The Workfare State. Eva Bertram
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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