DeParle, American Dream
Chapter 5, The Accidental Program: Washington 1935-1991
History of AFDC, 1935-1960
During the drafting of the Social Security Act, AFDC was thrown in as a temporary
measure, to tide over widowed mothers until Social Security matured. The designers
intended to exclude divorced women, single mothers and racial minorities. (85-86)
AFDC targeted the same small, elite group eligible for Mothers’ Pensions.
Regarding work, the program was “to release from the wage-earning role the parent
whose task is to raise children.” (86)
From the beginning, the states set benefits and many of the rules. Southern states did not
want to risk decreasing the supply of cheap field laborers.
AFDC covered 2% of American children in 1940; almost all were white; about 84
percent of the of the mothers were widows.
The recipient population became blacker and “unmarried” when benefits to widows were
accelerated under Social Security.
o Caseloads tripled between 1945 and 1960
o In 1960, 40 percent of caseload was black and 67% were from so-called
broken families. (87)
“One of the iron laws of American life is that cash payments to the healthy nonworking
poor breed suspicion.” (87)
Roosevelt favored public employment over cash transfers: to give away cash “is to
administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.”
AFDC 1960-1973
The Welfare Explosion of the 1960s: the result of conscious design, the Welfare
Rights Campaign
Important court cases:
o King vs. Smith (1968): established individual entitlement to benefits
o Shapiro vs. Thompson (1969): struck down state residency requirements
o Goldberg vs. Kelly (1970): benefits could not be taken away without due
process.
o King vs. Smith: reinstated benefits to a black woman dropped from the
Alabama rolls for having sex with a weekend visitor.
From 1968-1973, caseloads more than quadrupled.
Ninety percent of the blacks in Sunflower County were poor, while Eastland collected
$170,000 annually not to increase his cotton acreage.
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Applications were discouraged or lost, only half the eligible people were enrolled in
NYC.
Robert Cloward and Frances Fox Piven (89-91)
o Founded Mobilization for Youth
o Model for war on poverty and Legal Services program
o Strategy was “aggression”,
o 1966 article in The Nation called for demonstrations to create a climate of
militancy
o Goal was to enroll all eligible people
o Gave birth to the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) and the
age of the welfare radical
o “the bureaucracy responded by opening the tap” (90)
o Mitchell “Come and Get it” Ginsberg , welfare commissioner in New
York, reduced the application to 1 page. NYC caseload doubled, 19661972
o Ultimate goal was a guaranteed national income.
Lyndon Johnson hated the word welfare. Richard Nixon proposed a guaranteed income,
the Family Assistance Plan (died in the Senate in 1972).
1973—11 million welfare recipients; 1 or every 9 children. “Over the next generation,
nearly a third of the country’s children would spend part of their childhood on welfare;
80 percent of black children would. (91)
AFDC offered the needy “too little to live on and despised them for taking it.” (91)
Value of benefits peaked in 1972, and declined by 40 percent over the next 20 years.
In 1992, a year after Angie and Jewell move to Milwaukee, the average package of cash
and food stamps came to $7,600 a year, nearly $4,000 below the poverty threshold.
A near-universal change in expectations of mothers’ roles in the home and in the labor
market eroded support for a program that allowed poor mothers to escape the labor
market.
Although AFDC accounted for only about 1 percent of the domestic budget, the entire
welfare package (AFDC, food stamps, Medicaid, public housing, Head Start, and
disability payments) accounted for 15 percent of domestic spending. (92)
“It wasn’t a sustainable situation, yet the striking thing is how long it was sustained.”
(93)
“Substantively, the challenge involved preserving welfare’s safety net functions while
promoting work.” (93)
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But could poor mothers earn enough? LaDonna Pavetti reported on barriers to work:
 Half of AFDC mothers had problems that could interfere with the simplest jobs
 A third had limited cognitive abilities
 Thirteen percent fought depression
 Ten percent had medical disabilities
 Nine percent used cocaine heavily.
Description of “perverse incentives”—Notches and cliffs. (94)
Short summary of Carter’s unsuccessful attempt to fix welfare (94)
AFDC 1980-1996 (94-95)
Decade of the 80s brought rising poverty rates—especially among children, and dramatic
changes in family structure—the feminization of poverty:
Year
1950s
1960s
early 1980s
1990
By 1990:
% of children
Born to single moms
5%
10%
20%
25%
Two-thirds of black children were born to single mothers.
Half the nation’s poor lived in single-mother households.
The number of high poverty census tracts doubled.
Journalists who studied to ghettos underscored behavior as well as poverty.
Problems that constrained liberals in the welfare debate:

Liberalism didn’t know how to confront behavior—too much like blaming the
victim.

The good-jobs philosophy—rejection of entry level jobs in favor of training for
good jobs.

The two combined implied “don’t expect too much from people in the ghetto.”

To avoid this message, liberals shifted their focus to innocent children.

“With economists in control, most poverty academics had gotten out of the
business of talking to poor people altogether; tenure passed through data sets, not
inner-city streets.” (95)
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Charles Murray ushered in a new philosophy for conservatives: Welfare is the source of
persistent poverty. To cut is to care. (96)
Murray’s book, Losing Ground, spawned new research from the Left:
 Nicholas Lemann—(The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How
It Changed America)--ties of northern blacks to sharecroppers
 William Julius Wilson (The Truly Disadvantaged)—explained the rise of the
underclass without referring to welfare. Identified the interaction of industrial
decline, desegregation, and self-defeating cultural forces as the primary cause.
 Mickey Kaus (The End of Equality) endorsed work requirements. He agreed with
Murray that welfare was destroying American life.
The 1980s and the passage of FSA
Bane and Ellwood proved both conservatives and liberals right: “ Most people who
entered the system did leave within two years. But a substantial minority stayed, and
over time they came to dominate.”
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Reagan gave the states the right to experiment with mandatory work and training
programs.
MDRC results of the experiments were encouraging. Both conservatives and liberals
signed on to a “Spend more, demand more” philosophy, referred to as the New
Consensus.
The Governors led by Bill Clinton got behind the idea—mutual obligation.
The result was the Family Support Act signed in 1988. The FSA created JOBS, and
$1 billion in matching funds if the states enrolled 20 percent of their caseloads.
Unexpectedly, caseloads increased by a third.
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