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 Democratic Party over welfare policy.
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Lyndon Johnson did little to clarify or resolve the dilemma after assuming the presidency. Johnson declared a “War on Poverty” in his first State of the Union address on January 8, 1964, and signed the Economic Opportunity Act eight months later. His position on public assistance largely reflected and extended Kennedy’s vision. But the focus on self-support grew more explicit under Johnson, and the emphasis shifted to services designed to more quickly prepare individuals for the workforce.
Johnson’s emphasis on creating opportunity became a guiding principle for the War on Poverty, and was intended to convey a new Democratic commitment to helping the poor help themselves: “Rather than fight poverty by means of the dole,” explained one analyst, “we were to restore the poor to self-sufficiency through education, training and work—all in the spirit of the Economic Opportunity Act.”91 The focus on opportunity obscured more than it illuminated, however. The issues that divided Democrats in the 1960s, as in the 1930s, were not whether generating opportunity was desirable, but what if anything government would do to provide opportunities if they were not readily available in the private labor market, and whether programs promoting opportunity and self-support would replace or complement cash assistance for those who could not or did not support themselves.
Johnson expanded on the work components of Kennedy’s Public Welfare Amendments with his own reform—the Work Experience and Training program (WET), under Title V of the Economic Opportunity Act.92 Unlike the CWT program, WET was fully funded by federal dollars. Federal funding led to its adoption by all but one state, but its results were hardly more encouraging than those of CWT. Between 1964 and early 1967, WET enrolled only 133,000 individuals; even at its high point in this period, just 5 percent of adults in AFDC participated in the program.93
Meanwhile, political struggles over welfare were heating up. The 1964 election of the most liberal Congress since the New Deal had effectively split the Democratic Party in three over the welfare issue, with the Kennedy–Johnson reformers occupying the rapidly diminishing middle-ground position. To their right were the conservative Democrats, whose frustration with AFDC was growing. But pressure was also building to the left of the administration, generated in part by civil rights and welfare rights activists. They mobilized in poor communities and pressed for reforms that went well beyond the commitments of the New Deal and the promises of the Great Society. Many argued (as earlier welfarists had) that the Democrats should abandon the model of limited categorical assistance, to provide an expanded and more generous entitlement for all poor families. The concept of providing a denser safety net for all who needed it—perhaps through a basic guaranteed income—was also making headway among many government officials.94
Pressed from both sides, liberals in the Johnson administration continued to seek compromise positions that could appeal to all. This strategy, however, was slowly collapsing. With each reform initiative, administration officials had promised that the welfare rolls would drop—and yet the rolls continued to spiral upward. Between early 1962 and 1967, the number of AFDC recipients increased from 3.5 to 5 million. Costs escalated from $994 million in 1960 to $2.2 billion in 1967.95 The successive Kennedy–Johnson reforms, meanwhile, had gradually shredded the always tenuous distinction between the employable and unemployable poor at the heart of the New Deal rationale for public assistance. Aid was now granted (through AFDC-UP) to employable AFDC fathers, and (under the CWT and WET programs) to mothers as well as fathers who were encouraged to work. If federal policy directed aid to employable as well as unemployable poor adults, what was the basis and what were the parameters of public assistance for poor families? Who defined how employable a recipient might be? By 1967, the party’s conservative faction was ready to provide its own answers.
As the Public Welfare Amendments approached the end of their five-year authorization that year, the president sent Congress new plans for addressing poverty among children and the elderly. Despite public criticism of the rising AFDC rolls, Johnson argued for new expansions in aid, claiming that too few poor children were receiving the help they needed. He condemned states for meager benefit levels and for not taking advantage of AFDC-UP to expand the program, and also criticized states for failing to fully implement CWT programs.96 Johnson sought to sustain the same political balancing act that he and Kennedy had throughout the 1960s—combining welfarist expansions with noncoercive provisions to encourage work through incentives and social services.
But social service proponents were on the defensive. Measured against a yardstick selected by advocates themselves—declining rolls and costs—the 1962 services strategy had yielded few results in five years.97 At the same time, increasing numbers of nonwhite and never-married recipients had gained access to the program since its inception, and the backlash against the gains of the civil rights movement had generated new attacks on AFDC and its recipients. Women were entering the workforce in larger numbers, fueling demands that poor single mothers on welfare work for wages. And state welfare offices were clamoring for fiscal relief. Demands for conservative reform, in short, were mounting from many quarters.98
In Congress, critics were increasingly frustrated with the unmet promises of liberal welfarists within the party. “Witness
