American Dream
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caseloads nearly tripled: From 274,000 cases in 1945 to 745,000 in 1960. Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, appendix table 1.
widows, broken families: Edelman, “Family Support Act,” 25.
40 percent black: Martin Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 106.
Pensions carefully policed: Even in 1914, a prominent social worker, Homer Folks, warned that “to pension desertion or illegitimacy would, undoubtedly, have the effect of a premium upon these crimes against society.” Bell, ADC, 7.
88 “founding document”: Mickey Kaus, The End of Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 110.caseloads more than quadrupled: From 745,000 cases in 1960 to 3.12 million in 1973. Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, appendix table 1; Baseline, table 2.1.
“Animals shouldn’t live in such”: Bell, ADC, 103.
90 percent of blacks poor; Eastland’s cotton subsidies: Nick Kotz examined the living conditions on the Eastland plantation in a four-part series for the Des Moines Register and Tribune, Feb. 25-28, 1968, from which this information comes. See also Kotz, WP, July 5, 1971.
89 Ralph Abernathy: Burke and Burke, Nixon’s Good Deed, 44. turning people away, half the eligible: Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, 219.of the 23,000 children purged: Bell, ADC, 137.
“a substitute father” to “grocers”: King vs. Smith, 392 U.S. 309 (1968).
“workers began focusing”: Cloward quote and background on welfare rights movement from interviews with Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. In a sign of how quickly the spirit of the times changed, Cloward’s proposal for Mobilization for Youth, the program that launched the welfare-rights age, included a boilerplate pledge to cut the welfare rolls. See also DeParle, NYTM, Dec. 29, 1998, and Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (1977; repr., New York: Vintage, 1979), 264-361.
89 “argued and cajoled”: Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, 291.
90 “massive drive to recruit the poor”: The Nation, May 2, 1966.age of the welfare radical: Nick Kotz and Mary Lynn Kotz: A Passion for Equality: George Wiley and the Movement (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 40 cities, 307; Harassment, 234; Korvettes, 236; “brood mares,” 251.
“people who lay about”: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Politics of a Guaranteed Income: The Nixon Administration and the Family Assistance Plan (New York: Random House, 1973), 523.
iron his shirts: James T. Patterson, America’s Struggle Against Poverty 1900-1994 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 194.
“jobs that pay ten thousand,” “You can’t force me”: Burke and Burke, Nixon’s Good Deed, 162.
New York City caseload doubled: From 502,000 recipients (as opposed to cases) in 1966 to 1.1 million in 1972, NYC, Human Resources Administration.
91 “my department of health”: Burke and Burke, Nixon’s Good Deed, 44.“the days of the dole”: Kaus, The End of Equality, 113.
one of every nine kids: Burke and Burke, Nixon’s Good Deed, 9.
a third of children, 80 percent of black children: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Social Justice in the Next Century,” America, Sept. 14, 1991, 134-35.
Merle Haggard: “Working Man Blues” reached number 1 in 1969.
average package of cash and food stamps: In 1972, a mother of two received an average of $10,370 (1993 Green Book, 1253, expressed in 1992 dollars); the poverty threshold in 1992 was $11,304 (Census Bureau); benefits for subsequent years in 1993 Green Book, 1248-53.
92 one in ten worked when AFDC started: Kaus, The End of Equality, 111.half worked by the mid-1970s: For mothers of minor children, the labor force participation rate (the share working or looking for work) was 49 percent in 1976 and 51 percent in 1977. Data provided to the author by Howard Hayghe, BLS.
triple the cost, 15 percent of domestic: Calculations by Adam Carasso of the Urban Institute, based on 1990 data.
school lunches, subsidized housing: 1993 Green Book, p. 1604. The share with subsidized housing ranged from 19 percent in 1987 to 35 percent in 1990.
view in Jacksonville: Interview with Mark Greenberg. The case of Alice Roberts, the food stamp recipient arrested for fraud, wound up in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which barred the indiscriminate investigations. Quoting from a congressional report accompanying the food stamp law, the court warned of “the need to protect needy individuals from having their privacy bartered away in order to assuage their hunger.” Roberts vs. Austin, 632, F2nd, 1202 (5th Cir. 1981), 9.
93 half the black women: Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and Heather Boushey, State of Working America 2002-03 (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press), 136.problems that could interfere: Krista K. Olson and LaDonna Pavetti, “Personal and Family Challenges to the Successful Transition From Welfare to Work,” The Urban Institute, May 17, 1996.
94 Carter was appalled: Laurence E. Lynn Jr., and David deF. Whitman, The President as Policymaker: Jimmy Carter and Welfare Reform (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), 88.“Middle East”: Joseph A. Califano Jr., Governing America: An Insider’s Report from the White House and the Cabinet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981), 321.
slum and ghetto census tracts: Jargowsky, Poverty and Place, 35-41. Of the five million people who lived in high-poverty census tracts, 80 percent were members of racial minorities.
the disaster brought journalists: See Ken Auletta, The Underclass (New York: Random House, 1982); staff of the Chicago Tribune, The American Millstone: An Examination of the Nation’s Permanent Underclass (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1986); Leon Dash, When Children Want Children: An Inside Look at the Crisis of Teenage Pregnancy (1989; repr., New York: Penguin Books, 1990); Bill Moyers, “The Vanishing Family—Crisis in Black America,” CBS, Jan. 25, 1986.
95 “blaming the victim”: The phrase was coined by the psychologist William Ryan as part of his critique of the Moynihan report; see Ryan, Blaming the Victim (New York: Pantheon, 1971).the Moynihan report: See Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), esp. 51, 75; also Lemann, The Promised Land, 171-76.
poverty academics: For an expanded discussion of academic research on poverty following the Moynihan report, see Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), especially chapters 8 and 9.
96 “slavefare”: Edelman, “Family Support Act,” 254, quoting Rep. Augustus Hawkins of California.“lives of large numbers”: Charles Murray, Losing Ground (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 229. Presciently, Murray foresaw a large element of his appeal. “Why can a publisher sell it?” he wrote in his book proposal. “Because a huge number of well-meaning whites fear that they are closet racists, and this book tells them they are not. It’s going to make them feel better about things they already think but do not know how to say.” DeParle, NYTM, Oct. 9, 1994. The film, With Honors, was released in 1994.
97 reigning explanation: William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).“Our goal”: Mickey Kaus, “The Work Ethic State,” The New Republic, July 7, 1986, 31.
“the ghetto-poor culture”: Kaus, The End of Equality, 129.
98 including Arkansas: The Arkansas WORK program began in October 1982 under Governor Frank White. Having lost to White in 1980, Bill Clinton was reelected in Nov. 1982 and continued the program.half the mothers of preschool: For women with children under six, the labor force participation rate was 50.5 percent in 1983. Data provided to the author by Howard Hayghe, BLS.
groundbreaking study: Mary Jo Bane and David T. Ellwood, “The Dynamics of Dependence: The Route to Self-Sufficiency,” Report to HHS, 1983.
nine programs raised employment and earnings: Summarized in Edelman, “Family Support Act,” 102. The modesty of some of the gains ca
n be seen in the data on Arkansas, which raised the average recipient’s earnings by a total of $78 over six months. Judith M. Gueron, “Reforming Welfare with Work” (Occasional Paper 2, Ford Foundation Project on Social Welfare and the American Future, 1987), 17.
99 “viable solution”: Edelman, “Family Support Act,” 104.Reagan task force and events leading to the 1988 bill: Ibid., 100-147, 161, 262, 217.
6. THE ESTABLISHMENT FAILS: WASHINGTON, 1992-1994101 never met anyone on welfare: Interview with Bruce Reed.prosperous family: Interviews with Bruce Reed, Mary Lou Reed (his mother), and Tara Reed (his sister).
six times as many: In 1990, Idaho’s average caseload was 6,100, and Milwaukee’s was 36,200.
“We should invest”: Clinton speech to Democratic Leadership Council in Cleveland, May 6, 1991.
“build a mad as hell”: Reed memo to Bill Clinton, May 25, 1991.
“off the welfare rolls”: Clinton speech in Little Rock, Oct. 3, 1991.
a half dozen drafts, The next morning: Interviews with Bruce Reed and Stan Greenberg.
103 paper elaborated: The paper, “Reducing Poverty by Replacing Welfare,” was later printed in Mary Jo Bane and David T. Ellwood, Welfare Realities: From Rhetoric to Reform (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 143-62; it grew from David T. Ellwood, Poor Support: Poverty in the American Family (New York: Basic Books, 1988). “end to welfare as we know it”: Bill Clinton speech at Georgetown University, Oct. 23, 1991.
104 “spending even more”: Clinton, interview by Paula Zahn, CBS This Morning, Nov. 14, 1991.“skepticism about spending”: Greenberg memo to Clinton, Aug. 16, 1992.
Among those unsettled: Interview with David Ellwood, DeParle, NYTM, Dec. 8, 1996.
met in passing: Ellwood tells the story of reintroducing himself to Clinton at a governors’ meeting in the summer of 1991. Clinton lit up and told Ellwood he was carrying one of his papers. “Look, I’ve got it right here—all marked up,” Ellwood recalls Clinton saying. Then fishing the paper from a notebook, Clinton said, “Oh wait, this is Hillary’s copy.” While the encounter fortified Ellwood’s sense of Clinton’s seriousness, it may also have laid a groundwork for subsequent disappointments; at their first White House meeting on welfare, Clinton passed a note to an aide suggesting he had Ellwood confused with his father, Paul Ellwood, a prominent health-care expert. (On the confusion with Paul Ellwood, see Whitman and Cooper, USN, June 20, 1994.)
klieg lights: 1992 interview with David Ellwood, in which he called child support assurance (a welfare expansion that Clinton had never mentioned) “the single most important” part of his plan and said of time limits, “You can do that last.”
“We simply do not have”: David T. Ellwood, “Major Issues in Time Limited Welfare” meeting (background paper prepared for meeting at the Urban Institute, Dec. 2, 1992), 20, 24.
“Vacuous and incendiary”: David T. Ellwood, “From Social Science to Social Policy: The Fate of Intellectuals, Ideas, and Ideology in the Welfare Debate in the Mid-1990s” (lecture, Northwestern University, Jan. 9, 1996), 11.
105 nearly 3 million: Mark Greenberg, “The Devil Is in the Details: Key Questions in the Effort to ‘End Welfare As We Know It,’ ” CLASP, July 1993, 11.
106 cut the rolls 2 percent: Stephen Freedman and others, “The GAIN Evaluation: Five-year Impacts on Employment, Earnings, and AFDC Receipt” (Working Paper 96.1, MDRC, July 1996), table 1.By just mailing checks: Cost estimates come from CBO, “The Administration’s Welfare Reform Proposals: A Preliminary Cost Estimate,” Dec. 1994, and interviews with its coauthor John Tapogna.
The politics were hard: Early in their tenure, Ellwood and Reed convened a meeting of Democratic experts, many veterans of President Carter’s failed reform. A sampling of their advice: “Start small.” “Don’t go national.” “Be modest in goals and rhetoric.” “A quarter of a loaf isn’t so bad.” “The planets could not be more misaligned. “What you want to do might be impossible.” (Notes of one participant.)
106 visited some Democrats: McDermott, USN, June 20, 1994, 31; interviews with Robert Matsui and Harold Ford.Children’s Defense Fund opposed JOBS: Those wondering whether Clinton would really end welfare noted that his first stop in Washington as president-elect was a Children’s Defense Fund event. For CDF’s opposition to the Family Support Act, see letter from Marian Wright Edelman, the group’s founder, on Sept. 28, 1988; cited in 100th Cong., 2nd sess., Cong. Rec. 134 (Sept. 30, 1988): H 9103.
107 “clatter of campaign promises”: Pear, NYT, Jan. 15, 1993. Others voicing doubts included the housing secretary, Henry Cisneros (“I’m not a believer in artificial deadlines of that nature”) and the domestic policy adviser, Carol Rasco (she warned workfare jobs would have to be part of a meaningful “piece on a career ladder. . . . I feel very strongly about that”); DeParle, NYT, June 21, 1993. Ellwood’s deputy, Wendell Primus, was an ardent safety-net defender as a congressional aide; testifying a few months into office, he called for postponing a work rule already on the books; David E. Rosenbaum, NYT, May 5, 1993.“break the culture”: Clinton speech to American Newspaper Publishers Association, New York, May 6, 1992.
“punish the kids”: Interview with Bill Clinton, Feb. 24, 1992.
JOBS Plus: “If you’ve done that, you’ve done a great thing,” Moynihan told Reed, referring to an expanded JOBS program; interview with Bruce Reed.
a dyspeptic skeptic: “Need I say there is no commitment the campaign made that will so easily come to ruin,” Moynihan wrote to Vernon Jordan, the head of the Clinton transition team, speaking of the pledge to end welfare. He was pushing an aide, Paul Offner, for a welfare job that instead went to Mary Jo Bane, a New York state official (and former Harvard professor), with whom he had clashed. The rebuff did nothing to ease Moynihan’s distrust of the administration, which may have deepened when an anonymous Clinton aide told Time, “We’ll roll right over him.” (Moynihan letter to Jordan, Nov. 11, 1992; Time, Feb. 1, 1993.)
“I’ll look forward”: David T. Ellwood, “Welfare Reform As I Knew It,” The American Prospect, May-June, 1996.
108 an affluent childhood: Interviews with David Ellwood, Ann Ellwood (his mother), Deborah Ellwood (his sister), Marilyn Ellwood (his wife), and Paul Ellwood (his father); see also DeParle, NYTM, Dec. 8, 1996.putting health care before welfare: As a newcomer to Washington with few ties to the Hill, Clinton also may have hoped that starting with a health-care bill that Democrats wanted (as opposed to a welfare bill they disliked) would help him avoid Jimmy Carter’s troubled relations with Congress.
109 “Let ’em rip”: Clinton to leaders of welfare task force, June 18, 1993; interview with Bruce Reed. During my interviews with Reed, he sometimes consulted his records of meetings; any direct quotations of Clinton (or others) sourced to Reed stem from these written materials, rather than from his memory alone.
110 Ellwood joined the effort: Interviews with Ellwood and Bob Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, who played an important behind-the-scenes role. Spotting the shortfall in the EITC, Greenstein sent a confidential memo to Melanne Verveer in Hillary Clinton’s office. Mrs. Clinton passed it on to the president, who ordered the problem fixed. Among other things, the incident showed the rarefied access advocates like Greenstein momentarily enjoyed after twelve years of GOP control. Clinton at his seductive best: Interviews with Bruce Reed, David Ellwood, and Judith Gueron.
111 “that goddam task force”: Interview with Daniel Patrick Moynihan.“destructive element”: Interview with Bruce Reed.
“What kind of program”: Interview with Wendell Primus.
“only reasonable reaction”: Interview with David Ellwood.
112 Riverside had raised earnings: After two years, the counties that emphasized education and training raised their participants’ earnings by 17 percent; Riverside’s increase was 53 percent. For those who see this as complete vindication of the work-first model, several qualifications are worth noting. Even in Riverside about 60 percent of
the participants got some education or training. Plus, the differences between Riverside and its rivals diminished with time, consistent with the notion that education is a long-term investment; over five years, recipients in Butte County earned more. And earnings in all sites remained low, on average just $3,800 in the fifth year. See Freedman and others, “The Gain Evaluation,” table 1. See also Julie Strawn, “Beyond Job Search or Basic Education: Rethinking the Role of Skills in Welfare Reform,” CLASP, April 1998.“bag lady,” “work is education”: DeParle, NYT, May 16, 1993.
“Work organizes life”: Clinton at Church of God in Christ, Memphis, Nov. 13, 1993, PPP-1993, vol. 2, 1985.
Lillie Harden: See, for instance, Clinton’s State of the Union Address, Jan. 25, 1994 (PPP-1994, vol. 1, 129), where he told her story without using her name.
“My life”: Interview with Bill Clinton, Jan. 30, 2004.
113 task force sent him: Working Group on Welfare Reform, Family Support, and Independence, “Draft Discussion Paper,” Dec. 2, 1993.
114 “You let loose”: Interview with Daniel Patrick Moynihan.first showy move: Florida, with a Democratic governor, passed a time-limit bill first, in April 1993, but Thompson’s move in May was much more public and political. Winking at those in the know, his handouts argued for time limits by citing the Bane-Ellwood data on dependency.
114 “meaningful community service”: Gov. Bill Clinton and Sen. Al Gore, Putting People First: How We Can All Change America (New York: Times Books, 1992), 165.Clinton gave the green light: Interview with Bruce Reed.
an “untested” idea: E. Clay Shaw, Nancy L. Johnson, Fred Grandy, “Moving Ahead: How America Can Reduce Poverty Through Work,” June 1992, iii.