children that cannot care for itself—and wherever in America that family may live.”43
Yet Nixon’s program was more conservative than it looked. All able-bodied heads of families, except for mothers with children younger than six, would be required to accept work or job training—very much in the manner that Clinton later envisioned. And if that parent refused, his or her portion of the welfare benefit would be cut off, even though the child’s payment would continue. Moreover, the FAP, unlike the AFDC and later welfare proposals, would have directed a substantial amount of aid to working-poor families, as opposed to solely focusing on non-working-poor families if it had passed. By one calculation, under the FAP, a family of four with an income of $12,652, in 2013 dollars, would have seen its income increase by nearly half—to $18,725, in 2013 dollars.44
The FAP was designed to provide the means to guarantee all American children a stable annual income—regardless of the behavior of their parents—and to provide such aid to three times the number of children covered by the AFDC. The FAP, Hoff concluded, “would have revolutionized welfare by switching from providing services to providing income.”45 It was, she wrote, “the most comprehensive welfare reform ever proposed by a United States president.”46
Initially, editorial pages hailed the FAP as a reform on the order of social security. “A Republican President has condemned the word ‘welfare,’ emphasized ‘work’ and ‘training’ as conditions of public assistance, suggested that the states and the cities be given more Federal money to deal with their social and economic problems, but still comes out in the end with a policy of spending more money for relief of more poor people than the welfare state Democrats ever dared to propose in the past,” wrote James Reston in the New York Times. “Mr. Nixon has taken a great step forward. He has cloaked a remarkably progressive welfare policy in conservative language. . . . But mainly he has dealt with the intolerable paradox of American life. He has insisted that poverty in a prosperous country must be eliminated.”47
The FAP passed the House in April 1970, 243 to 155, but it bogged down in the Senate, where Senator Russell B. Long, who opposed the bill, held long hearings, allowing interest groups from around the political spectrum to organize opposition. Hard-line conservatives saw the FAP as a guaranteed-income handout and opposed it. Liberal opponents also objected to the FAP on various grounds—one being, predictably enough, money. The grants were far too low, they said. They proposed grants of $6,400 for a family of four, an amount that would sink the program’s budget and lose support from the American middle class. Radical welfare rights groups also lined up in opposition, and organized labor wasn’t crazy about the FAP, either, seeing a guaranteed income as a threat to the minimum wage. Still others objected to the work requirements.
Yet in his 1971 State of the Union address, Nixon pressed on:
The present welfare system has become a monstrous, consuming outrage—an outrage against the community, against the taxpayer, and particularly against the children it is supposed to help. . . . So let us place a floor under the income of every family with children in America—and without those demeaning, soul-stifling affronts to human dignity that so blight the lives of welfare children today. But let us also establish an effective work incentive and an effective work requirement. Let us provide the means by which more can help themselves.48
But the partisan hurdles were too much to overcome, and the FAP died in the Senate in October 1972, three years after it was first proposed. “Clearly, partisan politics prevented reform of the country’s welfare system,” Hoff wrote.49 By that time, the FAP had taken a pounding in the political debates and was regarded, by conservatives and more and more centrists, as a “guaranteed annual income”—which was anathema to most from the center rightward. In fact, the program was a guaranteed annual income, but it came with substantive conditions, and the guaranteed income in question was for children, not adults. Nixon tried to stress these points in defending the FAP, but ultimately the program became enshrined in the public mind as a massive new welfare benefit. Even George McGovern, Nixon’s opponent in the 1972 election, who in January of that year had proposed “demogrants” of $1,000—with broader eligibility and fewer conditions—for every poor family in America, retracted his proposal before election day in an effort to disassociate himself with what had become an unpopular (if poorly understood) proposal.
However, the FAP’s defeat did not preclude Nixon’s achievements in other related programs. The original FAP plan, released in 1969, contained a proposal for supplemental security income (SSI), a new program that would provide regular income for disabled, blind, and aged recipients. On October 17, 1972, just two days after the FAP’s final demise in the Senate, SSI passed both houses of Congress. It is likely that SSI had such an easy time because its target population was unambiguously needy—the blind, the old, and the disabled, unlike poor mothers, have few critics. Some didn’t even regard SSI as a genuine “welfare” program, seeing it as more of a subset of the most unassailable of all American social welfare programs: Social Security. It seems no accident that SSI’s name resembles that of the much larger program. Still, SSI may not have seen the light of day without the momentum—temporary though it was—that the FAP achieved.
Some Nixon critics see the FAP failure as incidental to his presidency. They point out, correctly, that Nixon’s true passion was foreign policy. Thus, they claim, his more liberal domestic policies were undertaken solely for political expediency—to blunt liberal initiatives and broaden his political base with moderate policies. Certainly there is some truth to this interpretation—Nixon’s domestic moderation did broaden his political base—but the critics don’t give Nixon enough credit (sometimes any credit) for caring about these issues. On welfare, in particular, the evidence in his presidential papers is that Nixon stayed engaged with the FAP—both in the long and sometimes contentious battle within his administration to formulate the policy and during the political battles that ran for years—to try to get it passed. Welfare reform was definitely something he wished to accomplish, and the time he devoted to it makes that clear. Even more proof of his commitment came in January 1974, when Nixon, already reeling under the Watergate scandal and fighting to save his presidency, still found time, in his State of the Union speech, to urge the Congress once again to take up the cause of welfare reform. This time, for obvious reasons, the effort never got off the ground.
Nixon’s mostly unheralded efforts to reform welfare and address poverty and hunger in the United States grew out of his own personal experiences and the suffering he witnessed during his stark childhood. He remembered how his mother and father struggled to put food on the table and clothe their children, and their hardships left a searing mark on him. In an evocative memo to speechwriter Ray Price, Nixon wrote:
In the depression years I remember when my brother had tuberculosis for five years and we had to keep him in a hospital, my mother didn’t buy a new dress for five years. We were really quite desperately poor, but as Eisenhower said it much more eloquently at Abilene in his opening campaign statement in 1952, the glory of it was that we didn’t know it.
The problem today is that the children growing up in welfare families receiving food stamps and government largess with social workers poking around are poor and they do know it.50
As Nixon saw it, changing welfare from a system of services to a system of income maintenance would alleviate this problem. The state, he believed, should stop reminding the children of modern welfare families that they were poor, and thereby stigmatizing them, when they already had daunting challenges to face in their lives. He sympathized with those in such difficult circumstances—though he also agreed with millions of Americans that the welfare system, as it had evolved by the early 1970s, perpetuated dependency while offering no incentives to poor adults to improve their lives. And he agreed with conservatives that the AFDC was contributing to family breakdown, placing more and more children in undesirable and sometimes precarious circumstances. All in all, his welfare reform proposals were conservative in spirit, if liberal in
