Toward a New Welfare History

Histories of American welfare have been stories about the state. Like Walter Trattner's widely read From Poor Law to Welfare State, now in its sixth edition, they have offered a narrative about the slow but steady expansion and elaboration of state and federal protections granted to poor and working people, and have usually done so by charting increases in government expenditures, by documenting the institutionalization of welfare bureaucracies, and by tracing rises or declines in poverty, unemployment, and other aggregate measures of well-being.¹ This has been the case even in more critical accounts that emphasize that American social welfare history is not a story just of progress, such as Michael Katz's In the Shadow of the Poorhouse.² These narratives have emphasized programs, not people (whether it is the poorhouse, the asylum, and mother's pensions, or the more recent innovations of national unemployment insurance, Social Security, AFDC and TANF, and Medicare and Medicaid). In the investigations of the welfare state that dominate academic research, the content and timing of government policy itself has served as the dependent variable, while the independent variables have been a congeries of interests, institutions, and policy entrepreneurs. Our attention has been focused upon what government has done, why it was done, and what the effects were as measured in official data.

Recent scholarship has thereby brought us new understandings of the patronage powers that led to the expansion of pensions to Civil War veterans,³ evaluated the influence of organized business interests during debate over the Social Security Act of 1935⁴ and in other eras,⁵ shown how the Democratic South shaped welfare policy to its racist and economic ends,⁶ explained the impetus behind the recent repeal of AFDC,⁷ or sought to explain the repeated failures to enact guaranteed income or universal health-care programs in light of organized pressure and institutional constraints.⁸ When such scholarship has honed in on individual-level experience, the emphasis has been on how reformers, politicians, and bureaucrats have sought to improve the poor and their condition. Poor and working people themselves are something of an abstraction in these accounts, even in the best ones, and when they are present they are usually the objects of policy, and largely passive, Julian Zelizer's recent suggestion in these pages that "the tension between scholars who study elite politics and grass roots politics quickly dissipates when policy is made the center of inquiry" notwithstanding.⁹ Even in those still-exceptional cases in which poor people are protagonists in welfare history, like Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward's Regulating the Poor and Poor People's Movements,¹⁰ it is their collective action and influence on the political system that have been the main focus. While we have heard and continue to hear much about poor and working people, we have still heard little from them, and seen little from their perspective.

Curiously, it has been opponents of the welfare state who have more dependably sought to understand the poor as individuals, none more notoriously than Charles Murray, whose thought-experiment in Losing Ground about "Harold and Phyllis" and how the "perverse incentives" of welfare would cause this couple to prefer aid over work, has dominated public and political understanding of the street-level impact of policy: that is, how do relief programs alter poor people's engagement with their families and children, their neighbors, their neighborhoods, the labor market, and the state.¹¹ Such stories, like Murray's, of an immobile, dangerous, and dependent underclass have so dominated policy discourse and popular understandings in part because there have been too few counter-narratives, too few accounts that, like Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein's Making Ends Meet, show us exactly how little a welfare check will buy and how poor women manage to survive nonetheless; like Katherine Newman's No Shame in My Game and Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, which have revealed the daily exigencies of being a low-wage worker in postindustrial America; or like Joe Soss's Unwanted Claims, which documents the ways in which citizens' interaction with...