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CHAPTER 1

Democratic Divisions on Work and Welfare

Two eras command attention in the historical development of both the U.S. welfare state and the modern Democratic Party: the New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society of the 1960s. Both were launched by liberal Democratic presidents backed by sizable congressional majorities, and the social welfare programs and policies they created came to be seen by supporters and detractors alike as among the defining legacies of the party. Yet the Democratic Party of the 1930s and 1960s was not only the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and their liberal supporters. It was also the party of Representatives Robert Doughton and Wilbur Mills, Senator Russell Long, and their conservative colleagues from the South.

Southern Democrats held nearly 40 percent of the party’s congressional seats in 1932 (38 percent in the House; 44 percent in the Senate) and more than 35 percent of them in 1968 (36 percent and 33 percent, respectively). Most were more conservative than others in the party, and they shared a distinctive approach to work and welfare. Several occupied some of the most powerful positions in Congress on social and domestic policy in these years. As debates unfolded over the shape and size of public assistance programs for poor families, the role of Southern Democrats in Congress proved decisive. During the 1930s, intraparty conflicts defined both the limits and possibilities of New Deal welfarism in federal policies toward the poor under the Social Security Act. And in the 1960s, Southern leaders would help execute an unmistakable rightward turn in welfare policy, even as scores of new antipoverty initiatives were launched by party leaders in the White House and social welfare spending spiked to new heights.

The origins of New Deal welfarism lay in the crisis of the Great Depression and the response of the incoming Roosevelt administration. The 1935 Social Security Act created both social insurance programs for workers (such as Unemployment Compensation and Social Security) and public assistance programs for discrete categories of poor Americans, including Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) for single-parent families. The new public assistance system was more comprehensive than the patchwork of state and local programs that preceded it. It created an unprecedented new role for the federal government and provided a new entitlement to certain vulnerable groups of poor Americans. Yet New Deal welfarism was constrained at its inception—not only by the limited scope of assistance, but also by an institutional structure that delimited federal authority over public assistance, and by a fractured coalition of political support within the Democratic Party. Even as the programs expanded in the decades that followed, these limitations left New Deal public assistance vulnerable to attacks by later critics, as the first section of this chapter demonstrates.

The turn from New Deal welfarism to modern workfare at the federal level began in the 1960s with a series of political skirmishes over ADC (later renamed Aid to Families with Dependent Children, AFDC). The transformation would, in time, encompass a range of other programs and expand well beyond work requirements for AFDC recipients. As the chapter’s second section explains, it was in these years—on the watch of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and in the midst of the largest expansion of social welfare programs since the New Deal—that federal cash assistance for poor families began the slow-moving shift to a work-conditioned safety net that would culminate in the 1996 repeal of AFDC and its federal entitlement. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson pursued a series of liberal expansions of AFDC between 1961 and 1967. The strategies they chose backfired, however, creating opportunities for Southern conservatives within their own party to seize the initiative to pursue a workfare agenda.

New Deal Welfarism: A Thin Entitlement

The Great Depression was entering its third year and unemployment levels approached a staggering 33 percent when Franklin Roosevelt assumed office in 1933.¹ The attention of the nation and the new administration was trained on prolonged joblessness and the need for immediate relief for the tens of millions facing destitution. Ten weeks after his inauguration, FDR signed into law the Federal Emergency Relief Act, authorizing matching grants to states to ease acute and widespread poverty through the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). From the outset, both Roosevelt and FERA administrator Harry Hopkins were determined to provide work to the unemployed—rather than relief through direct cash assistance—wherever possible.² “Direct relief was merely a temporary emergency expedient,” explained FERA assistant administrator Josephine Brown. “It was necessary to keep the unemployed from starving until work and wages in some form could be provided.”³ Public works programs soon emerged as a central component of the response to the Depression, with more than four million workers employed by the Civil Works Administration by January 1934. Federal relief flowed at unprecedented levels as well, reaching more than eleven million people at the beginning of 1934, and more than eighteen million by the fall.⁴

As the emergency began to subside, the president turned his attention to creating a permanent program of social protections designed to provide Americans with “security against the major hazards and vicissitudes of life.”⁵ He appointed a high-level Committee on Economic Security (CES) in June 1934 to study and prepare legislative recommendations for a comprehensive program of federal social provision. Their efforts would yield the landmark Social Security Act of 1935, which included both social insurance programs for current and retired workers and public assistance programs for eligible categories of poor Americans. Within the U.S. context, FDR’s vision for economic security was a bold one, and it rested primarily on the promise of social insurance. “The President wanted everybody covered for every contingency in life—‘cradle to grave,’ he called it—under a social insurance system,” said Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, who had been tapped to head the CES.⁶ Social insurance programs were designed to shield workers from economic hardship when they were unable to earn due to circumstances beyond their control, such as temporary unemployment, illness, or old age. Unemployment insurance and, later, old age insurance emerged as priorities for the CES.⁷

Although envisioned as a “second line” of defense against destitution, behind social insurance, public assistance was regarded as a necessary “supplement” for certain populations facing poverty but unable to earn their own support.⁸ Aid would be provided under the Social Security Act to three categories of poor Americans: the elderly through Title I (Old Age Assistance), single-mother families with dependent children through Title IV (Aid to Dependent Children), and the blind through Title X (Aid to the Blind); a program of Aid to the Permanently and Totally Disabled (Title XIV) was added in 1950. For varying reasons, each group was considered “unemployable.” As one FERA official explained, “An ‘unemployable’ person is one that is incapable of performing a day’s work on account of age or physical disability, or where home and family duties will render it impossible for the individual to work.”⁹ Assistance to people in the three categories would be provided through federal grants-in-aid to match expenditures by the states, which would administer the programs. Planners reasoned that aid to the poor had long been handled at the local and state levels, and primary responsibility should remain there, particularly as the federal government was now assuming a major new burden in confronting unemployment and creating social insurance programs on a national scale.¹⁰

Differences arose, however, over the purposes and parameters of public assistance. The most robust of the main contending visions was articulated by the CES Advisory Committee on Public Employment and Relief and key leaders within the FERA.¹¹ The Advisory Committee lobbied for a dense and broad safety net that would provide both a larger public works program and income assistance for all those in need who could not participate in it. The committee urged a sober realism about the limits of employment to ensure adequate economic security and the resulting need for public assistance on a permanent basis, arguing that “the social hazards to which millions of persons and families are subjected, are too varied and too complicated to make it safe to assume that work would remove the need.”¹² It also advised against a limited, categorical approach to determining who among the poor deserved assistance. The Advisory Committee argued instead for a unified program with appropriate federal authority, to address, in Josephine Brown’s words, the needs of “the ‘employables’ who would not fit into the practical work programs” and the “unemployables” who did not fit into designated categories.¹³ This vision of a broad program of federally supported general assistance to all poor Americans would surface repeatedly in subsequent decades.

The leading women activists at the federal Children’s Bureau, who were tasked with submitting recommendations for assisting children in poverty, held a different view of public assistance. The bureau had championed the development of state-level “mothers’ pensions” during the Progressive Era and saw New Deal public assistance as an opportunity to expand these programs. The aim would be to assist and enable eligible single mothers to provide proper care for their children in their homes without an undue burden of wage-earning. The bureau’s vision emphasized a casework approach that combined income assistance and counseling by trained social workers.¹⁴

The CES was charged with crafting the administration’s draft legislation, and many of its leaders—including executive director Edwin Witte and technical director Arthur Altmeyer—held a third position. Witte and Altmeyer were economists from Wisconsin who had helped create that state’s pioneering social insurance programs. Along with other prominent New Dealers, they wanted to make federal social insurance the centerpiece of the proposed legislation. They embraced the need for a more comprehensive, fair, and equitable system of public assistance for the poor, but they had a different assessment of its trajectory—one that would later be exploited by critics of public assistance. They were convinced that the need for public assistance would diminish as employment and social insurance grew. They therefore sought to keep the public assistance programs limited, in part to ensure that the new social insurance initiatives gained broad popular and congressional support.¹⁵

Despite their differences, these three positions shared significant common ground, and New Deal welfarism ultimately reflected elements of each.¹⁶ As the CES drew up recommendations, it adopted the more limited, categorical approach to federal public assistance (providing aid to those in the three categories of “unemployables”) rather than its Advisory Committee’s recommendation for a unified program of general assistance for the poor. The CES was persuaded, according to its report, that if all of its recommendations were adopted, this categorical approach would be adequate because the relief problem “will have diminished to a point where it will be possible to return primary responsibility for the care of people who cannot work to the State and local governments.”¹⁷ The CES plan did affirm the need for a more extensive and fairly administered system of aid for the poor—one with federal funding and oversight, however. In the case of poor families with children, the CES report stated bluntly that a “large group of children at present maintained by relief will not be aided by employment or unemployment compensation. There are the fatherless and other ‘young’ families without a breadwinner.” For these groups, “increased State appropriations and Federal grants-in-aid are essential.”¹⁸

The CES’s proposed ADC program would provide cash assistance to help eligible poor single mothers support their children at home. The programs, according to the CES report, “are designed to release from the wage-earning role” these single mothers.¹⁹ This principle was amplified in testimony before Congress by Grace Abbott, one of the authors of Title IV, who served on the CES Advisory Committee and had directed the Children’s Bureau. Because a “mother’s services are worth more in the home than they are in the outside labor market,” Abbott testified, she “should be enabled to stay home and take care of the children, and we expect she will have to do so until the children reach working age.”²⁰

As the ADC provisions moved through Congress with the other public assistance proposals, they quickly became the victim of intraparty conflict, as historian Linda Gordon and other scholars have documented.²¹ Disagreements between the Northern liberal and Southern conservative wings of the Democratic Party emerged in both the House and Senate committees charged with producing the legislation, chaired by Representative Robert Doughton (D-N.C.) and Senator Pat Harrison (D-Miss.). Southern committee leaders ultimately rewrote the terms of assistance, including benefit and eligibility rules, in ways that radically curtailed the scope and reach of the program.²²

The administration’s original legislation provided benefit levels that sought to ensure adequate (if minimal) support, defined as “a reasonable subsistence, compatible with decency and health, to dependent children.”²³ Southern Democrats in Congress opposed this provision, however. According to Abbott, they “feared that northern standards might be forced on the South in providing for Negro and white tenant families,” and the clause was stripped from the bill.²⁴ Instead, the final legislation stated only that ADC was to enable each state “to furnish financial assistance, as far as practicable under the conditions of the state.”²⁵ A similar clause was eliminated from the program for the elderly poor, Old Age Assistance. But the committee leaders’ particular disregard for the ADC program was revealed when final benefit levels were determined: ADC benefits were the lowest of the three categories. Edwin Witte, executive director of the CES, later acknowledged that this may have been a mistake, but he “did not feel that it was wise to raise this point, lest we lose this aid altogether.”²⁶

The original administration bill also contained a broad standard of eligibility for ADC. Following recommendations by the FERA, the administration initially defined dependent children as those for whom there was “no adult person, other than the one needed to care for the children, able to work and provide a reasonable subsistence.” This definition arguably would have laid the groundwork for federal assistance to virtually all poor children under working age, including those in two-parent families, and it would have exempted the caretaker parent—usually the mother—from waged work. Josephine Brown explained, “‘Aid to Dependent Children’ as conceived by the FERA meant general relief or assistance on a family basis to all families having children under sixteen.”²⁷ However, Doughton’s House Ways and Means Committee removed the implicit work exemption for the adult caretaker. The Senate Finance Committee further circumscribed eligibility by asserting that the children must have been deprived of parental support “by reason of death, continued absence from the home, or physical or mental incapacity of a parent.”²⁸ These changes not only limited the program’s reach. They also left unsettled the question of work obligations. The final federal legislation did not require work of poor mothers and was intended to support caregiving, but it did not explicitly prohibit states from imposing work rules. Moreover, the program’s low benefits would force many families to combine welfare and work to make ends meet.

Conflict also arose over what appeared to be an unobjectionable bureaucratic clause in the administration’s bill that provided for federal regulations “necessary to effectuate the purposes of this title.” Perceiving this as a threat to state control and patronage jobs, the House committee scaled back the provisions, and the administration assented. The removal of this provision and federal oversight over other specific standards limited federal administrators to approving or disapproving state ADC programs in their entirety, rather than demanding piecemeal changes. Federal officials would have to choose between accepting a flawed state plan with objectionable restrictions on aid, or rejecting the plan altogether and thereby denying federal aid to all poor single-mother families within that state.²⁹

The new system of public assistance was thus attenuated by compromises demanded by Southern legislators—concessions that would leave it vulnerable to subsequent workfare initiatives. New Deal public assistance still rested on a welfarist foundation, though a fragile one. Eligibility was based above all on need. There was no federal requirement that poor families earn wages in order to receive aid. Although states could determine their own standards of need, a federal guarantee ensured that matching funds would be provided to meet each state’s need as it fluctuated with economic conditions. Some federal standards also remained in place. To receive funding, each state was required to submit an administrative plan for its ADC program, to be approved by the federal Social Security Board. Plans had to meet certain requirements—affirming, for example, that the program was available throughout the state and administered by a single statewide agency. States also had to provide for fair hearings for those denied assistance, a principle federal administrators saw as essential to defending the individual entitlement to aid.³⁰ As the Social Security Act became law, the question was whether the thin welfarist foundation of the new public assistance programs would be challenged and undermined, or shored up and strengthened over time.

* * *

The years following the Social Security Act’s passage brought a marked expansion in the new program for poor families. ADC’s growth was troubled and uneven, however, leading to frustration among its welfarist advocates. Jane Hoey, who led the Social Security Board’s Bureau of Public Assistance (BPA), was anxious to see the program fully implemented as quickly as possible. Central to the agency’s welfarist vision was an immediate goal of securing the involvement of all states, and all counties within them. Hoey calculated that ADC was likely “still caring for only a fraction of the needy children for whom Federal funds might be made available” in 1939, and she was impatient.³¹ The BPA wanted states to build ADC up more rapidly, and to adopt more generous and inclusive eligibility criteria.

For their part, many state administrators saw ADC largely as a source of federal funds to support—but not reform—their existing state-run mothers’ pension programs. Deep-rooted state interests often ran against the expansionary vision of federal administrators. Most states faced serious fiscal constraints and worried about their funding obligations under the new assistance programs.³² Many officials wanted to keep programs small, affordable, and under their control. This trend was widespread in the South, where economic elites expected to maintain unfettered control over local workforces, leaving racial hierarchies at the heart of the region’s labor relations unchallenged. Increased public assistance threatened to disrupt these long-standing social and economic arrangements by providing an alternative income source to poor families with current or potential workers.³³ State and local officials thus jealously guarded their administrative prerogatives, and throughout the South, state public welfare commissioners coordinated their efforts to limit federal oversight.³⁴

As federal funds began to flow, Southern states displayed a distinct pattern of policy preferences, illustrated most clearly in the size and scope of the three assistance programs. Between the 1930s and 1960s, Southern states built up programs for the elderly poor that were among the largest in the country by rate of recipients (per 1,000 elderly residents). Their programs for the blind and disabled poor were also sizable.³⁵ Yet Southern states’ programs for poor families were quite small, in terms of numbers of families supported and program costs, despite the region’s high family poverty rates. Although benefit levels in all Southern public assistance programs were meager, the region’s ADC programs were more restrictive in their reach, and they provided the lowest average benefits in the nation.³⁶

Table 1.1 Southern States’ Old Age Assistance (OAA) Programs, 1960 and 1961

Source: Total recipient and payment data are from “Current Operating Statistics,” Table 11, Social Security Bulletin 25, no. 3 (March 1962): 33; these data are for November 1961. Recipient rate data are from “Current Operating Statistics,” Table 10, Social Security Bulletin 24, no. 9 (September 1961): 40; these data are for December 1960. The Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1962, 83rd ed. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1962), reports similar OAA recipient figures in Table 403, page 298, and provides population rankings, page 10.

Note: Southern state public assistance programs for the elderly had the highest participation rates in the country. Many of their programs were among the nation’s largest, measured by number of recipients as well as total monthly payments, even as Southern state population levels ranked mostly in the midrange nationally.

Early studies in the 1940s confirmed what federal administrators suspected: a number of states were using their discretionary authority under the Social Security Act to serve local interests by restricting access to ADC.³⁷ One widespread strategy was the use of vague and ill-defined “suitable home” restrictions, a holdover from Progressive Era mothers’ pension programs. These state rules—regarding a mother’s home life, child-rearing practices, and sexual relations—left significant discretion to caseworkers.³⁸ Many states used the restrictions to refuse or limit aid to unmarried mothers. “Suitable home” rules drew prominent early criticism from Winifred Bell, who wrote a classic firsthand study of ADC in its initial decades.³⁹ Extensive scholarship since then has exposed the ways that suitable home rules were used to exert social control over poor women.⁴⁰

Table 1.2 Southern States’ Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), November 1961

Source: “Current Operating Statistics,” Table 14, Social Security Bulletin 25, no. 3 (March 1962): 34; the data are for November 1961. Similar data for recipients are reported in Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1962, Table 403, page 298; similar data for average family benefits are reported in Table 404, page 299.

Note: In contrast to the Southern programs for the elderly and disabled poor, Southern state ADC programs did not rank high nationally (by recipients or payments), and their average benefits were the lowest in the nation.

Another strategy, and an important precursor to workfare, was to use employment rules to govern eligibility and benefits. States often granted local officials the discretion to determine a mother’s “employability.”⁴¹ Many women were denied ADC assistance on the grounds that they were in fact employable and should be earning wages instead. Many others were instructed or compelled to earn wages to supplement their ADC grants, through temporary suspensions of aid or the provision of insufficient benefits.⁴² Decisions to deny or limit aid were sometimes made regardless of whether mothers were actually able to secure jobs or sufficient wages.⁴³ Though it is difficult to assess the numbers who were working, studies of closed cases in the 1950s and early 1960s showed that around one-third of ADC mothers worked for wages, either full-time, part-time, or seasonally.⁴⁴

Like suitable home restrictions, employment rules were more prevalent in the South and disproportionately used to exclude black families. A Southern public aid field supervisor observed:

The number of Negro cases is few due to the unanimous feeling on the part of the staff and board that there are more work opportunities for Negro women and to their intense desire not to interfere with local labor conditions. The attitude that “they have always gotten along,” and that “all they’ll do is have more children” is definite…. Communities … see no reason why the employable Negro mother should not continue her usually sketchy seasonal labor or indefinite domestic service rather than receive a public assistance grant.⁴⁵

An investigation of complaints about ADC in Louisiana reached similar conclusions: “In some areas, it is contended that public assistance results in reducing the unskilled labor supply in employment where women and older children form a principal part of the labor supply … The fact that roughly two-thirds of the children receiving ADC are nonwhite influences attitudes toward the program.”⁴⁶

Federal administrators pushed back against these and other state practices that undermined the BPA’s welfarist aims. The agency’s institutional leverage was limited, however, and its primary response was to issue new regulations and guidance. For example, BPA officials issued a series of requirements in 1947 that state agencies not deny any individual the opportunity to apply for the program, and that they provide assistance to every applicant deemed eligible.⁴⁷ The BPA’s Handbook of Public Assistance was eventually over five inches thick with federal guidance.⁴⁸ On the employment question, the Handbook stated clearly that the ADC program and staff should “make it possible for a mother to choose between staying at home to care for her children and taking a job.”⁴⁹ Jane Hoey expressed serious concern about the failure to adequately realize these goals when recipients left welfare for work or combined the two due to low benefit levels. Inadequate assistance payments rendered “meaningless” any choice between work and benefits, she asserted.⁵⁰

Recognizing that states faced fiscal pressures to limit aid programs, federal administrators also increased the federal financial contribution to ADC.⁵¹ This strategy measurably helped to expand the program to cover more families. In a review of ADC’s first twenty-five years, Ellen Perkins at the Bureau of Family Services (BPA’s successor) would later note that increased federal funding produced a significant rise in state assistance standards in these years, which made more families newly eligible.⁵² Federal funding also helped generate greater coverage of nonwhite families. Between 1937 and 1940, some 14 to 17 percent of all ADC recipients nationwide were black; by 1948, the proportion of nonwhite families was 30 percent.⁵³

Overall, assistance for poor families thus saw a slow but steady welfarist expansion in its first three decades, despite resistance from a number of states. In Washington, meanwhile, intraparty differences over public assistance were only deepening. Several leading administration officials continued to defend and prioritize social insurance over public assistance in deliberations over policy reforms. More than once, major welfarist expansions and reforms to strengthen the New Deal framework for public assistance were considered—but federal officials drew back, instead repeating earlier assurances that the assistance programs would shrink as social insurance grew.⁵⁴ In Congress, the frustration of Southern Democrats over the trajectory of public assistance was rising. The sentiment was captured by Senate Finance Committee chair Walter George of Georgia, who insisted in 1950 that proposed reforms should simply replace public assistance with social insurance.⁵⁵

Liberal Expansions and the Southern Reaction in the 1960s

The role of the post-New Deal generation of Southern Democrats is less familiar than that of the Southerners who shaped the Social Security Act at its origins.⁵⁶ Led primarily by Wilbur Mills of Arkansas in the House and Russell Long of Louisiana in the Senate, who entered Congress in 1939 and 1948, respectively, this cohort would spearhead many of the first major legislative efforts to introduce workfare reforms in public assistance. Like their predecessors, they derived their influence in part from the sweeping prerogatives afforded to senior committee members in Congress before the institutional reforms of the early 1970s. The House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee had primary jurisdiction over public assistance policy. In the four decades following the act’s passage, Southerners chaired the House Committee in thirty-six of forty years, and the Senate Committee in thirty-eight of forty years.⁵⁷

Table 1.3 Congressional Committee Chairs, 1933–2015

House Ways and Means
Robert L. Doughton (D-N.C.)	1933–1947
Harold Knudson (R-Minn.)	1947–1949
Robert L. Doughton (D-N.C.)	1949–1953
Daniel A. Reed (R-N.Y.)	1953–1955
Jere Cooper (D-Tenn.)	1955–1957
Wilbur D. Mills (D-Ark.)	1957–1975
Al Ullman (D-Ore.)	1975–1981
Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.)	1981–1994
Sam Gibbons (D-Fla.)	1994–1995
Bill Archer (R-Tex.)	1995–2001
William M. Thomas (R-Calif.)	2001–2007
Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.)	2007–2010
Sander M. Levin (D-Mich.)	2010–2011
Dave Camp (R-Mich.)	2010–2015
Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.)	2015–
Senate Finance
Pat Harrison (D-Miss.)	1933–1941
Walter F. George (D-Ga.)	1941–1953
Eugene D. Millikin (R-Colo.)	1953–1955
Harry F. Byrd (D-Va.)	1955–1965
Russell B. Long (D-La.)	1966–1981
Robert J. Dole (R-Kans.)	1981–1985
Bob Packwood (R-Ore.)	1985–1987
Lloyd Bentsen (D-Tex.)	1987–1993
Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.)	1993–1995
William V. Roth, Jr. (R-Del.)	1995–2001
Max Baucus (D-Mont.)	2001–2003
Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa)	2003–2007
Max Baucus (D-Mont.)	2007–2014
Ron Wyden (D-Ore.)	2014–2015
Orrin Hatch (R-Utah)	2015–

Source: Congressional Directory, 1935 to 2012; History of the Committee on Finance, United States Senate (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1981), 141–53.

Note: Southern legislators (in italics) dominated the chairmanships of committees with jurisdiction over social welfare policy from the New Deal to the mid-1970s, a period in which committee chairs exerted a high degree of control over legislation. Southerners chaired the House Ways and Means Committee in thirty-six of forty years, and the Senate Finance Committee in thirty-eight of forty years, from the time of the Social Security Act to 1975. Their influence continued for some years afterward, though it was diminished. Note: Lee Metcalf (D-Mont.) was Finance Committee chair on January 14, 1966, the day Long began his tenure. Grassley also served as chair from January 20 to June 5, 2001.

These Southern lawmakers’ policy decisions in the first three decades of the New Deal system reveal clear priorities.⁵⁸ They wanted to increase federal funds for those they considered truly “unemployable” and permanently outside of the labor force—namely, those physically unable to earn wages. And they wanted to ensure that others—including most single mothers with care-giving obligations—would work: they were not persuaded that these families should receive aid on the same terms as other categories of the “unemployable” poor. These priorities translated into active Southern support for the programs for the elderly, blind, and disabled poor, and deep suspicion of the ADC program. On five occasions in the 1950s, Southern and Western congressional leaders led the charge for increases in public assistance funding—particularly for the favored categories of elderly and disabled poor—that were not requested by the Truman administration, and that were opposed (to the point of a veto threat) by the Eisenhower administration.⁵⁹

Southern Democrats were successful in increasing aid for the elderly and disabled poor through the 1950s, but they were frustrated by the growth of ADC. Over time, they became convinced that the answer was to change federal policy to restrict aid to and require work of ADC recipients.⁶⁰ Federal policy, however, regarded poor, single-mother families as one of the original categories of “unemployables” eligible for public assistance. Southerners had little chance to challenge these categories—until the 1960s, and reforms introduced by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

* * *

Although they shared an ambitious antipoverty agenda, reforming the New Deal public assistance programs was not initially a high priority for either Kennedy or Johnson. Kennedy’s early domestic agenda focused on controlling unemployment levels in the wake of successive recessions between 1957 and 1961, and many of Johnson’s antipoverty programs concentrated on creating opportunities and services for employable Americans.⁶¹ Kennedy and Johnson recognized, however, that new policies were needed to reach those unable to earn wages in the labor market: fully three out of five poor Americans were under eighteen or over sixty-five years of age.⁶² Both administrations pursued expansionary reforms in public assistance and sought to extend the core welfarist commitments of the New Deal programs.

As the Kennedy team prepared to take office in 1961, a task force charged with proposing reforms for the new president took a first step in this direction. It was chaired by Wilbur Cohen, who had staffed FDR’s Committee on Economic Security and later the Social Security Board. Cohen’s team called for welfarist measures such as securing federal funding for state general assistance programs, pressing for more uniform assistance payments across states, denying aid to states that imposed undue restrictions, and boosting federal matching funds as a means to increase benefit levels.⁶³

But the welfare system, and particularly ADC, was under attack as the new administration began. The controversy was fueled by the rising costs and caseloads of the program—which were spiraling up, not down as promised—and more pointedly, by the changing demographic composition of its recipients. An increasing proportion of ADC mothers were nonwhite and nonmarried. Conservative critics were building support for efforts to slash welfare rolls and costs. Some demanded that suspected “cheaters” be rooted out; others argued that all recipients able to work for wages should do so. Attempts to purge ADC rolls and to restrict welfare use at the state level had begun to escalate, particularly in the South and Southwest.⁶⁴ The regional and racial dimensions of the welfare struggle were underscored months before Kennedy’s election, when state officials in Louisiana issued a tough new rule denying ADC benefits to mothers who failed to maintain “suitable homes.” More than 23,000 children instantly lost eligibility; 95 percent of the children were black, and 70 percent were born to nonmarried mothers.⁶⁵ Although the Louisiana crisis was resolved by a federal ruling the following year, the case drew national attention.

Confronted with a widening political controversy over welfare, administration leaders crafted a series of reforms between 1961 and 1967. The first was the 1961 ADC-UP program; it was followed by the 1962 Public Welfare Amendments and the 1964 Work Experience and Training program. They were meant to simultaneously meet expansionary liberal aims and mollify conservative concerns about ADC’s trajectory. Ironically, reform strategies intended to strengthen welfarist commitments to poor families would backfire by 1967 and instead advance a workfare alternative.⁶⁶

Kennedy made the case for his first reform in a February 1961 message to Congress. He proposed to broaden ADC by permitting states to assist certain two-parent families. “Needy children are eligible for assistance if their fathers are deceased, disabled, or family deserters. In logic and humanity, a child should also be eligible for assistance if his father is a needy unemployed worker—for example, a person who has exhausted unemployment benefits.”⁶⁷ The reform, which Kennedy had championed as a senator, was called “ADC-UP,” for “unemployed parent.”⁶⁸ In addition to softening the impact of the economic downturn for poor families, Kennedy had another motive. Critics had long argued that ADC unfairly favored single-parent homes and unintentionally created incentives for the breakup of two-parent families. Many ADC supporters shared these concerns. In seeking congressional support for ADC-UP, Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) Secretary Abraham Ribicoff emphasized that the reform would remove any rationale for unemployed fathers to leave their homes to make their families eligible for assistance.⁶⁹

Advocates hoped that this approach would increase support for the expansionary measure among moderates and conservatives—and the initial signs were positive. Jurisdiction over the proposed changes lay with the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance Committees, chaired by Southern Democrats Wilbur Mills (D-Ark.) in the House and Harry Byrd (D-Va.) in the Senate. The House Committee produced a bill that largely reflected the administration’s proposal, and the measure was eventually approved in both chambers by voice vote. The new law authorized federal ADC grants for two-parent families with a parent who was either out of work or working fewer than a hundred hours a month.⁷⁰

ADC-UP’s smooth ride through Congress obscured important differences over key provisions among Democratic leaders, however. Passage was eased by the administration’s decision to make ADC-UP optional, not mandatory, for states; as soon became clear, Southern states had no intention of adopting the welfarist expansion. Both committees also added language to restrict its scope and toughen its provisions. Mills’s Ways and Means Committee sought a more aggressive approach to work promotion for the newly eligible unemployed parents—adding, for example, a provision that aid would be terminated if the parent refused a job offered by a state employment agency “without good cause.” This stipulation would become a staple of workfare reforms in the years ahead.⁷¹

Liberals heralded the reform as a major new expansion. Many welfarist reformers believed it had the potential to transform ADC from a program for a select group of single-parent households to one serving the broader population of poor families, and might even lead to a more universal approach to public assistance.⁷² Hopeful liberals misjudged the reform’s impact, however. Because the program was optional for states, it had a limited effect on family poverty. Fully half of the states chose not to adopt it throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The South simply opted out. By 1967, twenty-one states had established ADC-UP programs, with benefits going to 67,500 families (less than 6 percent of all AFDC families). Oklahoma was the sole Southern state with a program, serving only 590 families; this amounted to less than one-quarter of 1 percent of recipient families in the South.⁷³

ADC-UP did, however, open a new front in the escalating political battle against ADC, one that altered its trajectory in ways the creators of the reform neither anticipated nor desired. It was the first of the 1960s reforms that overtly challenged the premise that federal public assistance was for the unemployable poor. As Wilbur Cohen and Social Security Commissioner Robert Ball later observed, “After the enactment of Public Law 87-31 [ADC-UP], the question of work relief came sharply into focus, as Federal participation in assistance was being provided for the first time to a group of individuals [unemployed fathers] who were, by definition, employable.”⁷⁴ Although benefits continued to flow overwhelmingly to single-mother families, ADC quickly became more vulnerable to claims that it encouraged idleness. Among the loudest critics were Southern congressional Democrats. Even as they chose not to enact ADC-UP in their own states, several used its passage to level new attacks at ADC. In the name of helping dependent children, charged Senator Strom Thurmond (D-S.C.), the measure “merely make[s] payments to a man to enable him to live without working for a living.”⁷⁵

The following year, the administration unveiled its second and most ambitious reform. The Kennedy team wanted a way to pursue its broadly liberalizing agenda for ADC, but without increasing the size of a program under fire. The “solution” came from experts in the social work community: provide social services, in addition to cash assistance, to the poor. Advocated by HEW Secretary Ribicoff, the strategy aimed not to eliminate cash assistance, but to shift attention to problems that might keep families from achieving self-support. Preventive and rehabilitative services ranged from counseling and employment assistance to alcohol rehabilitation and legal advice.⁷⁶ The “services solution” to poverty problems had been advanced by social workers since the Progressive Era and had gained traction in the 1950s, but this was a new and more receptive political context.⁷⁷ The strategy promised to meet liberals’ desire for a more comprehensive response to the poverty-related problems of welfare families. At the same time, it was designed to appeal to conservatives by targeting the trends that concerned them, from out-of-wedlock births to fraud. The Kennedy strategy was packaged as a way to solve all of these problems—and in the process, to reduce welfare costs and caseloads.⁷⁸

The proposed reform had far-reaching implications for welfare policy. Although the Kennedy administration understood the structural sources of economic insecurity, the services strategy was not grounded in these assumptions.⁷⁹ The provision of “preventive, rehabilitative, or protective” services to the poor, however well intentioned, implied that the causes of poverty were, at root, individual problems requiring counseling and casework. Funds were aimed not at transforming the social or economic environments that confronted the poor, but at changing the poor themselves. Most important for the political development of ADC, the services-for-self-support strategy could be cast broadly enough to accommodate work promotion policies. If adding unemployed men through ADC-UP had created a new political logic for work requirements, the services strategy now provided a policy framework for introducing work and training obligations, as one of several “rehabilitative” services to encourage individual self-support.

Liberal reformers emphasized that the purpose of the modest work and training provision they proposed was not coercive or punitive, and that the main target was unemployed men in ADC-UP who needed assistance in re-entering the workforce. They continued to see cash assistance to support caregiving as a central purpose of ADC. Work programs would not curb the welfare load significantly, cautioned a study requested by Ribicoff, noting that “approximately 90 percent of the persons receiving assistance are too young to work, too old to work, or are caring for young children and should remain at home.”⁸⁰ But these caveats were lost as the new strategy paved the way for a larger shift in federal policy. Once self-support was accepted as an explicit aim of federal welfare policy, and work programs were accepted as one means toward this end, a new debate opened up about work and welfare. In time, the question would narrow from whether most recipients could and should work, to which recipients should work and on what terms, and, finally, to how to make them do so.⁸¹

The social services strategy was set out in proposed amendments to the Social Security Act in early 1962. Once again, the president hoped to win over moderates and conservatives by emphasizing its potential to solve problems perceived to lie at the root of the rapid rise in the welfare rolls. And once again, the proposal moved fairly smoothly through Congress.⁸² As with ADC-UP, however, the apparent consensus hid a growing policy divide within the Democratic Party on the purposes of public assistance. One difference between Southerners and the White House concerned which poor populations should receive federal assistance dollars. Mills’s Ways and Means Committee obligingly approved the key components of the Kennedy proposal—but then shifted the legislation’s budgetary focus to reflect Southern Democrats’ priorities: the committee quietly added an increase in federal benefit payments for the Southerners’ favored recipient groups, the elderly, blind, and disabled poor. The increase had not been requested by the administration, and Secretary Ribicoff testified against it. It proved the most costly single provision of the law.⁸³

The two wings of the party also held conflicting ideas and expectations about the services strategy, and Kennedy’s marketing tactics encouraged the dual interpretation. On the one hand, the president took care to emphasize that social services were primarily designed to build on—not replace—the liberal commitment to income assistance, and liberals saw it as an expansion of the New Deal welfarist ideal.⁸⁴ On the other hand, Kennedy sought to satisfy conservatives frustrated by ADC’s costs and caseloads.⁸⁵ Above all, it was Kennedy’s pledge that the reform would lower the ADC rolls that conservative members of his party wanted to hear. Lawmakers seized on this point, and the nuances in Kennedy’s message evaporated. Many expected the new strategy to replace cash aid: it “places emphasis on the provision of services rather than depending on welfare checks,” noted Mills’s committee approvingly.⁸⁶

Kennedy signed the Public Welfare Amendments on July 25. The law authorized federal payments to defray state costs for rehabilitative or preventive social services. It also renamed the program “Aid to Families with Dependent Children” (AFDC). Within the legislation, a new Community Work and Training (CWT) initiative was a minor provision reflecting one approach to “rehabilitating” recipients. The initiative was optional: state or local governments could choose to create CWT programs to help develop welfare recipients’ work skills.⁸⁷ The primary targets were unemployed fathers, but the initiative was also designed to serve some AFDC mothers on a voluntary basis and with adequate childcare support.⁸⁸ Like ADC-UP, the work and training program remained limited in practice: by 1967, just twelve states had implemented the provision, enrolling a total of only 15,300 recipients.⁸⁹

There was thus little reason, in the early 1960s, for liberal Democrats to suspect that this minor provision would serve as the opening wedge for a new conservative approach to public assistance for poor single mothers. But the Kennedy reforms had created a new dilemma for the program, one that made explicit the tension between the New Deal welfarist aim and the emerging workfare agenda. Gilbert Steiner at the Brookings Institution identified the conflict soon after the amendments passed. Pointing to a memo used by Ribicoff to build congressional support by promoting a “family-centered approach,” he asked: “Is the public policy enunciated by President Kennedy of training adults for useful work instead of prolonged dependency consistent with the public policy enunciated by Ribicoff of providing children with adequate protection, support, and a maximum opportunity to become responsible citizens? Is the focus on child welfare or on adult rehabilitation?” Steiner had identified “the great new ADC dilemma: whether the program should be preoccupied with the economic needs of dependent children and their families or whether its preoccupation should be with transforming adults into breadwinners.”⁹⁰ Over the next several years, this dilemma would define the divisions and struggles within the Democratic Party over welfare policy.

* * *

Lyndon Johnson did little to clarify or resolve the dilemma after assuming the presidency. Johnson declared a “War on Poverty” in his first State of the Union address on January 8, 1964, and signed the Economic Opportunity Act eight months later. His position on public assistance largely reflected and extended Kennedy’s vision. But the focus on self-support grew more explicit under Johnson, and the emphasis shifted to services designed to more quickly prepare individuals for the workforce.

Johnson’s emphasis on creating opportunity became a guiding principle for the War on Poverty, and was intended to convey a new Democratic commitment to helping the poor help themselves: “Rather than fight poverty by means of the dole,” explained one analyst, “we were to restore the poor to self-sufficiency through education, training and work—all in the spirit of the Economic Opportunity Act.”⁹¹ The focus on opportunity obscured more than it illuminated, however. The issues that divided Democrats in the 1960s, as in the 1930s, were not whether generating opportunity was desirable, but what if anything government would do to provide opportunities if they were not readily available in the private labor market, and whether programs promoting opportunity and self-support would replace or complement cash assistance for those who could not or did not support themselves.

Johnson expanded on the work components of Kennedy’s Public Welfare Amendments with his own reform—the Work Experience and Training program (WET), under Title V of the Economic Opportunity Act.⁹² Unlike the CWT program, WET was fully funded by federal dollars. Federal funding led to its adoption by all but one state, but its results were hardly more encouraging than those of CWT. Between 1964 and early 1967, WET enrolled only 133,000 individuals; even at its high point in this period, just 5 percent of adults in AFDC participated in the program.⁹³

Meanwhile, political struggles over welfare were heating up. The 1964 election of the most liberal Congress since the New Deal had effectively split the Democratic Party in three over the welfare issue, with the Kennedy–Johnson reformers occupying the rapidly diminishing middle-ground position. To their right were the conservative Democrats, whose frustration with AFDC was growing. But pressure was also building to the left of the administration, generated in part by civil rights and welfare rights activists. They mobilized in poor communities and pressed for reforms that went well beyond the commitments of the New Deal and the promises of the Great Society. Many argued (as earlier welfarists had) that the Democrats should abandon the model of limited categorical assistance, to provide an expanded and more generous entitlement for all poor families. The concept of providing a denser safety net for all who needed it—perhaps through a basic guaranteed income—was also making headway among many government officials.⁹⁴

Pressed from both sides, liberals in the Johnson administration continued to seek compromise positions that could appeal to all. This strategy, however, was slowly collapsing. With each reform initiative, administration officials had promised that the welfare rolls would drop—and yet the rolls continued to spiral upward. Between early 1962 and 1967, the number of AFDC recipients increased from 3.5 to 5 million. Costs escalated from $994 million in 1960 to $2.2 billion in 1967.⁹⁵ The successive Kennedy–Johnson reforms, meanwhile, had gradually shredded the always tenuous distinction between the employable and unemployable poor at the heart of the New Deal rationale for public assistance. Aid was now granted (through AFDC-UP) to employable AFDC fathers, and (under the CWT and WET programs) to mothers as well as fathers who were encouraged to work. If federal policy directed aid to employable as well as unemployable poor adults, what was the basis and what were the parameters of public assistance for poor families? Who defined how employable a recipient might be? By 1967, the party’s conservative faction was ready to provide its own answers.

As the Public Welfare Amendments approached the end of their five-year authorization that year, the president sent Congress new plans for addressing poverty among children and the elderly. Despite public criticism of the rising AFDC rolls, Johnson argued for new expansions in aid, claiming that too few poor children were receiving the help they needed. He condemned states for meager benefit levels and for not taking advantage of AFDC-UP to expand the program, and also criticized states for failing to fully implement CWT programs.⁹⁶ Johnson sought to sustain the same political balancing act that he and Kennedy had throughout the 1960s—combining welfarist expansions with noncoercive provisions to encourage work through incentives and social services.

But social service proponents were on the defensive. Measured against a yardstick selected by advocates themselves—declining rolls and costs—the 1962 services strategy had yielded few results in five years.⁹⁷ At the same time, increasing numbers of nonwhite and never-married recipients had gained access to the program since its inception, and the backlash against the gains of the civil rights movement had generated new attacks on AFDC and its recipients. Women were entering the workforce in larger numbers, fueling demands that poor single mothers on welfare work for wages. And state welfare offices were clamoring for fiscal relief. Demands for conservative reform, in short, were mounting from many quarters.⁹⁸

In Congress, critics were increasingly frustrated with the unmet promises of liberal welfarists within the party. “Witness after witness told the Congress over the years that if we would just do this and do that to improve social insurance, then public assistance would eventually wither away,” Wilbur Mills explained to social welfare officials in Arkansas. “And this is turning out to be largely true for every cash public assistance program except the AFDC program.”⁹⁹ Mills directed particular ire at the failure of the services strategy to produce program reductions and savings.¹⁰⁰ Welfarist advocates countered that there had not been the time or opportunity for a true test.¹⁰¹ Politically, however, the services strategy had run out of time. Mills and other congressional leaders had had enough. When the Johnson administration provided an opening by proposing an expanded work support program as part of AFDC’s reauthorization in 1967, they seized the opportunity to press their own agenda for conservative reform.

The break with the administration on welfare policy had been brewing for some time, as tensions rose between Southern conservatives and Northern liberals over civil rights and the Great Society. The 1966 congressional midterm elections had strengthened the Southerners’ position, as the liberal wing lost its majority. Democrats retained control of Congress but gave up forty-seven seats in the House, and more than three-quarters of those losses were from outside the South. In the wake of race riots in Newark and Detroit in July 1967, Mills’s committee finally moved to “kill a major proposal to liberalize welfare,” reported the Wall Street Journal.¹⁰² Instead of approving Johnson’s plans for AFDC, the committee sent the House a package of reforms that would, for the first time, require states to enroll AFDC recipients in work programs, formally alter the program’s stated aims, and effectively end its entitlement status by freezing the number of recipients. The proposals, developed by Mills’s committee in executive session over months, caught the administration by surprise.¹⁰³

Tougher work policies, Mills suggested, would solve the AFDC crisis. His proposals built on the earlier Kennedy and Johnson programs—but shifted their logic and intent. The Ways and Means Committee began by revising the preamble to Title IV of the Social Security Act (AFDC). States should now ensure “that each appropriate relative, child and individual will enter the labor force and accept employment.”¹⁰⁴ The committee crafted a new section to be added to Title IV, creating a Work Incentive (WIN) program. States would be required to establish work-training programs for adults and children over sixteen receiving AFDC; they would also be required to set up day-care centers for AFDC parents with young children, making these parents eligible for work and training as well. All eligible recipients were to be referred to the programs by state and local welfare agencies, and the committee envisioned that the vast majority of adult recipients would be judged appropriate for work referrals. Refusal to work or receive training without “good cause,” the committee suggested, could lead to termination of AFDC assistance.¹⁰⁵ Mills’s committee also included a measure to reward employment by creating positive incentives for welfare recipients, a strategy supported by liberals. Expanding on an administration proposal, Ways and Means proposed a work incentive permitting working parents to keep $30 plus one-third of their earnings before any deductions were made to their AFDC checks. This effectively reduced the “tax” on earnings from 100 percent to 67 percent and was more generous than the administration’s proposed earnings disregard.¹⁰⁶

In a marked change from past practice, the committee otherwise rejected virtually every major provision of the Johnson administration’s 1967 proposal for public assistance reform. The final WIN provisions were crafted largely by lawmakers rather than federal administrators: WIN marked the entry of Congress as a central actor in charting welfare policy. The committee’s bill departed from existing federal policy in several ways. Perhaps the single most important shift was the explicit assertion that all AFDC parents, with limited exceptions, should be considered for work or training programs; participation for those referred would not be voluntary. Although requiring single mothers to earn wages remained controversial, the committee clearly stated its intention “that a proper evaluation be made of the situation of all mothers to ascertain the extent to which appropriate child care arrangements should be made available so the mothers can go to work.”¹⁰⁷

In a second departure, the committee emphasized that the work provisions were to be mandatory, not optional, for the states. The workfare agenda for public assistance trumped the traditional Southern Democratic commitment to states’ rights for Mills: “For 5 years, this load has gone up and up and up, with no end in sight…. We want states to see to it that … unless there is a good cause for them not to be required to take it, that [recipients] take training and then work…. That is what we wanted to do in 1962. We left it to the option of the States, and they did not do it. Five years later, today, we are on the floor with a bill which requires that it be done.”¹⁰⁸

A third significant departure was a direct challenge to the entitlement principle within AFDC. For the first time, Congress would set a limit on the number of AFDC families for which each state would receive matching funds.¹⁰⁹ The “freeze” applied to cases in which the father was “absent” rather than deceased. In a reflection of conservative concerns about out-of-wedlock childbirth as well as work, the legislation also authorized the states to set up programs to reduce “illegitimate births.”¹¹⁰ The proposed limit on matching funds directly undercut the core New Deal welfarist commitment to provide public assistance to all who qualified, as a matter of right.

Mills’s proposed reforms were sent to the House floor in August 1967. Because the reforms were debated under a closed rule, and as part of a measure with a major increase in benefits for the popular Social Security program, House passage was assured despite liberal objections to key provisions. But the federal workfare proposals would not make their way to the president’s desk without a pitched battle among Democrats. The House bill drew immediate and strong opposition from several liberal quarters.¹¹¹

Members of Congress were confronted by organized opposition to various aspects of the reform. Welfare rights groups labeled the proposed WIN amendments “the slave labor amendments.”¹¹² Social workers accepted the principle of encouraging work through incentives and training, but rejected the compulsory and coercive elements embodied in the bill in favor of a voluntary, individualized approach. “Mothers must have the right of choice as to if and when it is appropriate and desirable for them to work outside the home, giving the care of their children to others,” insisted a representative of the Family Service Society of America.¹¹³ A broad array of civil rights, labor, and religious groups also organized against WIN, focusing on the provisions imposing mandatory employment and a freeze.

As the bill moved to the Senate, organizers worked with welfarist Senate leaders—notably Fred Harris (D-Okla.) and Robert Kennedy (D-N.Y.)—to ensure that the Senate version was less punitive. But liberals in the Senate had to contend with Senator Russell Long. Long’s prominence on the Senate Finance Committee had risen in the wake of the 1963 death of Senator Robert Kerr (D-Okla.), a conservative who had nonetheless worked constructively with the White House on Social Security expansions. Long had assumed the position of committee chair in 1966. He was a Louisiana Democrat, a staunch opponent of civil and welfare rights and a leading proponent of workfare. During hearings on the bill, Long made his views known on the issue: “People who can work ought to work,” he announced. Poor mothers should not receive cash assistance for “filling up whole houses with children,” then refuse to work when jobs were available. He railed repeatedly against the twin evils of idleness and out-of-wedlock births, both of which were fueled, in his view, by the AFDC program.¹¹⁴ In September, Long confronted welfare rights activists during a Finance Committee session, and the exchange grew heated. When the women refused to leave until more senators arrived to hear their testimony, Long exploded, banging his gavel so hard that it broke. “If they can find time to march in the streets, picket and sit all day in committee hearing rooms, they can find time to do some useful work.”¹¹⁵

The Senate ultimately produced a bill that was less punitive than the House measure. After significant pressure from liberal Democrats, Long agreed to permit some work exemptions for recipients who were ill or had very young children. And in a series of close votes on the Senate floor that clearly demonstrated the divide between Northern and Southern Democrats, several of the most restrictive AFDC provisions were scaled back.¹¹⁶ Southern conservatives won the next round, however. When House and Senate leaders met in a conference committee to iron out differences between their two bills, the conference agreement reflected the harsher House version, rather than the more liberal Senate version, on almost every important issue.¹¹⁷

Opponents ratcheted up the pressure. The National Association of Social Workers (NASW) contacted every senator to demand that new conferees be appointed. Telegrams were fired off to President Johnson from George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO, and Walter Reuther, president of the Industrial Union Department, urging opposition and a veto if necessary. As Congress prepared to adjourn in December, liberal reformers became convinced that the best option was to postpone final action to allow for an extended debate in the next session. However, Long devised a legislative maneuver with fellow conservative Democrat Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) and Republican Everett Dirksen (R-Ill.). They moved to call up the conference report reflecting the House language and win passage on a voice vote—at a time when the Senate chamber was virtually empty of the bill’s opponents, thwarting liberal plans to filibuster the legislation. Furious, the NASW sent a telegram to the president asking that he eliminate the punitive elements of the bill.¹¹⁸

The Johnson administration faced a difficult choice: fight to retain the core New Deal conception of welfare developed and championed by party liberals since the 1930s, or accept the move toward a model of restricted and work-conditioned aid favored by party conservatives. Administration officials were not inclined to wage a decisive battle with Southern Democrats over welfare reform, and the administration accepted the turn toward workfare. HEW had not expected the freeze to be included in the final package, and many officials worried about the punitive orientation of the new law. But HEW leaders elected not to join liberal welfarists and labor leaders in publicly pressing the president to veto the legislation. Many in HEW agreed with the need for more work and training, even if they preferred the use of incentives rather than requirements to increase participation in those programs.¹¹⁹ Others in the administration may have held stronger reservations, but were simply unwilling to expend further political capital on the issue. “The Johnson administration stretched a long way in civil rights legislation and its war on poverty,” concluded historian Blanche Coll. “This much being done, and having offered the elderly and the poor generous medical care, the executive branch was not inclined to buck Congressman Mills and Senator Long in their drive to put AFDC mothers to work.”¹²⁰

Although the WIN amendments were signed into law, the freeze provision had drawn enough public criticism to persuade Johnson to delay its implementation, and it was ultimately repealed by Congress in 1969, before it ever went into effect.¹²¹ There was no delay, however, in implementing the amendments’ work-related measures. A program was created that sought to prepare AFDC recipients “for work in the ‘regular economy’” and to restore their families “to independence and useful roles in their communities.”¹²²

* * *

At the outset of the 1960s, the political initiative on welfare had rested with liberal Democrats in the White House, and a newly elected John Kennedy had galvanized the nation for a battle against poverty. By the end of the decade, Southern Democrats in Congress were charting the course in public assistance reform, toward workfare and restricted support for AFDC families. In the intervening years, two liberal administrations had pursued expansionary strategies that ultimately helped drive welfare policy in a conservative, work-based direction. They had undercut the existing New Deal rationale for public assistance and the fragile intraparty compromise on aiding the “unemployable poor.” They had developed and oversold reforms in the AFDC program that were expected to reduce the welfare rolls and that emphasized the importance of recipients’ self-support, fueling the pro-work arguments of welfare critics. And through initiating work programs (however small) as part of their social services strategy for AFDC recipients, they had created a justification and opportunity for conservatives within their own party to develop a policy initiative (WIN) that challenged core aims of welfarist public assistance.

In the end, welfare politics in the 1960s yielded contradictory outcomes. Developments early in the decade (particularly the Public Welfare Amendments of 1962) were seen by many as the culmination of the liberal welfarism of the War on Poverty, and they were described that way by President Kennedy. Broader political developments in the late 1960s, moreover, made AFDC by the end of the decade into the closest approximation of a genuine welfarist entitlement in the program’s history. Indeed, some welfare scholars see this period as the only one in which the program provided a meaningful entitlement to eligible families.¹²³ Welfare rights drives and Supreme Court rulings knocked down barriers to access, and the percentage of eligible families actually receiving assistance climbed dramatically, from an estimated 33 percent in the early 1960s to more than 90 percent by 1971.¹²⁴ AFDC benefits, though still meager in most states, rose steadily through the decade, and in-kind assistance, including Medicaid, low-income housing assistance, and food stamps, also expanded.¹²⁵ Yet precisely at this moment, Congress and the White House shifted the program onto a workfarist rather than welfarist track at the federal level, a track that would eventually lead to the elimination of the entitlement and its replacement with a workfare alternative.