The Workfare State. Eva Bertram

from that of many of his Southern colleagues. In principle, Mills advocated states’ rights, limited federal government, the free market, and the work ethic. FAP’s proposal to provide an income guarantee for the working poor troubled him, as it did other Southerners. He worried that it “would create tremendous disincentives to work in some states, like mine for example, where the wages are low.”⁶² All the same, Mills supported FAP and its proposed federalization of public assistance. He felt that these programs, and particularly AFDC, had been “sadly and badly administered” by the states.⁶³ It bothered Mills enormously that although the federal government picked up the bill for more than half of public assistance costs, it was constrained in its ability to control federal welfare spending because of the existing cost-sharing system. The New Deal structure of divided authority (championed by many Southern lawmakers) also made it too easy for states to evade federal rules—including the 1967 WIN work requirements. Mills sought to persuade skeptical conservatives that reducing state discretion would address WIN’s failures and rein in costs.⁶⁴ His Republican counterpart Byrnes echoed Mills’s concern, pointing to low state participation in WIN, and asserting, “Hell, we can’t trust the states…. Look at what has happened to the WIN program.”⁶⁵ In a Rules Committee hearing on FAP, Byrnes argued that “this new system has much better administrative potential than the present system … [for] getting people into the economic system and going to work.”⁶⁶

      Though Mills’s main concern was with state administration of AFDC, he extended the logic to the “adult categories.” For these programs, Mills proposed not only federal administration of matching grant programs, but also an increase in the income floor.⁶⁷ This concept became the basis for the provisions in FAP that would become SSI. It would not be easy, however, to convince other Southern leaders to support the federalization of public assistance for the elderly and disabled, as proposed in the 1971 version of FAP. For decades, the Southern position on public assistance had been to accept federal dollars but maintain state control over administration. In deliberations in the heavily Southern and Western Senate Finance Committee in the fall of 1972, members balked. The Committee wanted the adult programs to remain under state administration, and voted accordingly. “This motion was advocated by the ‘states’ rights types’ on the Committee,” explained a Senate staffer. “It took a big lobbying job by HEW to get the federal program approved by the House back into the Senate bill.”⁶⁸

      In fact, it took more than “a big lobbying job” to win Southern conservative support. It took a shift in the political and economic interests of Southern elites, and the persistent pressure of one of their leaders in the Senate, Russell Long. By the early 1970s, demographic shifts had changed the logic of public assistance in the South, and Long understood this. Waves of migration beginning in the 1940s had brought primarily young African American workers and their families to the North. This was spurred in part, Long noted, by “mechanization of the farm,” which had “cut back drastically on the availability of jobs.”⁶⁹ Large numbers of elderly blacks remained behind, most of whom were no longer able to work for wages. Rural Southern counties were increasingly saddled with the twin burdens of a diminishing tax base and a growing public assistance burden. One Mississippi county, for example, saw its elderly population expand from 5 to 11 percent between 1940 and 1970.⁷⁰ In Long’s state of Louisiana, roughly one-third of the elderly population received Old Age Assistance for the poor, and Louisiana’s OAA program had grown to the third largest in the nation.⁷¹ Indeed, of the thirteen largest OAA programs, eight were in the South.⁷²

      By the time SSI was considered in Congress, therefore, Southern leaders faced a new reality. Concerns over local control of assistance for the elderly and disabled poor had diminished or been superseded by the burden of increased payments. But if these demographic changes led some policymakers to see the proposed SSI reform as less of a threat, it required the political savvy of Russell Long to see in SSI an opportunity to advance the interests of conservative Southerners in defeating FAP and promoting workfare.

      For two years, Long had used his power as Finance Committee chair to block FAP. During this protracted struggle, Long developed a parallel strategy to that of delay. He would defeat FAP by proposing a sizable expansion of funding for the two categories of poor he believed should receive public assistance: those physically unable to work, and the working poor.⁷³ The first would eventually become SSI; the second would become the EITC.

      By 1972, with FAP languishing but not yet defeated, Long made a critical move. In September, his committee announced its support for the House proposal to federalize aid to the elderly and disabled—reversing its previous position and paving the way for approval of SSI.⁷⁴ As Long later explained to his biographer, he believed that supporting federalization of the so-called adult programs for the elderly and disabled would eliminate any chance that the “family support” provisions of FAP would ever be enacted: “To keep them from coming back with something that was going to make the whole nation into a welfare state, I felt that the way to spike their guns on that would be to take all the money they estimated spending on this family program and apply that to the aged.”⁷⁵

      With Long and his committee no longer an obstacle, SSI was included in the omnibus Social Security legislation passed later that year. The creation of a major new federal assistance program, SSI, was thus due in no small measure to the divergent workfare campaigns of two conservative Southern leaders who had long been protective of states’ rights: Mills’s drive to impose work requirements on AFDC recipients, and Long’s persistent attempts to scuttle the Family Assistance Plan.