The most successful expansionist reforms in the 1950s and early 1960s sought to improve clients by funding social services. The problem with the emphasis on services was that it suggested that poor people were psychologically, as much as financially, needy—and that part of poor people’s rehabilitation inhered in their learning to make ends meet despite their economic poverty. In 1950, Congress and the Democratic administration created a new welfare program, Aid to the Permanently and Totally Disabled (APTD).26 In 1954, Congress passed new rules that allowed ten million agricultural and domestic workers to gain eligibility for welfare aid.27 In 1956, the national government authorized a new social insurance program (non-means-tested and tied to waged work) centered on disability. The scale of Social Security Disability Insurance would far surpass that of means-tested programs such as APTD and ADC. Social Security amendments in that same year shifted the emphasis of ADC toward rehabilitation by adding social services to the mandate of the program.28
States and cities were more active in welfare reform than was the national government. Here, again, differences among Democrats were as significant as those between Democrats and Republicans. With national officials playing a muted role in supervising or overruling them, state and local politicians made policy to preserve racial and class hierarchies, react to migration, and enforce (or at least advertise) normative standards of gendered and sexual behavior.29 Beginning with Georgia in 1951, over half of the states reformed the definition of a “suitable home” under ADC to exclude unwed mothers and “illegitimate” children from receiving benefits. States that took this action included those in the Democratically controlled (and Jim Crow) South, as well as midwestern states, such as Michigan, which experienced inmigration by African Americans and working-class whites after World War II.30 By 1962, there were investigative units dedicated to enforcing the “suitable home” rule and other moralistic, gendered provisions under welfare policy in eight states and eighteen large cities.31
In the 1950s and well into the 1960s, heavily rural states in the South, all under Democratic control, pursued some of the most restrictive welfare reforms. The two leading sources of these policies were the felt need of certain white supremacist politicians to respond to civil rights activism, and the changing demands of employers in an era of out-migration and new technology. Public assistance was hardly alone as a realm of policy officials used to shore up white and planter dominance: Agricultural policy, too, helped sustain white supremacy and planter aristocracy in the Deep South. Local officials responded to civil rights activism by cutting access to commodity food, often the only government aid agricultural and domestic workers regularly received.32 In the late 1960s, many southern African Americans theorized that states introduced food stamps—which in those days cost cash that rural people rarely had—in place of commodity food as punishment for civil rights activism, with the intention to starve them or drive them north.33 Restrictive public assistance reforms had particular staying power because they drew from gender and sexual morality, while also being built on anti–civil rights and proemployer forces. The best-known example of a state welfare cutoff of this kind occurred in Louisiana in 1960. Twenty-three thousand children, 95 percent of them African American, lost subsistence aid because the homes of their unwed mothers were deemed “unsuitable.”34 Similarly, Alabama passed a package of welfare reforms into law as the civil rights movement began to post real gains.35 Even after passage of the national Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, local authorities across the South manipulated public assistance to punish people for their activism.36
The mix of expansive and restrictive welfare reforms, and divisions these sparked among Democrats, was even more complicated in the 1960s than previously. However, two themes from the prior decade that were also critically important in 1990s welfare reform continued: an emphasis on services in conjunction with cash aid, based on a sometimes unstated belief that mothers who were poor failed to earn their livelihoods because they were effectively disabled; and concern about the sexual behavior and romantic choices of women who received ADC. In 1961, a Democratic secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare ruled that states could not deny welfare on the basis of the so-called unsuitability of the home of a child born outside marriage. But the Kennedy and Johnson administrations did not back up the ruling by exercising their authority to cut federal funding to states that refused to follow it.37 Social Security amendments in 1962 turned ADC into Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). This move recognized the labor of maternal care. However, legislators who created AFDC also did so in part because they saw impoverished mothers as deficient and government as an agent of rehabilitation.38 The reforms introduced by President Kennedy followed medical and disability models to emphasize “prevention and rehabilitation.” Without spelling out the argument in detail, the president suggested that, like some disabled people, mothers who could not make the economic system work for their families could receive a course of professional intervention and then “get … off assistance and back into useful, productive roles in society.”39 While ostensibly sympathetic to impoverished parents, the emphasis on rehabilitation flowed all too easily into mandates for waged labor. With the support of social welfare advocates in Washington, D.C., national policy makers introduced work mandates into public assistance policy in the name of reforming clients and readapting them to normal life.40
Urban Democrats outside the South found their voices to oppose restrictive welfare policies, even when their chief antagonists were others in their own party. The 1967 welfare reforms from the Johnson administration and leading congressional Democrats represented a post–Civil Rights Act backlash against activist demands for racial and economic equality. Under Democratic control, Congress passed into law a welfare “freeze” that capped the national budget for public assistance. This was an early compromise of the principle of entitlement. However, under pressure from Democrats such as Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who was threatening a dissident presidential run, Congress repealed the freeze before the administration implemented it. President Johnson and the white Southern Democrats who chaired major committees also ushered into law a national work mandate under welfare policy. The Work Incentive Program of 1967 was known as “WIN” to policy makers and “WIP” to the activists who thought of it as just the latest in a long line of efforts to compel African American women to perform demeaned, low-wage (or no-wage) work.41
Another rising theme of the 1960s, which would later prove significant in PRWORA, was the importance of men, masculinity, and fatherhood in public assistance. Although most mainstream Democrats agreed on this, serious splits emerged over how to translate it into policy. Following on the NOLEO provision were other initiatives to reengage noncustodial fathers in their children’s and female partners’ lives.42 At the same time, unemployed and underemployed men were increasingly a focus of public assistance policy. This was a masculinist response to the civil rights and Black Power movements, and to the perception that urban riots were driven by male unemployment. Even the work training and educational benefits sponsored under the “service” provisions of the 1962 reforms went overwhelmingly to low-income men.43 A demonstration program to enhance the access of two-parent families to welfare aid, which the Kennedy administration initiated in 1961, was made, later in the decade, a permanent option the states could adopt. These policies were a fit with the Moynihan Report and an address President Johnson gave at Howard University in 1965, which described a crisis in black masculinity caused by the twin scourges of discriminatorily high unemployment for men and African American women’s excessive access to income.44
Nothing About Us, Without Us
The arc of welfare reform bent, briefly, toward expansion. This was a result of enormous, organized energy on the part of welfare clients and a wide array of nonclient allies in the 1960s and 1970s. Activists and advocates built on prior models to make a greater impact on local, state, and national antipoverty politics than they had at any time since passage of the Social Security Act. The forces that conspired to enable and sustain this wave of welfare reform from below were the African American movement, south and north; related activist movements among lawyers and social workers (including, reprising earlier models, unionized welfare caseworkers); the renaissance of feminism, especially a variety of radical feminisms shaped by the New Left and by the Black Power, Chicano/a, and Puerto