the case for his first reform in a February 1961 message to Congress. He proposed to broaden ADC by permitting states to assist certain two-parent families. “Needy children are eligible for assistance if their fathers are deceased, disabled, or family deserters. In logic and humanity, a child should also be eligible for assistance if his father is a needy unemployed worker—for example, a person who has exhausted unemployment benefits.”67 The reform, which Kennedy had championed as a senator, was called “ADC-UP,” for “unemployed parent.”68 In addition to softening the impact of the economic downturn for poor families, Kennedy had another motive. Critics had long argued that ADC unfairly favored single-parent homes and unintentionally created incentives for the breakup of two-parent families. Many ADC supporters shared these concerns. In seeking congressional support for ADC-UP, Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) Secretary Abraham Ribicoff emphasized that the reform would remove any rationale for unemployed fathers to leave their homes to make their families eligible for assistance.69
Advocates hoped that this approach would increase support for the expansionary measure among moderates and conservatives—and the initial signs were positive. Jurisdiction over the proposed changes lay with the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance Committees, chaired by Southern Democrats Wilbur Mills (D-Ark.) in the House and Harry Byrd (D-Va.) in the Senate. The House Committee produced a bill that largely reflected the administration’s proposal, and the measure was eventually approved in both chambers by voice vote. The new law authorized federal ADC grants for two-parent families with a parent who was either out of work or working fewer than a hundred hours a month.70
ADC-UP’s smooth ride through Congress obscured important differences over key provisions among Democratic leaders, however. Passage was eased by the administration’s decision to make ADC-UP optional, not mandatory, for states; as soon became clear, Southern states had no intention of adopting the welfarist expansion. Both committees also added language to restrict its scope and toughen its provisions. Mills’s Ways and Means Committee sought a more aggressive approach to work promotion for the newly eligible unemployed parents—adding, for example, a provision that aid would be terminated if the parent refused a job offered by a state employment agency “without good cause.” This stipulation would become a staple of workfare reforms in the years ahead.71
Liberals heralded the reform as a major new expansion. Many welfarist reformers believed it had the potential to transform ADC from a program for a select group of single-parent households to one serving the broader population of poor families, and might even lead to a more universal approach to public assistance.72 Hopeful liberals misjudged the reform’s impact, however. Because the program was optional for states, it had a limited effect 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
