about the story of the Family Assistance Plan is how close it came to becoming law. A legislative proposal that would have remade federal social welfare policy by extending aid to all poor families—working or nonworking, single or two-parent—cleared the House twice with strong margins. According to the White House’s vote count, it may well have cleared the Senate had it been brought to a vote in the summer of 1970; even at the end, in the fall of 1972, FAP might have been enacted if the administration or the Democratic leadership had found the eight votes to reverse the 35–51 outcome on October 4.88
Despite its defeat, the battle over the Nixon proposal changed the terms of the debate and defined new political coalitions in the politics of public assistance. FAP had put the working poor on the national political agenda: both sides in the FAP debate agreed that the problem demanded attention. The welfare poor did not fare so well. The sustained attack on AFDC in the campaign for FAP had left the program and its recipients more discredited than ever, and proposals (by liberal Democrats) to broaden welfarist protections, or to defend the principle of choice in the labor market (as Shultz had argued), were rejected.
The dominant explanation for FAP’s defeat was that the proposal was unable to gain adequate support from either liberals or conservatives. Strictly speaking, this is accurate, but it obscures two deeper factors essential to understanding subsequent welfare politics. First, by the early 1970s, the debate over work and welfare was not simply a debate between “liberals” and “conservatives.” It had evolved into a struggle between two competing conceptions of public assistance, each with its own logic for work and welfare. One was welfarism, rooted in the premise of entitlement to cash assistance to all eligible families; a noncoercive approach to work could be accommodated within this framework. The other approach was a modern form of workfare. The idea at its core—that the poor must be made to work—was not new, of course; nor was the policy of work requirements for welfare recipients. But the concept of elevating work promotion and enforcement above and outside of the commitment to the traditional safety net against poverty, and the idea of replacing the logic of entitlement with the logic of work incentives, was just beginning to take form as a full-blown policy alternative to welfarism at the federal level.
The battle over FAP exposed and deepened the political divide between welfarists and workfarists. It also pushed workfarists to more aggressively articulate and advocate for their alternative. The defeat of FAP struck an ideological blow for their position. Workfare would not gain institutional expression until the passage of three legislative initiatives, described in the next chapter. It would not become the dominant approach to public assistance until the passage of the 1996 welfare reform. But it was during the political struggles over FAP that many of the core ideas behind U.S. workfare began to coalesce, along with the beginnings of a political coalition to support it, from state and local officials to Southern Democratic and conservative Republican lawmakers.
A second critical factor in the battle over FAP was the role of moderates and conservatives. The conventional wisdom on the defeat of FAP emphasizes the actions of liberals: the widespread perception was that liberals “lost” FAP in the quest for an even more far-reaching reform. Liberal defections gained far more media and scholarly attention, particularly from those partial to the reform. These observers aimed their harshest criticism at liberal opponents for being too “pure” in their position, or for demanding even more than FAP proposed—and more than was politically feasible.89
In fact, a close analysis of the votes undertaken by Lester Salamon showed that liberal support for FAP was extremely strong in the final vote tallies. The critical defection from FAP came from the absence of both conservative and moderate support in the Senate. In the face of a strong conservative challenge in the Senate led by Long and his Republican Finance Committee colleagues, there was a palpable lack of leadership to mobilize support for FAP among moderates. Senate Majority Leader Michael Mansfield (D-Mont.), for example, did not take a position. By the time FAP arrived on the Senate floor, moreover, even the president had distanced himself from it, giving moderates still greater reason to play it safe on the issue. So although more than 70 percent of moderates in the House voted in support of H.R. 1, for example, less than 40 percent did so in the Senate.90
The role of moderates and conservatives in FAP’s defeat also supports a core claim of this chapter: by the time FAP came to a vote, there was little common ground in the debate over work and welfare. Policymakers and the public were divided between liberal welfarists and conservative workfarists. Each had moved toward a stauncher position through the late 1960s. The Nixon administration’s strategy of appealing to each side in the FAP debate of the early 1970s only widened the chasm between them. Moderates, meanwhile, were left with little reason to believe that anything would work, and no new middle ground to stand on.
In the end, conservative Senate Democrats played the most decisive role in the FAP battles. FAP had the momentum of a nationally broadcast presidential address and easy House passage when it reached Senate Democrats in the spring of 1970. They tied it down and picked it apart until a successor version of the legislation was finally defeated in the fall of 1972. Southern Democrats then picked up select pieces of the wreckage they had made and fashioned the beginnings of a fundamentally different approach to welfare and work, as the next chapter explains. Their role in creating a workfare alternative was no accident: they had a deep stake in the debate over who received cash assistance, and how. In the process of defending these interests, they would permanently transform the national system of public assistance.
CHAPTER 3
Building Workfare: WIN II, SSI, and EITC
Senator Russell Long had headed home to Louisiana victorious when Congress adjourned in December 1967. He had regaled a crowd in Shreveport with the story of how his eleventh-hour maneuver on the Senate floor had foiled a filibuster planned by liberal Democrats, securing passage of the WIN amendments authored by his fellow Southerner Wilbur Mills and sealing the fate of the welfare measure proposed by President Johnson and Senate liberals. “That group of young turks,” he concluded, “has a lot to learn” about how to run a filibuster.1 Four years later, he was back before crowds in his home state to celebrate an even greater victory in blocking another president’s liberal welfare reform proposal. This time it was Richard Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan (FAP). Hand-scrawled in the margins of Long’s March 1971 speech was his conclusion: “Last year FAP failed. Finance Committee and I as the chairman in particular was blamed…. Good thing.”2 Long would later call the defeat of FAP the crowning achievement of his legislative career.
With FAP’s collapse, the campaign by conservative Southern Democrats against liberal welfare reform measures seemed to draw to a close. As it turned out, they were just getting warmed up. In the early 1970s, emboldened by their victories on WIN and FAP, Southern Democratic leaders in Congress shifted from a strategy of blocking liberal reform initiatives to crafting their own model of federal income assistance. They quietly spearheaded three legislative initiatives in quick succession that changed the landscape of public assistance: the Talmadge Work Incentive amendments (WIN II) were approved in 1971, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) passed in 1972, and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) became law in 1975. Though not conceived or executed as a coordinated conservative assault on the New Deal system, the piecemeal reforms fundamentally altered much of the existing structure of public assistance. Their combined impact was to steer the ends and means of federal income assistance toward the principle of rewarding and enforcing work.
The three reforms are often overlooked in accounts of welfare policy change, or treated as distinct, unrelated developments. Many accounts move quickly from the (largely expansionary) 1960s to the (largely contractionary) 1980s. The 1970s were, in the words of one historian, years of “stalemate” in poverty politics, sandwiched between the liberal and conservative welfare state projects.3 The Talmadge amendments are often raised only in passing, as
