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4. Explaining the Postwar Rise of Welfare Opposition Many of these [welfare] children merely have been abandoned by one or more parents, simply because the parent or parents know that the welfare department will provide funds for rearing these children, leaving the parents free to earn, spend, and beget other children to become wards of the government. . . . To me, this type of thing is weakening the moral fiber of which strong families are built. Children from homes supported by the government funds arrived at the conclusion that support comes easy and without work. georgia county welfare official, 1952 48 The 1950s Welfare Backlash and Cold War Liberalism The notion that poor people were using welfare to avoid work and their familial obligations was encouraged by the rise of conservative ideas in the 1950s. Structuralist views of poverty and the belief that the state had a responsibility to help the poor declined as a “cold war liberal” ideology took hold. This ideology viewed the free enterprise system and economic growth as the key to economic prosperity, democracy, and equality.1 Such beliefs flourished amid the relative affluence of the period, as average family income rose for all income brackets. Not only were the poor less numerous, but they were also less visible as white working- and middle-class people moved to suburbs and increasingly relied on cars for transportation.2 Cold War anticommunist hysteria—stirred up by the House Un-American Activities Committee’s investigation of communism in the Hollywood Motion Picture Industry in the late 1940s and Senate hearings led by Joseph McCarthy on communist subversion of the U.S. government in the early 1950s—also undermined support for welfare.3 Conservative politicians viciously attacked New Deal programs, claiming they were infiltrated by communists, contrary to the free enterprise system, and un-American.4 On the other hand, while the decade’s prosperity reduced the sense of urgency for social reforms, it also undercut the notion that welfare would ruin the economy.5 Most Republicans, especially the cosmopolitan “eastern establishment,” and conservative Democrats treated the New Deal as a per- manent feature of politics. Reflective of this, President Eisenhower was a moderate Republican, whose administration brought “some retrenchment and much consolidation” to New Deal programs.6 As Eisenhower explained to his brother in 1954, “Should any political party attempt to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs , you would not hear again of that party in our political history.”7 Congress even improved federal welfare programs in the 1950s. It expanded housing assistance, improved vocational and rehabilitation services, created permanent veterans’ readjustment benefits, and improved unemployment benefits. In 1952 and 1954, Old Age and Survivors Insurance was extended to cover more farmworkers, and disability insurance was created in 1956.8 Congress even improved ADC, establishing caretaker grants in 1950 that gave adults an allowance in addition to their children’s grant. It also increased the federal government’s share of public assistance payments in 1946, 1948, 1950, 1952, and 1956.9 Even at the state level, campaigns to restrict ADC were only partially successful. Nearly half of all states refused to restrict poor mothers’ access to welfare through employment requirements or “suitable home” policies. There were three reasons for this. First, opposition to welfare remained concentrated among conservative business leaders and low-wage employers, especially farmers, in the 1950s. Second, racialized opposition to welfare was only just emerging in the 1950s, since the color barrier for welfare receipt had only recently been lowered. There was also a fairly low level of immigration , which limited opposition to immigrants’ use of welfare. Third, maternal employment was still uncommon, which limited support for work requirements for welfare mothers. The most active support for the welfare backlash during this decade came from two partly overlapping social groups: large farmers and conservative whites. Large farmers, occasionally joined by other business leaders, were interested in limiting poor mothers’ welfare rights in order to minimize their taxes and ensure a supply of cheap labor. Conservative whites, concerned with maintaining the racial status quo, also pressured the state to restrict welfare. In this chapter, I examine in greater detail the role of these two groups in the antiwelfare campaigns of the 1950s and the conditions under which these campaigns succeeded. Using quantitative evidence, I argue that welfare critics were more successful in restricting welfare eligibility where agribusiness was more important to the state’s economy, racial conflicts were more salient, and states were...

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