Backlash against Welfare Mothers: Past and Present

7. Setting the Stage: The Failures of Liberal Innovation

7. Setting the Stage The Failures of Liberal Innovation The blunt truth is that liberals have achieved virtually no fundamental change in our society since the end of the New Deal. senator edmund s. muskie, addressing the Liberal Party in New York in 1971 107 The 1960s and 1970s were particularly tumultuous decades in welfare history , bringing forth both expansions and contractions in poor mothers’ welfare rights. On the one hand, increased electoral power of liberals, the rise of the civil rights movement and its demands for employment opportunities, and urban riots in the early 1960s provided new impetus to expand the rights of poor families. Under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, Congress undertook a “service and rehabilitation” strategy for alleviating poverty, expanding services and job training for low-income people and creating financial incentives for employment. The rise of a new grassroots welfare rights movement and a series of legal victories for poverty rights lawyers undercut many of the restrictive policies and practices that had earlier prevented poor mothers from receiving welfare. Partly as a result of these developments, the AFDC program experienced its most rapid growth, as the number of families it served almost tripled between 1960 and 1970, increasing from 787,000 to 2,208,000.1 This dramatic caseload growth brought renewed attention to the welfare system, sparking considerable debate. These policy changes proved to be too limited and too narrowly targeted, however, to either eradicate poverty or gain broad-based support. Because AFDC and War on Poverty programs disproportionately served racial minorities—who were disproportionately unemployed, concentrated in low-wage jobs, and excluded from other welfare programs—racialized opposition to their expansion quickly emerged. AFDC also came under attack from conservative business leaders and low-wage employers. In the late 1960s, the backlash against welfare reached the national level, culminating in the creation and strengthening of federal work requirements for welfare mothers in 1967 and 1971. Along with a broader white backlash against the civil rights movement, this welfare backlash contributed to Republican Richard Nixon’s election. President Nixon represented the moderate wing of the Republican Party and ruled over a largely Democratic Congress, however, which encouraged the development of innovative policy proposals. Nixon tried, unsuccessfully, to replace the welfare system with a guaranteed income program for the working and nonworking poor. In the late 1970s, Carter revived presidential efforts to revamp the welfare system, and urged Congress to adopt the Program for Better Jobs and Income, which combined a guaranteed income program with job creation. Congress’s failure to improve on AFDC, despised by both the Left and the Right, was a crucial turning point in American welfare history, paving the way for more forceful attacks on welfare mothers.2 The Service Strategy and Its Limits Under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, the federal government expanded its efforts to combat poverty. Their initiatives provided new job training opportunities, monetary incentives to work, and social services to low-income people, in an effort to rehabilitate the poor and integrate them into mainstream society. Both presidents focused on expanding opportunity, but not on reducing inequality or seriously redistributing the wealth. They emphasized training and services rather than job creation or a guaranteed income because it was a less expensive approach and because they were optimistic that the booming economy would create more jobs in the private sector.3 In response to rising concerns about structural unemployment and poverty, popularized through Michael Harrington’s (1962) book, The Other America, Congress created a number of new job training initiatives through the 1961 Area Redevelopment Act, the 1962 Manpower Development and Training Act (MDTA), and the 1963 Vocational Educational Act.4 Congress also expanded ADC in 1961, authorizing states to provide aid to two-parent families through the ADC Unemployed Parents program, and thus reinforcing the family wage system for low-income families.5 Through the 1962 Social Security Act amendments, which renamed the program Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Congress expanded the program’s casework services and created a new Community Work and Training (CWT) program to “rehabilitate” current, former, and potential recipients. Like the Area Redevelopment Act and MDTA training programs, CWT authorized federal funds for job training and work expenses, such as child care, for welfare recipients. Reflecting the persistent influence of the family wage model 108 / The First Welfare Backlash on policy makers, CWT mainly targeted unemployed fathers and was largely voluntary. Most...