The Workfare State. Eva Bertram
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physical or mental incapacity of a parent.”28 These changes not only limited the program’s reach. They also left unsettled the question of work obligations. The final federal legislation did not require work of poor mothers and was intended to support caregiving, but it did not explicitly prohibit states from imposing work rules. Moreover, the program’s low benefits would force many families to combine welfare and work to make ends meet.
Conflict also arose over what appeared to be an unobjectionable bureaucratic clause in the administration’s bill that provided for federal regulations “necessary to effectuate the purposes of this title.” Perceiving this as a threat to state control and patronage jobs, the House committee scaled back the provisions, and the administration assented. The removal of this provision and federal oversight over other specific standards limited federal administrators to approving or disapproving state ADC programs in their entirety, rather than demanding piecemeal changes. Federal officials would have to choose between accepting a flawed state plan with objectionable restrictions on aid, or rejecting the plan altogether and thereby denying federal aid to all poor single-mother families within that state.29
The new system of public assistance was thus attenuated by compromises demanded by Southern legislators—concessions that would leave it vulnerable to subsequent workfare initiatives. New Deal public assistance still rested on a welfarist foundation, though a fragile one. Eligibility was based above all on need. There was no federal requirement that poor families earn wages in order to receive aid. Although states could determine their own standards of need, a federal guarantee ensured that matching funds would be provided to meet each state’s need as it fluctuated with economic conditions. Some federal standards also remained in place. To receive funding, each state was required to submit an administrative plan for its ADC program, to be approved by the federal Social Security Board. Plans had to meet certain requirements—affirming, for example, that the program was available throughout the state and administered by a single statewide agency. States also had to provide for fair hearings for those denied assistance, a principle federal administrators saw as essential to defending the individual entitlement to aid.30 As the Social Security Act became law, the question was whether the thin welfarist foundation of the new public assistance programs would be challenged and undermined, or shored up and strengthened over time.
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The years following the Social Security Act’s passage brought a marked expansion in the new program for poor families. ADC’s growth was troubled and uneven, however, leading to frustration among its welfarist advocates. Jane Hoey, who led the Social Security Board’s Bureau of Public Assistance (BPA), was anxious to see the program fully implemented as quickly as possible. Central to the agency’s welfarist vision was an immediate goal of securing the involvement of all states, and all counties within them. Hoey calculated that ADC was likely “still caring for only a fraction of the needy children for whom Federal funds might be made available” in 1939, and she was impatient.31 The BPA wanted states to build ADC up more rapidly, and to adopt more generous and inclusive eligibility criteria.
For their part, many state administrators saw ADC largely as a source of federal funds to support—but not reform—their existing state-run mothers’ pension programs. Deep-rooted state interests often ran against the expansionary vision of federal administrators. Most states faced serious fiscal constraints and worried about their funding obligations under the new assistance programs.32 Many officials wanted to keep programs small, affordable, and under their control. This trend was widespread in the South, where economic elites expected to maintain unfettered control over local workforces, leaving racial hierarchies at the heart of the region’s labor relations unchallenged. Increased public assistance threatened to disrupt these long-standing social and economic arrangements by providing an alternative income source to poor families with current or potential workers.33 State and local officials thus jealously guarded their administrative prerogatives, and throughout the South, state public welfare commissioners coordinated their efforts to limit federal oversight.34
As federal funds began to flow, Southern states displayed a distinct pattern of policy preferences, illustrated most clearly in the size and scope of the three assistance programs. Between the 1930s and 1960s, Southern states built up programs for the elderly poor that were among the largest in the country by rate of recipients (per 1,000 elderly residents). Their programs for the blind and disabled poor were also sizable.35 Yet Southern states’ programs for poor families were quite small, in terms of numbers of families supported and program costs, despite the region’s high family poverty rates. Although benefit levels in all Southern public assistance programs were meager, the region’s ADC programs were more restrictive in their reach, and they provided the lowest average benefits in the nation.36
Table 1.1 Southern States’ Old Age Assistance (OAA) Programs, 1960 and 1961
Source: Total recipient and payment data are from “Current Operating Statistics,” Table 11, Social Security Bulletin 25, no. 3 (March 1962): 33; these data are for November 1961. Recipient rate data are from “Current Operating Statistics,” Table 10, Social Security Bulletin 24, no. 9 (September 1961): 40; these data are for December 1960. The Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1962, 83rd ed. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1962), reports similar OAA recipient figures in Table 403, page 298, and provides population rankings, page 10.
Note: Southern state public assistance programs for the elderly had the highest participation rates in the country. Many of their programs were among the nation’s largest, measured by number of recipients as well as total monthly payments, even as Southern state population levels ranked mostly in the midrange nationally.
Early studies in the 1940s confirmed what federal administrators suspected: a number of states were using their discretionary authority under the Social Security Act to serve local interests by restricting access to ADC.37 One widespread strategy was the use of vague and ill-defined “suitable home” restrictions, a holdover from Progressive Era mothers’ pension programs. These state rules—regarding a mother’s home life, child-rearing practices, and sexual relations—left significant discretion to caseworkers.38 Many states used the restrictions to refuse or limit aid to unmarried mothers. “Suitable home” rules drew prominent early criticism from Winifred Bell, who wrote a classic firsthand study of ADC in its initial decades.39 Extensive scholarship since then has exposed the ways that suitable home rules were used to exert social control over poor women.40
Table 1.2 Southern States’ Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), November 1961
Source: “Current Operating Statistics,” Table 14, Social Security Bulletin 25, no. 3 (March 1962): 34; the data are for November 1961. Similar data for recipients are reported in Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1962, Table 403, page 298; similar data for average family benefits are reported in Table 404, page 299.
Note: In contrast to the Southern programs for the elderly and disabled poor, Southern state ADC programs did not rank high nationally (by recipients or payments), and their average benefits were the lowest in the nation.
Another strategy, and an important precursor to workfare, was to use employment rules to govern eligibility and benefits. States often granted local officials the discretion to determine a mother’s “employability.”41 Many women were denied ADC assistance on the grounds that they were in fact employable and should be earning wages instead. Many others were instructed or compelled to earn wages to supplement their ADC grants, through temporary suspensions of aid or the provision of insufficient benefits.42 Decisions to deny or limit aid were sometimes made regardless of whether mothers were actually able to secure jobs or sufficient wages.43 Though it is difficult to assess the numbers who were working, studies of closed cases in the 1950s and early 1960s showed that around one-third of ADC mothers worked for wages, either full-time, part-time, or seasonally.44
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