to work and mothers with very young children. In fact, FAP’s work requirement was hardly rigorous (as administration officials were quick to point out to liberals). Even if an able-bodied parent refused to work, the rest of the family would continue to receive benefits.
The core elements of Nixon’s strategy thus emerged in his opening speech. He would promote FAP as a “solution” to the existing welfare crisis and sell the proposal using the language of work promotion and enforcement. Nixon believed that the plan’s work requirements and incentives, along with the promise of fiscal relief, would appeal to business, to moderate and conservative policymakers, and to state and local officials. He expected the measure’s new national standards and guaranteed support for the poor to appeal to a broad liberal coalition, including labor, the social work community, welfare rights activists, and civil rights leaders, particularly those concerned about conditions in the South. But political support would prove elusive.45 In the short run, Nixon’s strategy would fail, contributing to FAP’s defeat. In the long run, the strategy would reconfigure welfare politics, strengthening the drive for a vision of workfare defined not by FAP supporters but by its opponents in Congress.
Few signs of FAP’s fate were evident in the initial glow of public reaction following President Nixon’s address, however. Ninety-five percent of editorials nationwide were “favorable” toward FAP, according to an HEW survey, and nearly all of the major newspapers in the nation’s twenty-five largest metropolitan areas were “enthusiastic.” The New York Times described FAP as “a bold attempt to transform” the welfare system. Business Week said that FAP “is far more than just an ingenious compromise of opposing viewpoints. It is a new and promising approach to a problem that never could be solved in the framework of the old system.” And The Economist said, “President Nixon’s television message on welfare reform and revenue sharing may rank in importance with President Roosevelt’s first proposals for a social security system in the mid-1930s, which were the beginning of America’s now faltering welfare state.”46
Public opinion seemed to echo the editorial sentiment. Indeed, the permanent staff at the White House could not remember any domestic issue drawing a public response so enormous and unanimous. Some 2,757 letters and telegrams arrived between August 9 and September 10. More than 80 percent voiced unqualified support, and only 9 percent expressed flat opposition. A favorite among the White House staff was the telegram that read simply: “TWO UPPER MIDDLE CLASS REPUBLICANS WHO WILL PAY FOR THE PROGRAM SAY BRAVO.” Gallup began polling public opinion a week after the president’s speech. The results reflected strong bipartisan support for “President Nixon’s welfare reforms.” Of those familiar with the proposal, 65 percent were favorable toward FAP; 20 percent were not.47
On closer examination, however, an unmistakable pattern emerged. Press reports and polling data revealed that the strongest expressions of support focused on the president’s promise that FAP would replace the existing welfare system—not on the reform measures contained in the plan. The enthusiasm was less a vote for FAP than a vote against AFDC and related welfare programs: FAP had been packaged, presented, and received as a “solution” to the perceived welfare crisis. The Detroit Free Press editorial expressed a prevailing sentiment: “The status quo is no answer—so the President’s attempt, complicated and controversial as it is, is a better way to go.” Similarly, the focus of the positive telegrams pouring into the White House was almost exclusively on FAP’s promise to reform current welfare policies. “FAP was an extraordinary departure in proclaimed public policy, for which there was virtually no public demand, and with which there was no familiarity,” Moynihan later observed. But “the president had one large advantage: he was proposing to supplant the existing welfare system, which was widely regarded as a failure and about which something had to be done.”48 Nixon’s strategy played to this advantage. His pitch for FAP ensured that it arrived on the public agenda and seized the spotlight not on its merits as an innovative plan to aid working as well as welfare poor families, but as an alternative to an unpopular welfare system.
* * *
Before long, cracks began to emerge in the initial foundation of public support. Attacking AFDC’s failures, it turned out, provided little basis for building consensus on what should replace it. Liberal welfarists saw AFDC as inadequate and degrading; conservative workfare advocates saw it as overly generous, too costly, and pauperizing. As a result, despite the president’s efforts to ensure that FAP contained something for both conservatives and liberals, his repeated attempts to reach out to one side succeeded primarily in alienating the other.
The policy agenda of business leaders, policymakers, and others in the conservative camp focused on the need to limit benefits and tighten work requirements, rein in rather than expand the welfare state, and, above all, avoid a guaranteed income. After an extensive outreach effort by the administration, some business organizations pledged grudging and conditional backing.49 But the strongest voices in the business community opposed FAP. It was not true welfare reform, in their view, and demanded far too little of the welfare poor. Karl Schlotterbeck of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce warned the House Ways and Means Committee that FAP contained “the beginning of a national guaranteed income arrangement,” and Chamber members fanned out in Washington to lobby against it.50 In testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, Paul Henkel of the Council of State Chambers of Commerce concurred: “We support welfare reform but not guaranteed income.” He urged lawmakers to take steps to “[tighten] up work and training requirements for welfare recipients.”51
Business leaders particularly opposed FAP’s provisions for the working poor. They worried that any guarantees of cash assistance for these workers might lead them out of the workforce and onto the welfare rolls. The answer to the problem of working poverty, Schlotterbeck insisted in Senate testimony, was economic growth, not welfare-state expansion.52 In a full-page advertisement in the midst of the congressional debate in April 1970, the Chamber of Commerce decried FAP as a tool for higher taxes and a plan that “would triple our welfare rolls. Double our welfare costs.”53 Many state and local government officials joined conservatives in expressing skepticism about FAP, objecting in particular to its projected costs.54
Above all, conservative leaders feared the plan was a “gigantic giveaway which could further reward the indolent,” said Representative Lawrence Williams (R-Pa.),55 and that it would “make the whole nation into a welfare state,” according to Senator Russell Long (D-La.).56 A number of conservatives felt particularly betrayed by what they saw as the administration’s mis-characterization of FAP as a tough work-based program. Columnist James Kilpatrick spoke for many conservatives when he wrote in early 1970, “President Nixon served up his welfare proposals last August, wrapped in a package of pretty rhetoric and tied with a bow of conservative blue. Sad to say some of us who should have known better were fairly swept off our feet. I hereby repent.” Although Nixon originally emphasized “the idea of ‘workfare’ instead of welfare,” a closer look at FAP showed that of the nearly ten million recipients on the rolls, the vast majority would be exempt under FAP because they were children, elderly, mothers of preschool children, sick, or disabled. As a result, Kilpatrick said, “only 500,000 prospects remain for the work-or-starve demand” that was so appealing to him and other staunch workfare advocates. Worse yet, the plan to aid the working poor would double welfare rolls and costs. These newly assisted working-poor families, he argued, “would be the permanent poor feeding like parasites on the body politic unto the end of time.”57
Liberals were also disappointed by FAP’s plans for the working and welfare poor. Many were initially drawn to FAP by the rhetoric of expanded entitlement and the promise of an “income floor” under all poor families. FAP looked good “at first blush,” acknowledged Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward in 1971, then at Columbia’s School of Social Work. But as liberal reformers took a second look, they saw that its main initial effect was to assist the needy in some of the nation’s poorest regions, such as the South, where existing benefits were quite low. FAP offered
