Social Security Bulletin 24 (1961): 41. Federal aid formulas through the 1950s had created a strong incentive for southern states to create OAA programs that admitted large numbers of beneficiaries but kept benefits low, as this approach led to the federal government paying a higher share of the benefits. Like many other southern programs, Louisiana's program incorporated a large percentage of the elderly population; unlike others, however, it also paid relatively high benefits, which increased the burden on the state (Brown, Race, Money, and the American Welfare State, 124–25, 199).

97. Mann, Legacy to Power, 302.

98. For a discussion of Long's maneuverson on SSI, see Erkulwater,“Forgotten Safety Net,” 177–83.

99. Cited in Mann, Legacy to Power, 305–6. Long took credit for creating SSI, and said that this move, combined with Nixon's eventual disenchantment, led to the defeat of FAP. Derthick notes that Long's sudden shift was critical to the passage of SSI, and argues that it reflected his response to Nixon's challenge (issued in accepting the Republican nomination that summer) to “quit treating our senior citizens in this country like welfare recipients” (Derthick, Agency Under Stress, 89–90).

100. For analyses of these politics, see Erkulwater, “Forgotten Safety Net,” 183–92, and Derthick, Agency Under Stress, chap. 5.

101. Burke and Burke, Nixon's Good Deed, 197; see also Erkulwater, “Forgotten Safety Net,” 194.

102. Ibid.

103. Congressional Quarterly Almanac 27 (1972): 899–914.

104. Patterson, America's Struggle Against Poverty, 189.

105. Leman, Collapse of Welfare Reform, 89; Patterson, America's Struggle Against Poverty, 191.

106. U.S. Congress, House, 1998 Greenbook, 264, 296. The aged component represented the largest number of recipients at the outset, but declined steadily from 1974 (2,285,909) to 1996 (1,412,632) as social security benefits moved more elderly out of poverty. The number of blind recipients stayed almost constant, and was always small (74,616 to 82,137 over the same period). The number of disabled, however, increased dramatically, from 1,635,539 to 5,118,949. During the same period, the number of recipients under 18 rose from 107,000 to 958,000, almost all in the disabled category.

107. Erkulwater cites a 1995 Urban Institute study indicating that more than 10 percent of child AFDC recipients and as many as 20 percent of adult AFDC recipients might have mental or physical problems severe enough that they could qualify for SSI. She notes that some antipoverty advocates suggested that states pursue a concerted effort to switch qualified recipients from AFDC/TANF to SSI when they qualify, but also that “most states have yet to engage in any largescale shifting of TANF recipients” (Erkulwater, Disability Rights, 216–17).

108. For an example of how lawmakers presented SSI as a measure akin to social security, rather than welfare, see U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Finance, Social Security Amendments of 1972, 26 Sept. 1972, 12–13.

109. From 1970 to 1993, the median monthly state benefit for a mother with three children dropped from $792 to $435 in constant dollars (Blank, Rebecca, It Takes a Nation: A New Agenda for Fighting Poverty [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997], 100Google Scholar).

110. The average federal SSI payment for individuals increased from $95.11 in 1974 to $325.26 in 1994, due, almost entirely, to indexation (U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Ways and Means, 1998 Green Book, 105th Cong., 2nd sess., WMCP 105–7, 19 May 1998, 263–64). In 1980, for example, most states chose to limit their spending by not raising AFDC benefits to keep pace with inflation, leading to a loss of real income for recipient families. SSI saw its costs rise automatically with inflation, reaching $7.8 billion in 1980, a 50 percent increase from its initial level six years earlier (Congressional Quarterly Almanac 35 [1980]: 410).

111. See, for example, Congressional Quarterly Almanac 37 (1982): 478. For more on Long's role in pushing for disability reviews in the 1980s, see Derthick, Agency Under Stress, 81, 158. For more on the Reagan reviews, see Erkulwater, Disability Rights, chap. 4.

112. Congressional Quarterly Almanac 36 (1981): 461.

113. “President Reagan's Economic Proposals,” Congress and the Nation 6 (1981–1984): 1039. In 1981, SSI was one of seven programs that the Reagan administration declared a “social safety net” for the “truly needy,” which “generally escaped the deep budget cuts other programs suffered” that year. (Congressional Quarterly Almanac 36 (1981): 461. In 1982, the administration nonetheless proposed technical and administrative changes to SSI that were “less dramatic” than spending cuts proposed for other programs, but would have resulted in $1.1 billion in reduced spending over five years. (Congressional Quarterly Almanac 37 (1982): 478.

114. Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, 3 Aug. 1996, 2196. Some of the reductions to SSI were restored by 1998. For a discussion of debates over SSI in 1996, see Congressional Quarterly Almanac 51 (1996): 6–15; “Welfare: Legal Immigrants to Benefit Under New Budget Accord,” New York Times, 30 Jul. 1997, 17; and Erkulwater, Disability Rights, esp. chap. 8.

115. In 2004, federal EITC payments were approximately $34 billion; the TANF block grant was $16.5 billion (Haskins, Ron, Work Over Welfare: The Inside Story of the 1996 Welfare Reform Law [Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2006], 342Google Scholar).

116. The vast majority of studies on EITC focus on its impact and effectiveness as a targeted tax credit, addressing issues such as design, compliance, efficiency costs, and labor market effects. See, for example, Hoffman, Saul D. and Seidman, Laurence S., Helping Working Families: The Earned Income Tax Credit (Kalamazoo, MI: Upjohn Institute, 2003)Google Scholar, and The Earned Income Tax Credit (Kalamazoo, MI: Upjohn Institute, 1990); and Meyer, Bruce D. and Holtz-Eakin, Douglas, eds., Making Work Pay: The Earned Income Tax Credit and Its Impact on America's Families (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001)Google Scholar.

117. Ventry, “The Collision of Tax and Welfare Politics”: 22. Howard provides a careful examination of the origins of EITC in welfare reform debates, in particular, and of its expansion in the context of welfare reform, as well as tax reform, in the late-1970s and mid-1980s. See Hidden Welfare State, 67; “Protean Lure for the Working Poor”: 404–36; “Happy Returns: How the Working Poor Got Tax Relief,” American Prospect (1994), and The Welfare State Nobody Knows, esp. chap. 5.

118. Opening Statement of Chairman Russell Long. U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Finance, Family Assistance Act of 1970: Hearings before the Committee on Finance, United States Senate, 91st Cong., 2nd sess., 29 Apr. 1970, 1.

119. Ibid., 1.

120. Ibid., 2.

121. Cited in Mann, Legacy to Power, 300.

122. U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Finance, “Press Release: 1 May 1970,” in U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Finance, H.R. 16311—The Family Assistance Act of 1970. Revised and Resubmitted to the Committee on Finance by the Administration, 91st Cong., 2nd sess., Committee Print, Jun. 1970, 2. See also, Mann, Legacy to Power, 301.

123. Mann, Legacy to Power, 301.

124. Ventry, “Collision of Tax and Welfare Politics,” 23.

125. Congressional Quarterly Almanac 25 (1970): 1036.

126. Long had famously barred welfare recipients and rights advocates (whom he denounced as “brood mares”) from further hearings on the 1967 WIN amendments, after they refused to leave the hearing room until they had a chance to address all members of the committee. He broke his gavel slamming it into the table to close the session, and concluded: “If they can take time to march in the streets and sit in the hearing room all day, it seems to me they have enough time to get jobs” (Mann, Legacy to Power, 269). For a discussion of his ongoing battle against the concept that welfare was a “right,” see Mink, Welfare's End, 50–60.

127. See Bowler, Nixon Guaranteed Income Proposal, 89.

128. Veneman, Memorandum for the President, 3 Sept. 1970, 4.

129. Congressional Quarterly Almanac 26 (1971): 519; Mann, Legacy to Power, 301.

130. Congressional Quarterly Almanac 26 (1971): 521.

131. Cited in “Family Assistance Plan—A Chronology,” 607; see also Congressional Quarterly Almanac 27 (1972): 905.

132. Ventry, “Collision of Tax and Welfare Politics,” 22; Howard, Hidden Welfare State, 67.

133. See Anderson, Martin, Welfare: The Political Economy of Welfare Reform in the United States (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1978)Google Scholar, and “A Short History of a ‘Family Security System,’” 14 Apr. 1969, Nixon Presidential Materials, White House Central Files, Subject: Welfare, Box 60.

134. Congressional Record—Senate, 30 Sept. 1972, 33011.

135. U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Finance, Report of the Committee on Finance to Accompany H.R. 1, 85.

136. Mann, Legacy to Power, 303. For more on Long's approach to welfare reform, see U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Finance, Welfare Reform: Guaranteed Job Opportunity—Explanation of Committee Decisions, 92nd Cong., 2nd sess., 28 Apr. 1972; U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Finance, Welfare Reform: Fiscal Relief for States—Explanation of Committee Decisions, 92nd Cong., 2nd sess., 5 Jun. 1972; and U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Finance, Welfare Reform: Child Support and Paternity Determination—Explanation of Committee Decisions, 92nd Cong., 2nd sess., 19 May 1972.

137. Congressional Quarterly Almanac 27 (1972): 905.

138. Congressional Record—Senate, 30 Sept. 1972, 33011.

139. The critical vote came on 4 October, when the Senate approved 46–41 a proposal to pilot-test three competing welfare reform plans, including FAP, Long's workfare plan, and a solidly welfarist liberal alternative offered by Sen. Ribicoff (D–CT). For a description of the proposal and the alternatives, see Congressional Record—Senate, 4 Oct. 1972, 33624–35. Long called this test approach “the best opportunity to lead the Senate out of the wilderness on Title IV that is available to us” (ibid., 33635).

140. Mann, Legacy to Power, 299.

141. Howard, “Protean Lure for the Working Poor,” provides an excellent analysis of this, with a focus on how the ambiguity of the measure—its appeal to different policymakers for different reasons—eased its passage.

142. Throughout these debates, however, many moderates and liberals defended the tax credit, often employing Long's logic. Sen. Walter F. Mondale (D–MN) argued, for example, that it would “bring a lot of relief to decent, hard-working American families who today, if they looked at the figures realistically, could say, ‘Better stop working; our government has decided to tax me back on welfare’” (Congressional Quarterly Almanac 28 [1973]: 579).

143. This discussion draws on Howard, Hidden Welfare State, 69–74. On the relationship between the recession and the debate over tax policy and social spending, see “Senate Pushes Toward Passage of Tax Cut Bill,” Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, 22 Mar. 1975; “Tax Cut Cleared; A ‘Tough Call’ for Ford,” Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, 29 Mar. 1975; and “High Unemployment Strains Benefit Systems,” Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, 12 Apr. 1975.

144. James R. Storey, “The Earned Income Tax Credit: A Growing Form of Aid to Low-Income Workers,” Congressional Research Service (CRS) Report for Congress, updated 5 Dec. 1996, 3.

145. Howard, Hidden Welfare State, 70–71.

146. U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Finance, Report to Accompany H.R. 2166, 94th Cong., 1st sess., Senate Report 94-36, 17 Mar. 1975, 33. Howard notes that the effect was to reduce the potential beneficiaries to 7 million (Hidden Welfare State, 71).

147. Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, 29 Mar. 1975, 637.

148. Congressional Quarterly Almanac 33 (1978): 601.

149. Ibid.

150. Downey subsequently led House Democrats in efforts to legislate a new childcare program to aid working families, which became a major EITC increase signed by President George Bush in 1990. See Congress and the Nation VIII (1989–1992): 611–13. For a discussion of Downey's role in the childcare debate, and his increasing focus on the EITC, see Howard, “Protean Lure for the Working Poor,” 426–32.

151. U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Ways and Means, Subcommittee on Human Resources, Selected Issues Relating to the AFDC and the JOBS Program, 102nd Cong., 1st sess., 19 Dec. 1991, 5.

152. Elaine Ciulla Kamarck and William A. Galston, “Putting Children First: A Progressive Family Policy for the 1990s,” Progressive Policy Institute report, 27 Sept. 1990, 25–26. Kamarck served in the White House from 1993 to 1997; Galston was Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy in the first Clinton administration.

153. Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, 26 Jun. 1993, 1636. In 1993, Clinton pushed for and won the addition of a very limited EITC For childless workers as well.

154. Haskins, Work Over Welfare, 50, 342.

155. Congress and the Nation, V: 688. For more on the status of AFDC at the time, see Platsky, Leon D., “Aid to Families with Dependent Children: An Overview, Oct. 1977,” Social Security Bulletin 40 (1977): 17–22Google Scholar.

156. Howard, “Protean Lure for the Working Poor,” 415.

157. Haskins, Work Over Welfare, 45.