“What recourse would there be for Blacks who say they are too sick to work? Who will be the judge? … Why can’t some mothers remain in the home to raise their own children? … What guarantee does the Black recipient have that he will not be forced to take all of the dirty and sloppy jobs available in the sweatshops of industry?”74
On the question of work requirements, as on other issues, Nixon thus faced a gaping divide in perception and political positions. Both welfarists and work-farists had coherent conceptions of how to combine work and welfare, but their strategies served fundamentally different ends. Conservative workfarists believed welfare recipients should be required to work in order to reduce reliance on government aid; liberal welfarists argued that recipients had an entitlement to cash assistance and that work should be voluntary. And for different reasons, neither side was drawn toward policy compromise for the welfare poor by FAP’s proposals for the working poor. The Nixon administration’s attempts to mollify both sides on the work question thus proved unable to win over either. On the one hand, Moynihan repeatedly insisted to liberals that the FAP work requirements were not onerous and did not undermine the entitlement of assistance for poor children. He argued that it was all that was politically possible at the moment, and should be seen as a critical step forward, holding out the prospect of building a new kind of antipoverty politics across lines of race and employment status.75 On the other hand, President Nixon, in a speech before a conference of Republican governors in April 1971, highlighted the other side of FAP. Displaying his conservative credentials, he said:
I advocate a system which will encourage people to take work. And that means whatever work is available. It does not mean the attitude expressed not so long ago at a hearing on welfare by a lady who got up and screamed: “Don’t talk to us about any of those menial jobs!” … Scrubbing floors or emptying bedpans is not enjoyable work, but a lot of people do it—and there is as much dignity in that as there is in any other work to be done in this country—including my own.
Within hours, the NWRO had fired off a terse press release: “You don’t promote family life by forcing women out of their homes to empty bedpans. When Richard Nixon is ready to give up his $200,000 salary to scrub floors and empty bedpans in the interest of his family, then we will take him seriously.”76 Welfare recipients and other liberals emerged more firmly opposed to the president’s plan—and conservatives were no more convinced that his commitment to workfare was serious.
* * *
FAP’s fate was ultimately decided in a protracted legislative battle that extended over two congressional sessions, from 1969 through 1972. More than once, FAP passed the House, and there was a point at which the measure seemed within a hair’s breadth of winning congressional approval. The House Ways and Means Committee first held hearings on the proposal in the fall of 1969, and FAP won the vital (and in many respects surprising) support of Wilbur Mills. FAP was, in his view, a preferred alternative to the revenue-sharing proposals that were then under consideration, and the plan’s work provision assuaged many of his concerns.77 Once Mills threw his weight behind the bill, he steered it to easy passage when the House took up the measure the following spring. More than 80 percent of Mills’s fellow Southern Democrats voted against FAP despite his support. Nonetheless, FAP passed the House floor by a vote of 243–155 on April 16, 1970, and prospects in the Senate looked good.
Two weeks later, however, the Senate Finance Committee brought the auspicious early progress to a halt. Chairman Russell Long (D-La.) led the opposition, joined by John Williams of Delaware, the ranking minority member. In a critical round of hearings in April 1970, committee leaders struck a conservative, workfarist position. Lawmakers charged that the plan contained particularly powerful disincentives to work, because it retained the automatic link created under AFDC between eligibility for cash assistance and access to the new and expanding in-kind programs such as food stamps and Medicaid. This automatic link meant, in effect, that when a family earned enough wage income to reach the “cutoff” notch, they immediately lost a significant source of benefits. The extra dollar of earnings that placed the family beyond the eligibility point cost far more than a lost dollar of cash assistance: it also meant the family would lose linked benefits such as health insurance and food aid. This created a logic to earn less than the cutoff point, the senators argued.78
This “notch effect” plagued the existing AFDC system as well. But conservatives worried that FAP was worse, because it threatened not only to persuade current recipients to stay on welfare but also to draw current workers onto the rolls.79 Like Nixon aide Martin Anderson, lawmakers worried that the combination of FAP’s cash aid and existing in-kind benefits might offer poor workers a better deal than they could find in the labor market. In response to the committee’s concerns about this and other issues, administration officials reworked the legislation. Once again, the revisions earned little additional conservative support and turned liberals already troubled by what they saw as low benefits and harsh work requirements more adamantly against FAP.80
Throughout the summer and fall of 1970, the Nixon White House believed that it had the votes to win passage—if the bill could be moved out of the Finance Committee and onto the Senate floor. But Long and others strategically delayed the vote, and the bill stalled in committee.81 Lacking the support of even a majority of Republicans, FAP needed Democratic votes to pass. Yet in the partisan atmosphere of the fall of 1970, as the nation geared up for a congressional election, few Democrats were in the mood to hand the president a legislative victory. When Vice President Spiro Agnew hit the campaign trail with stump speeches condemning “radical liberals,” resentment surged among liberal Democrats—and FAP’s prospects plunged further. By the time the vote was taken in the Senate Finance Committee on November 20, four liberal Democrats joined the conservatives in defeating the bill, 6–10. These included not only Eugene McCarthy (D-Minn.) but Fred Harris (D-Okla.), who was swayed by NWRO arguments, and Albert Gore, Sr. (D-Tenn.), who was one of the Democrats bruised by Agnew’s attacks. A last-ditch effort to secure a victory on the floor of the Senate also failed, 21–49.82
Undeterred, Nixon vowed to make FAP a “major legislative goal” for the new ninety-first Congress. A reworked FAP once again passed the House, and, once again, stalled in the Senate.83 The revised bill, called H.R. 1, offered some new attractions for both conservatives and liberals. But conservative objections were sharpened by an increase in the basic benefit level, and removal of the stipulation that recipients could be forced to take any job paying standard local wages, no matter how low.84 And liberals were outraged by the elimination of the guarantee that recipients would not receive less under FAP than under existing AFDC programs, and removal of the provision allowing recipients to refuse to take jobs that were not “suitable.” The NWRO, moreover, organized a more effective and far-reaching opposition to the bill among congressional liberals this time.85
In the Senate, welfarists and workfarists crafted alternative legislative proposals. Liberals lined up behind Senator Ribicoff (D-Conn.), who came forward with a more generous family assistance bill in October 1971 that shored up and strengthened the welfare entitlement. Senator Long of the Senate Finance Committee unveiled his own plan, billed as a true and tougher “workfare” proposal. The Finance Committee—still dominated by a conservative majority—rejected both FAP and the Ribicoff proposal, and approved Long’s workfare plan.86
The bill was slow to reach the floor of the Senate, and as months passed, Nixon lost interest in the FAP campaign. When the full Senate finally turned its attention to family assistance in the fall of 1972, the nation was in the throes of another election season, including a vitriolic presidential campaign pitting Nixon against Senator George McGovern (D-S. Dak.), the standard-bearer of the Democratic Party’s liberal wing. In the end, none of the three bills—H.R. 1, the Ribicoff plan, or the Long alternative—earned enough support to pass. The struggle over family assistance was over.87
FAP’s Failure and Welfare’s Future
One
