American Dream

by Jason DeParle

  But it didn’t wither away. Between 1945 and 1960, caseloads nearly tripled. They grew partly from federal pressure to reduce racial discrimination. The size of the benefits also grew, which extended eligibility a bit farther up the income ladder. And as black families moved North, the racial barriers they faced, though significant, tended to be lower. More significant than the growth of the rolls was the shift in their composition. Congress accelerated the ability of widows to move into the more generous Social Security program. That creamed off the “worthy poor” that AFDC was meant to serve and left welfare with the stigmatized remains: the divorced, abandoned, and never-married mothers of out-of-wedlock children. At the program’s start, five-sixths of its beneficiaries were widows. By 1960, when Hattie Mae first enrolled, almost two-thirds came from so-called broken families. By then, 40 percent of the caseload was black, triple the original rate.

  Hostility was quick to arise. One of the iron laws of American life is that cash payments to the healthy nonworking poor breed suspicion. Mothers (or at least suitable white ones) were briefly deemed an exception only because society didn’t expect them to work—their work was raising children. Yet even the Mothers’ Pensions were carefully policed. At the time he created AFDC, Roosevelt himself was deeply concerned about dependency. The 1935 State of the Union Address, which has been called the “founding document” of the modern welfare state, criticized the cash welfare strategy of the early New Deal and called for replacing it with a giant work program, the Works Progress Administration. In a passage much beloved by welfare’s critics, Roosevelt warned that to give away cash “is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.” The antigovernment conservatives who quote him today forget that Roosevelt wasn’t just criticizing welfare; as the author Mickey Kaus has noted, he was creating as an alternative more than 3 million government jobs.

  At first, the welfare expansion was incremental and bureaucratic—almost accidental. In the next stage, it was anything but. The welfare explosion of the 1960s proceeded from conscious design. Looking to wage a broader fight on poverty, a coterie of activists launched a remarkably successful crusade for something not previously known to exist: “welfare rights.” They organized. They demonstrated. And above all they sued. King vs. Smith (1968) found in the statute an individual entitlement to benefits, meaning everyone who was eligible had to be served. (There could be no waiting lists.) Shapiro vs. Thompson (1969) struck down residency requirements. Goldberg vs. Kelly (1970) ruled that benefits couldn’t be taken away without due process. From 1960 to 1973, the rolls more than quadrupled.

  Though it has been much maligned in retrospect, it is easy to see in the context of the times the appeal of a welfare expansion. At the start of the sixties, poverty rates were twice what they are now; more than half of black Americans were poor. Mississippi had commissioned a study of families dropped from the rolls, and it inspires no nostalgia for the good old days. “Animals shouldn’t live in such a place,” investigators reported after visiting families left without aid. “There were six or seven little Negro children running freely through the shack and they were half-dressed, dirty and barefooted. . . . The older women seemed to accept their situation as if nothing mattered anymore. They seemed more like shells—defeated.” In Sunflower County, where 90 percent of the black people were poor, the millionaire James Eastland got welfare of a sort; the $170,000 a year he collected in cotton subsidies was nearly twice the county’s annual school-lunch budget. As the civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy used to ask, if the country could pay Eastland not to grow food, couldn’t it afford to help poor children eat?

  As the sharecropping system fell apart, the poor flowed into cities looking for help, and welfare offices had endless tactics for turning them away. Some greeted migrants with bus tickets home. Others menacingly posted police outside their waiting rooms. Applications - could be reclassified as “inquiries” and set aside instead of processed. Even in New York City, no more than half of the eligible population was enrolled in the early 1960s. Racial discrimination was rampant. Of the twenty-three thousand children purged from the Louisiana rolls, 95 percent were black. Under the famous “man in the house” rule, recipients also had to open their lives to degrading investigations. King vs. Smith, perhaps the most important welfare ruling of the age, reinstated benefits to a black woman dropped from the Alabama rolls for having sex with a weekend visitor. Under state law the relationship made the man a “substitute father,” and she could regain her benefits only after two people swore the affair had ceased. The state offered a curious list of suitable sexual witnesses: “law-enforcement officials; ministers; neighbors; grocers.” If welfare rights meant getting the grocer out of Mrs. Smith’s bedroom—well, who could argue with that?

  But a large, rights-oriented program would create problems, too—for poor people and the politics of poverty. The most audacious campaign for welfare rights occurred in New York City, where it was led by two Ivy League intellectuals, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. The spiraling rolls, the indignant protests, the saturation of welfare with due process rights—many of the movement’s traits can be traced to the program that Cloward helped found and Piven helped staff on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Mobilization for Youth. Though it quickly became the model for the war on poverty and the Legal Services program, poverty per se wasn’t its focus when it started in 1962. Juvenile delinquency was. But no sooner did the program open its doors than it was overrun by families needing money. “The workers began focusing on getting these families on welfare,” Cloward said. “It was something they could do.” Their strategy can be summarized in a word: aggression. “They argued and cajoled; they bluffed and threatened,” Piven and Cloward later wrote. They also sued. By 1966, the city’s rolls doubled to half a million, a figure not seen since the end of the Depression.

  By then Cloward and Piven had glimpsed something bigger. In a 1966 article in The Nation, they called for a “massive drive to recruit the poor onto the rolls” nationwide. Arguing that aid only flows when the poor demand it, they urged “bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies” and “demonstrations to create a climate of militancy.” Requests for reprints ran thirty thousand strong. Soon after, the National Welfare Rights Organization was born, and the age of the welfare radical was officially under way. As Angie was born in the spring of 1966, demonstrations for welfare rights erupted in forty cities. “Harassment, giving ultimatums, overwhelming centers is our greatest tactic,” wrote the NWRO. For some recipients, entitlement grew from a legal concept to a social one. In Brooklyn, welfare families jammed a Korvette’s store, telling cashiers to “charge the goods to the welfare department.” The classic exchange of the era involved Louisiana senator Russell Long, who dismissed the protesters as “brood mares” and “people who lay about all day making love and producing illegitimate babies.” Referring to Long’s complaint that he couldn’t find anyone to iron his shirts, one welfare recipient warned: “We only want the kinds of jobs that pay ten thousand dollars or twenty thousand dollars! We aren’t going to do anybody’s laundry!” Another recipient pressed the thought to its logical conclusion: “You can’t force me to work!”

  Just as Cloward and Piven predicted, the bureaucracy responded by opening the tap. With ghetto riots quickening the impulse to placate the poor, New York reduced its application to a single page of self-declared need, and its welfare commissioner became known to detractors as Mitchell “Come and Get It” Ginsberg. Between 1966 and 1972, the New York City caseload doubled again. Nationally, the rolls nearly tripled. The creation of Medicaid in 1966 increased welfare’s lure, since signing up for AFDC was the only way most families could enroll in the health insurance program. In pushing cities and states toward bankruptcy, Cloward and Piven had hoped to win local support for a federal bailout—preferably in the form of a guaranteed income. Astonishingly, the strategy nearly worked. Most leaders of the war on poverty embraced the idea, though the chief poverty warrior did not
. It’s ironic that the words Lyndon Johnson and welfare remained knotted in national memory, since Johnson hated the very word so much he sometimes called the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare “my department of health and education.” Johnson thought the war on poverty would cut the rolls and predicted “the days of the dole in this country are numbered.” It was Richard Nixon, of all people, who proposed a guaranteed income, after a Democratic adviser, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, helped persuade him of his chance to become a great Tory reformer, the American Disraeli. The Family Assistance Plan cleared the House in 1971, only to fail a year later in the Senate, where conservatives denounced it as a giveaway, and, in the strangest twist of all, liberals called it tight-fisted.

  By 1973, when the welfare explosion finally slowed, there were 11 million Americans on the rolls, including one out of every nine kids. The program had reached a size it had never been expected to reach; served groups it hadn’t been intended to serve; and armed them with rights it was never meant to confer. Over the next generation, nearly a third of the country’s children would spend part of their childhood on welfare. For black children, the figure would approach 80 percent. Welfare had won in the streets and the courts. But it had lost in the broader culture. Even as a million people a year flowed onto the rolls in the late 1960s, Merle Haggard had topped the country charts with an anthem of blue-collar pride:

  Hey, Hey, the working man

  The working man like me

  I ain’t never been on welfare

  And that’s one place I won’t be

  Welfare. Did the American political dictionary contain a more loaded word?

  As the smoke cleared, the program that remained combined the worst of both worlds: it offered the needy too little to live on and despised them for taking it. Even as benefits peaked in 1972, the average package of cash and food stamps left a mother with two children in poverty, and over the next two decades, the value of the typical check fell more than 40 percent. Despite some offsetting growth in food stamps, by 1992 the average package of cash and stamps came to just $7,600 a year, nearly $4,000 below the poverty threshold—hence the need for boyfriends and off-the-books work. As the program’s benefits were fading, so was its original rationale: to let mothers stay home with their kids. When AFDC started, fewer than one married woman in ten worked outside the home. By the mid-1970s, half of American mothers worked; why, they asked, should they pay taxes to let poor mothers stay home? That a majority of recipients were minorities further eroded political support. While the program once conjured a West Virginia widow, it now brought to mind a black teen mother in a big-city ghetto; demographically, that was a death sentence.

  Its costs posed problems, too. It’s true that even when its federal costs peaked at $16 billion a year, AFDC accounted for only about 1 percent of the total federal budget. That was nothing like the $477 billion the country spent on Social Security and Medicare. But count the share of food stamps and Medicaid that went to poor mothers and children and you triple the cost. Plus AFDC and Medicaid required state matching funds, insuring constant conflict in state legislatures. In addition, there were dozens of other programs that critics could label “welfare.” Half of recipients ate subsidized school lunches; a quarter lived in subsidized housing. Add Head Start, disability payments, and the like, and depending on who’s doing the counting, the cost of welfare could range from negligible to more than $100 billion, or 15 percent of domestic spending. Its vague definition was one of its problems; welfare could be blamed for everything and typically was.

  Among those who resented it the most were those receiving its aid. One of the country’s leading welfare advocates, Mark Greenberg, got the ground-level view in 1978 when he left Harvard Law School for a legal-services job in Jacksonville, Florida. His clients couldn’t live on welfare, but they couldn’t live on work, either—not as maids or convenience-store clerks, where they earned little, lost jobs often, and received no benefits. The most industrious combined the two, often on the sly. “Many of the hardest-working people I met were at constant risk of being arrested for fraud,” he said. “They hated welfare, but if they reported their jobs they would lose their children’s Medicaid.” One of Greenberg’s clients was arrested in a dragnet after the Fernandina Beach police, looking for secret workers, canvassed the neighbors of everyone on food stamps as though they were criminal suspects. The client had reported her job, but one caseworker had failed to tell another. “While some people had made bad choices in their lives, the suffering they endured was vastly disproportionate,” Greenberg said. “People were treated dismally by public bureaucracies.”

  It wasn’t a sustainable situation—yet the striking thing is how long it was sustained. John Kennedy had promised sweeping reform and gotten an ineffective program of “rehabilitative services.” Lyndon Johnson had signed the first work requirements in 1967, but they had little funding and no teeth. Richard Nixon had tried to marry a guaranteed income to modest work rules and fell in a hail of Left-Right recrimination. In Congress, the ruling Democrats were divided among themselves; liberals wanted to raise benefits, especially in the South, while conservatives wanted to cut costs. Substantively, the challenge involved preserving welfare’s safety net functions while promoting work. But the outlook for low-skilled workers was increasingly precarious. From 1973 to 1989 unemployment averaged 7 percent, about 50 percent higher than the previous three decades; among black women it was 14 percent. Wages were stagnant among women and eroding among men. At the end of the 1970s, half the black women in the labor force earned a wage that left a family of four in poverty, even if they worked full-time. With the American safety net already much smaller than its European counterparts, cuts seemed especially risky.

  Where jobs did exist, it wasn’t clear recipients could hold them. LaDonna Pavetti is perhaps the leading authority on recipients’ personal attributes; she estimated that about half of the women on AFDC had problems that could interfere with the simplest jobs. A third had severely limited cognitive abilities. Thirteen percent reported near-daily bouts of depression. Ten percent had medical disabilities. Nine percent acknowledged heavy cocaine use. Some had multiple problems—depression and drug abuse. The good news is that even those with the worst problems worked. The bad news is that they didn’t work steadily. They bounced around like the clients Mark Greenberg saw, making beds, cleaning offices, and drawing public aid.

  Women who did leave welfare for work could count on little support. The system was filled with perverse incentives (“notches” and “cliffs”), meaning that recipients who increased their earnings often lost so much aid they wound up no better off. Sometimes they were worse off. Briefing Jimmy Carter on the problem, his welfare secretary, Joseph Califano, explained that if a Wisconsin woman doubled her earnings to $5,000, her net income would fall by $1,250 and she would lose Medicaid. Carter was appalled. “When people really understand this, I’m sure they will do something about it,” he said. But any smoothing of the take-away rate would simply bring more people on the rolls, at a cost of billions. The other plausible solutions—creating government jobs, offering child care, expanding health insurance—likewise seemed prohibitively expensive. One reason the despised program endured so long is that it appeared to cost less than the alternatives. While Carter had promised a “complete overhaul,” his plan never even came to a vote in a congressional committee. It did, however, produce a famous quote: welfare reform, Califano warned, was “the Middle East of domestic politics.”

  While welfare policy was immobilized as Angie came of age, ghetto life was entering a troubling new state. Poverty rates had plunged in the sixties and plateaued in the seventies, but they surged in the first half of the eighties—especially among children. One in five kids—and nearly half of black kids—lived below the poverty line. The post-industrial economy was one part of the story, but family structure was the other. The share of children born outside marriage, 5 percent in the fifties, reached 10 percent at the end of the si
xties, 20 percent in the early eighties, and more than 25 percent at the decade’s close. By 1990, two-thirds of African American children were born to single mothers. Half the nation’s poor lived in single-mother households. The poor were growing not just in numbers but in social isolation. The number of slum and ghetto census tracts—those where at least two-fifths of the residents are poor—doubled in two decades. Then crack arrived, and with it shockwaves of violence. This wasn’t just poverty but poverty of a new and disturbing sort: brutal, stigmatizing, self-destructive.

  The disaster of the ghettos brought one thing disasters typically attract, journalists. In 1982, Ken Auletta published The Underclass, a book influential less for what it said than for popularizing the phrase. The Chicago Tribune followed a few years later with a book-length series on the city’s ghetto poor. The Washington Post sent reporter Leon Dash to spend a year living in a poor District neighborhood; he returned with a startlingly candid look at teen pregnancy. Almost all the work on ghetto life was launched with sympathetic intent, but it inevitably covered some unflattering ground: school failure, nonmarital births, drugs, crime. The focus, that is, wasn’t merely on poverty but also on behavior. One startling depiction of inner-city life came from Bill Moyers’s 1986 documentary on the black family. Though the two-hour CBS special broadcast was titled Crisis in Black America, part of its power came from seeing how rarely those caught in the tragedy viewed their lives as a crisis. The most infamous of Moyers’s characters was a man with six kids he didn’t support, by four women, who crowed about his “strong sperm.” “Well, the majority of the mothers are on welfare,” he explained. “So what I’m not doing, the government does.” His name was too fitting: Timothy McSeed.