The History of the War on Poverty BIBLIOGRAPHY Table of Contents Social Welfare in America: Overviews and Early Histories up to the War on Poverty The War on Poverty Primary Sources on the War on Poverty Early Assessments and Reflections on the War on Poverty Secondary Sources on the War on Poverty Social Welfare in America Since the War on Poverty Legacies: Recent Writings and Resources on the War on Poverty Other Bibliographic Sources, Resources and Archival Collections Teaching the War on Poverty: Syllabi and Related Material Social Welfare in America: Overviews and Early Histories up to the War on Poverty Abbott, Edith. Public Assistance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940. A detailed twovolume study of local, state, and federal relief policy from the colonial period to the New Deal. Abramovitz, Mimi, Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present. Boston: South End Publishing, 1988. Amenta, Edwin. Bold Relief: Institutional Politics and the Origins of Modern American Social Policy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Argues that the goal of the New Deal was not to create a two-track welfare state of paltry means-tested benefits and generous social insurance—it was, rather, to establish a “bold program of work and relief.” Berkowitz, Edward D. America’s Welfare State: From Roosevelt to Reagan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Brinkley, Alan. The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War. New York: Vintage Books, 1996. Fox, Cybelle. Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration and the American Welfare State from the Progressive Era to the New Deal. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Gordon, Linda. Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890-1935. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994. Katz, Michael B. In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America. New York: Basic Books, 1986. Comprehensive history. 1 Kessler-Harris, Alice. In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Pursuit of Economic Citizenship in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Koven, Seth, and Sonya Michel. “Womanly Duties: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, 1880-1920.” The American Historical Review 95, no. 4 (October 1, 1990): 1076–1108. O’Connor, Alice. Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in TwentiethCentury U.S. History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. An intellectual history of social policymaking. Mink, Gwendolyn. The Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917-1942. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. Newman, Katherine S. and Elizabeth S. Jacobs. Who Cares? Public Ambivalence and Government Action from the New Deal to the Second Gilded Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Examines public opinion about social policymaking from the New Deal to the present, arguing that there was not a groundswell of support for new policies to help the poor during the New Deal and the Great Society, but nor was there popular support for rolling back these policies in the 1980s and 1990s. Novak, William J. The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. A legal history of early state and local social welfare policies. Novak argues against scholars who have described the early U.S. as “stateless,” demonstrating the long history of government regulation of public safety, political economy, public property, morality, and public health—regulation that occurred at the state and local level, rather than the federal level. Patterson, James T. America’s Struggle Against Poverty, 1900-1994. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Rodgers, Daniel. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, Harvard University Press, 1998. A study of the exchange of ideas among reformers on both sides of the Atlantic in the progressive era, on such subjects as housing, income. Skocpol, Theda. Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992. ----- Social Policy in the United States: Future Possibilities in Historical Perspective. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995. Trattner, William. From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America. 6th Ed. New York: The Free Press, 1999. A textbook survey of the history of social welfare, from the colonial period to welfare reform. Weir, Margaret, Ann Shola Orloff and Theda Skocpol eds. The Politics of Social Policy in the United States. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. 2 The War on Poverty Primary Sources on the War on Poverty Cahn, Edgar S., and Jean C. Cahn. “The War on Poverty: A Civilian Perspective.” The Yale Law Journal 73, no. 8 (July 1, 1964): 1317–1352. Harington, Michael. The Other America: Poverty in the United States (1962). On Harrington, see also Dwight McDonald review in The New Yorker. The 50th Anniversary Edition of the book, published by Scribner in 2012, has a useful introduction by Maurice Isserman, as well as a 1993 introduction by Irving Howe, and a new afterward of Harrington’s writings on poverty in the 1980s. Johnson, Lyndon B. “Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union” January 8, 1964. Video available here. In which the President declares an “unconditional war on poverty in America.” Johnson, Lyndon B. “Special Message to the Congress Proposing a Nationwide War on the Sources of Poverty,” March 16, 1964. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/? pid=26109. Johnson, Lyndon B. “Remarks Upon Signing the Economic Opportunity Act.” August 20, 1964. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=26452. Lewis, Oscar. Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty. New York: Basic Books, 1959. In this book, an ethnographic study of Mexican slum dwellers, Lewis argues that poverty is not only defined by an absence of wealth, but also creates “a subculture of its own.” The phrase “culture of poverty,” which Lewis coined, took on a life of its own after the book’s publication. Harrington borrowed it and Moynihan and other participants in the War on Poverty used it to explain the problems the poor faced—particularly intergenerational poverty. So too did many critics of the War on Poverty in later years. On the history of the phrase, and its many uses, see Small M.L., Harding D.J., Lamont M. (2010). "Reconsidering culture and poverty" Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 629 (1): 6–27. ----- La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York. NewYork: Random House, 1966. Mcdonald, Dwight. “Our Invisible Poor” The New Yorker January 19, 1963. Influential review of Michael Harrington’s book as well as other recent reports on poverty in the United States. Includes some reflections (interesting given today’s debates) on the relative importance of addressing poverty over inequality. Full text available at link above. Moynihan, Daniel P. The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Washington: U.S. Department of Labor, 1965. The report, which has become known simply as 3 the Moynihan Report, attracted criticism soon after it was circulated within the administration, though it was not widely available to the public for some time. Was controversial primarily because of Moynihan’s focus on what he described as the “tangle of pathology” in African American communities, which he attributes primarily to the matriarchal family structure. Moynihan’s primary policy recommendation was that the federal government needed to address lack of jobs for African American men. In it he also highlighted the break between unemployment rates and number of families receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children. On the lessons and legacy of the Moynihan report, see The Moynihan Report Revisited: Lessons and Reflections after Four Decades, Special Issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, January 2009, available at: http:// ann.sagepub.com/content/621/1.toc. Reich, Charles. “The New Property, 73 YALE LAW JOURNAL 733 (1964). Argues that government benefits should be considered “property,” with the corresponding due process protections. Tenbroek, Jacobus, ed. The Law of the Poor. San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Company, 1966. Collection of essays originally presented at a conference at Berkeley, providing “a critical review of the rules and procedures, doctrines and presuppositions of the law applicable to the poor, primarily as that law is found in welfare codes, statutes, ordinances, programs and administration” (vii). Including essays on cash assistance, residence laws, vagrancy, public housing, child welfare, disability, and mental health services, among other subjects. Early Assessments and Reflections on the War on Poverty Johnson, Earl. Justice and Reform: The Formative Years of the OEO Legal Services Program. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1974. Levitan, Sar A. and Robert Taggart, The Great Society’s Poor Law: A New Approach to Poverty. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969. Moynihan, Daniel P. ed. On Understanding Poverty: Perspectives from the Social Sciences. New York: Basic Books, 1969. With chapters on the history of poverty, class and culture, poverty and race, as well as a bibliography of social scientific research on poverty. ----- Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty. New York, 1970. Critiques the community action approach of the War on Poverty and the failure to develop a jobs program. “An immense opportunity to institute more or less permanent social changes—a fixed full employment program, a measure of income maintenance—was lost while energies were expended in ways that very probably hastened the end of the brief period when such options were open” (193, check citation, from Davies). ----- Toward a National Urban Policy. New York: Basic Books, 1970. ----- The Politics of A Guaranteed Income: The Nixon Administration and the Family Assistance Plan. New York: Random House, 1973. 4 Piven, Frances Fox and Richard Cloward. Regulating the Poor: the Functions of Public Welfare (1971). Argues that Kennedy and Johnson had to address poverty, or inject federal dollars into inner cities, in order to pacify African Americans. Sundquist, James L. ed. On Fighting Poverty: Perspectives from Experience. New York: Basic Books, 1969. Chapters by participants and observers (including Adam Yarmolinsky) on the origins of the War on Poverty, the experience of Community Action Programs, and the early controversies. Secondary Sources on the War on Poverty Ashmore, Susan Youngblood. Carry it on: The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, 1964-1972. Athens: University of Georgia Press: 2008. Argues that antipoverty and civil rights activities in Alabama’s black belt reinforced eachother to attack the roots of black subordination in the South. On this theme see also Kent Germany, below. Bauman, Robert. Race and the War on Poverty: From Watts to East L.A. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. Cazenave, Noel A. Impossible Democracy: The Unlikely Success of the War on Poverty Community Action Programs. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. Chappell, Marisa. The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty and Politics in Modern American. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Argues that the liberal antipoverty coalition from the 1960s forward was wedded to the idea of the male breadwinner family, and worked to create male breadwinner families, especially among poor African Americans, at a moment when that model was becoming increasingly unrealistic. Davies, Gareth. “War on Dependency: Liberal Individualism and the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964,” Journal of American Studies, 26 (Aug. 1992), 205–31 Davis, Martha. Brutal Need: Lawyers and the Welfare Rights Movement, 1960-1973. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. A history of lawyers in the War on Poverty— with a focus on the work of Ed Sparer and the Columbia Center on Social Welfare Policy and Law. Fisher, Gordon. “The Development of the Orshansky Poverty Thresholds and their subsequent History as the Official U.S. Poverty Measure.” May 1992. This is a comprehensive history of the most commonly cited poverty threshold, developed by economist Mollie Orshansky in 1963/64. Recently, scholars and policymakers have revisited the question of how best to measure poverty. The National Academy of Sciences published an influential report recommending a new approach to measuring poverty in 1995. The report is available here. The Census Bureau introduced a Supplemental Poverty Measure, largely based on the NAS report, in 2011. On the Supplemental Poverty Measure, see Kathleen Short, “The Research Supplemental Poverty Measure: 2012” Current Population Reports November 2013. For a helpful infographic comparing the two poverty measures see: http:// www.census.gov/how/infographics/poverty_measure-how.html. 5 Germany, Kent. New Orleans After the Promises: Poverty, Citizenship, and the Search for the Great Society. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007. One of a number of recent books that looks at the War on Poverty from the bottom up. The Community Action Program in New Orleans is at the book’s center, and Germany argues that black activists used CAP as a base to challenge the South’s racist political culture. For other bottom-up accounts see especially Annelise Orleck and Lisa Gayle Hazirgian eds. The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History. Goldstein, Alyosha. Poverty in Common: The Politics of Community Action during the American Century. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. Hampton, Henry. PBS Documentary. America’s War on Poverty. January 1995. Detailed description at: http://www.fordham.edu/economics/mcleod/ WaronPovertyFilmNotes.pdf; http://library.wustl.edu/units/spec/filmandmedia/ collections/henry-hampton-collection/awop.html Hampton, acclaimed producer of Eyes on the Prize, a documentary of the civil rights movement, considers the War on Poverty. Haveman, Robert. Poverty Policy and Poverty Research: The Great Society and the Social Sciences. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. Considers the influence of policy on social science research—and includes a detailed bibliography. Johnson, Earl. To Establish Justice For All: The Past and Future of Civil Legal Aid in the United States. Praeger, 2013. Katznelson, Ira. “Was the Great Society a Lost Opportunity” in Fraser and Gerstle ed., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980 Kornbluh, Felicia Ann. The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. A history of the welfare rights movement that does equal justice to the local-- New York City-- and national politics of welfare in the 1960s and 1970s. Levenstein, Lisa. A Movement without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. McKee, Guian A. “Lyndon B. Johnson and the War on Poverty: Introduction to the Digital Edition” Presidential Recordings of Lyndon B. Johnson Digital Edition, University of Virginia. Very useful overview essay about the insights that the White House tape recordings offer into why Johnson launched a War on Poverty—and how he envisioned it. On this subject see also Robert Caro, Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (New York: Knopf, 2012). Mittelstadt, Jennifer. From Welfare to Workfare: The Unintended Consequences of Liberal Reform, 1945-1965. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Nadasen, Premilla. Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States. New York: Routledge, 2005. 6 Orleck, Annelise and Lisa Gayle Hazirgian, eds. The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964-1980. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011. Orleck, Annelise. Storming Caesar’s Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty. Boston: Beacon, 2005. A collective biography of a group of poor black women activists who left the south for jobs in Las Vegas in the 1950s and, in the 1960s, after losing their jobs, applied for public assistance and fought for welfare rights. In the 1970s, they formed a powerful and influential community development corporation to improve the lives of African Americans in the city. Russell, Judith. Economics, Bureaucracy, and Race: How Keynesians Misguided the War on Poverty. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Shephard, Kris. Rationing Justice: Poverty Lawyers and Poor People in the Deep South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. Schmitt, Edward R. President of the Other America: Robert Kennedy and the Politics of Poverty. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010. Quadagno, Jill S. The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Social Welfare in America Since the War on Poverty DeParle, Jason. American Dream : Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation’s Drive to End Welfare. New York: Viking, 2004. Edin, Kathryn and Maria Kefalas. Promises I can Keep:Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Ellwood, David. Poor Support: Poverty in the American Family. New York: Basic Books, 1989. Hancock, Ange-Marie. The Politics of Disgust: The Public Identity of the Welfare Queen. New York: New York University Press, 2004. Haskins, Ron. Work over Welfare: The Inside Story of the 1996 Welfare Reform Law. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2006. A blow-by-blow account of how PRWORA passed Congress and became law, written by the former Republican staff director of the House Ways and Means Human Resources Subcommittee. Katz, Michael B. The Underserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare. New York: Pantheon Books, 1990. ----- The Price of Citizenship: Redefining the American Welfare State. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. 7 Murray, Charles. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980. 1984. Argues that a paradigm shift occurred the 1960s: as federal spending on social welfare increased, the new programs that resulted increasingly focused on equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity. Controversially suggests that these programs—the social policy of Great Society—are responsible for the increasing number and worsening circumstances of poor Americans. Wilson, William Julius. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Innercity, the Underclass, and public policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. A second edition published in 2012 has a new afterward. Argues that industrial decline and the disappearance of good-paying jobs have created a black underclass in American cities. Links black male unemployment to the rise in single-parent black families, suggesting there has been a decline in “marriageable” black men—an insight echoing and updating the Moynihan Report. Read at the time as a sort of rejoinder to Murray. ----- When Work Disappears. The World of the New Urban Poor. New York: Knopf, 1996. Legacies: Recent Writings and Resources on the War on Poverty Baily, Martha J. and Sheldon Danziger, Legacies of the War on Poverty New York: Russell Sage, 2013. Council of Economic Advisors. The War on Poverty 50 Years Later: A Progress Report. January 2014. Chait, Jonathan. Paul Ryan Tries to Enlist Social Science to Back Up His Poverty Plan, Disaster Ensues. New York Magazine, March 5, 2014, http://nymag.com/daily/ intelligencer/2014/03/ryan-enlists-social-science-disaster-ensues.html. Discusses the House Budget Committee Report: The War on Poverty: 50 Years Later. House Budget Committee Majority staff, March 3, 2014. And rebuttal by social scientists at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, among others: CBPP Commentary: Ryan Report Distorts Safety Net’s Picture, March 4th, 2014. Edelman, Peter. “The War on Poverty and Subsequent Federal Programs: What Worked, What Didn’t Work, and Why? Lessons for Future Programs,” Clearinghouse Review 40, no. 7 (May-June 2006). Goldfarb, Zachary. “Study: U.S. Poverty Decreased Over Last half-century thanks to safetynet programs” Washington Post, December 9, 2013. Links to study and LBJ speech and quotes from White House officials. Lowrey, Annie, “50 Years Later, War on Poverty is a Mixed Bag,” New York Times, January 5, 2014. LBJ Library, links to press coverage on the 50th anniversary: http://www.lbjlibrary.org/ press/war-on-poverty-press. 8 Meyer, Bruce D. and James X. Sullivan. “Winning the War: Poverty from the Great Society to the Great Recession.” NBER Working Paper No. 18718. “We find that moving from traditional income-based measures of poverty to a consumption-based measure (which we argue is superior on both theoretical and practical grounds) and, crucially, adjusting for bias in price indices leads to the conclusion that the poverty rate declined by 26.4 percentage points between 1960 and 2010, with 8.5 percentage points of that decline occurring since 1980.” New York Times, Room for Debate, Does the United States Need Another War on Poverty? January 5, 2014. Sherman, Arloc. “Official Poverty Measure Masks Gains Made Over Last 50 Years,” September 13, 2013, CBPP. Sherman, Arloc, Sharon Parrott, and Danilo Trisis, Chartbook: The War on Poverty at 50, January 6, 2014, CBPP. Spotlight on Poverty, links to press coverage, events, etc: http:// www.spotlightonpoverty.org/50th_anniversaries.aspx Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality. “State of the Union: The Poverty and Inequality Report, 2014.” Tax Policy Center, Urban Institute and Brookings Institution. “50 Years into LBJ’s War on Poverty, What’s the Role for Tax Policy”? An event on January 24, 2014. The link has video of the panel discussions and the keynote by Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, Jason Furman. U.S. House of Representatives. Committee on Ways and Means. Greenbook: Background Material and Data on the Programs within the Jurisdiction of the Committee on Ways and Means. Includes information about AFDC/TANF, SSI, Medicare, Unemployment Insurance, Social Security, and other programs. The 2012 is available here: http://greenbook.waysandmeans.house.gov/2012-green-book. The first Greenbook was published in 1981, and the Greenbooks from 1996 forward are available online at: http://greenbook.waysandmeans.house.gov/archive. Wimer, Christopher et al., “Trends in Poverty with an Anchored Supplemental Poverty Measure” December 5, 2013. Other Bibliographic Sources, Resources and Archival Collections Rutgers University Libraries has two bibliographies on the history of social welfare policies, one for pre-1930 and one for post-1930 policy. Both are very useful, with links to primary source documents that might be particularly helpful when teaching. Georgetown University Law Library has a poverty law research guide: http:// www.law.georgetown.edu/library/research/guides/poverty.cfm 9 For a terrific bibliography of sources on poverty law in particular, with an emphasis on more recent books and law review articles on poverty lawyering, see Scott L. Cummings and Jeffrey Selbin, “Poverty Law: United States” (Full citation: Cummings, Scott L. and Selbin, Jeffrey, Poverty Law: United States (September 7, 2013). International Encyclopedia of Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2d Ed., Forthcoming; NYLS Clinical Research Institute Paper No. 31/2012; UC Berkeley Public Law Research Paper No. 2242275. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2242275). The Social Welfare History Project has very useful encyclopedia-style entries on the people, events, organizations, and programs most important for understanding the history of social welfare in America. Teaching the War on Poverty: Syllabi and Related Material The National Poverty Center collects syllabi of courses on poverty policy and related topics: http://www.npc.umich.edu/opportunities/training/course/index.php For an interesting debate about teaching poverty law see: Amy L. Wax, Musical Chairs and Tall Buildings: Teaching Poverty Law in the 21st Century, 34 Fordham Urb. L.J. 1363, 1364, 1366-69 (2007); Martha F. Davis, The Pendulum Swings Back: Poverty Law in the Old and New Curriculum, 34 Fordham Urb. L.J. 1391, 1393 (2007); and Karen M. Tani, Poverty Law 101: The Law and History of the U.S. Welfare State, 39 Fordham Urb. L.J. City Square 1 (2012), http://urbanlawjournal.com/?p=417. The blog Poverty Law: Poverty Law for Professors and Legal Academics has collected some syllabi: http://maximinlaw.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/poverty-law-syllabi-fall-2011/ A new textbook on poverty law came out in 2014: Juliet Brodie, Clare Pastore, Ezra Rosser, Jeffrey Selbin, Poverty Law: Policy and Practice. Aspen, 2014. The front matter (preface and table of contents) is available from the SSRN . Poverty Law, Policy and Practice is the first new poverty law casebook in 17 years and only the second since 1976. With current literature from multiple viewpoints, the book provides an overview of the field, including cases, data and major government programs that map onto important theoretical, doctrinal, policy and practice questions. The book is designed to accompany a survey course, and an online teacher’s manual will be published soon. A note on this bibliography This bibliography is not exhaustive. Rather, the goal is to highlight 1) some of the most enduring scholarship on the War on Poverty and 2) the most recent work being done by social scientists, legal scholars, and historians on the subject. For context, we have included a list of useful sources on social welfare in America before and after the War on Poverty, as well as some recent analyses of the legacies of the War on Poverty. Elisa Minoff started this bibliography, but she hopes others will add to it and improve it. If you would like to contribute citations and commentary, please e-mail Elisa at elisa.minoff@gmail.com. Elisa can either give you permission to edit the document directly 10 or add your suggested citations herself. 11