for blacks. According to the Labor Department, the percentage of black workers forced to accept part-time jobs, poorly paid and irregular, was twice as high in the South as elsewhere in the United States.17
In this economic context, even the low benefit levels promised under FAP would have a sweeping impact. Of the nearly four million households that would receive FAP payments, more than two million were in the South: under FAP, the percentage of families with incomes less than $2,000 in the South would approach that of other parts of the country for the first time.18 Estimates from the Nixon administration and members of Congress suggested that FAP would make more than one-third of Mississippi’s population eligible for public assistance, along with one-quarter of Kentuckians and Louisianans and roughly one-fifth of the populations of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina.19 FAP would triple the welfare rolls in thirteen states, railed Senator Harry Byrd, Jr. (D-Va.).20
As Southern elites recognized immediately, providing welfare assistance to six to seven million additional Southerners, primarily in working-poor families, would alter the economic choices available to workers, changing the character of the low-wage labor market.21 In correspondence to Southern lawmakers, local business leaders reported difficulties in finding and retaining “unskilled labor,” especially in food and service industries. They worried, as a business leader in Little Rock wrote, that “our inability to employ our labor needs” may be due not to “a shortage in the potential work force but perhaps an unwillingness on the part of many people to work, preferring instead to receive benefits from various places such as welfare, unemployment compensation, food stamps and the like.”22
FAP also threatened to upset the balance of political power in the South by providing a new base of economic security for blacks. A majority of FAP benefits would continue to go to white families, according to administration estimates.23 But, as an official of the anti-integration Citizens’ Councils stated, FAP “would enormously increase the voting power of the poor people, and in the South an awful lot of poor people are Negroes.”24 Among other things, FAP’s income guarantee would limit the effectiveness of economic reprisals—such as reductions in pay or loss of employment—that many employers used to intimidate blacks from voting. This meant, wrote Steve Van Evera in New South in the fall of 1971, that FAP could give black political power “the greatest boost … in the rural South since the Voting Rights Act of 1965.”25 When a 1970 survey of Southern opinion on FAP was published in the Wall Street Journal, the vast majority, the paper reported, “agree[d] with Senator Herman Talmadge, the Georgia Democrat, that the bill ‘would undermine the best qualities of this nation’” and “bring significant changes in the Southern way of life.”26
On Capitol Hill, lawmakers argued that increased access to public assistance would be a disincentive to work. Representative Phil Landrum (D-Ga.) told a reporter, “There’s not going to be anybody left to toll these wheelbarrows and press these shirts. They’re all going to be on welfare.”27 Long and others also worried about the larger labor market implications of FAP’s guaranteed income, including potential upward wage pressures. Arguing for his own alternative to FAP, Long emphasized to fellow conservatives that unlike FAP, his plan would not disrupt the existing wage structure in the low-wage sector. He carefully listed forty-one distinct jobs in which a person might continue to earn less than the federal minimum wage under his plan, including in public sector positions, “small retail stores,” “small service establishments,” “agricultural pursuits,” and “domestic service.”28
In the face of FAP’s challenge to the existing order, its modest work requirement appeared to be little more than a cruel joke to Southern conservatives. They saw quickly what Nixon aide Patrick Moynihan was unable to convey to Northern liberals who opposed FAP’s work mandate as too tough: under the FAP requirement, guaranteed assistance would continue to flow to other family members even if the head of the family refused to take an available job.29 The only penalty for refusing work was the loss of the breadwinner’s share of the family grant. After decades of local work rules, Southerners were accustomed to more stringent controls on welfare recipients’ labor.
Some in the Nixon administration believed Southern leaders’ interest in maintaining cheap labor supplies fueled their dogged attempts to tighten work requirements. One exasperated HEW official questioned whether Long’s devotion to the idea of imposing strict work obligations on welfare recipients had less to do with the alleged erosion of the work ethic among poor mothers—and more to do with the availability of domestic labor for the Southern elite. Regardless of costs or family circumstances, he emphasized, “[Long] will reply, ‘That’s okay, you can’t put a value on those children seeing a mother get up at 5:30 to go to work.’ Doing what? Picking armadillos off the highway? … I think that … what Long and others are really concerned about [is] that if this bill goes through they won’t be able to get a maid down in Louisiana.”30
Southerners’ concerns about FAP’s impact on employment helped fuel the protracted legislative tug-of-war over work provisions described in the previous chapter. Southern Democrats joined Republicans in stripping the caveat from FAP’s work requirement that recipients were only obliged to accept “suitable” employment. Representative Joel Broyhill of Virginia drew the line in the sand, telling reporters: “I will insist that no one receive any assistance through the welfare program who is physically able to do work but refuses to do so. I don’t want any provision limiting the requirement to ‘suitable’ employment. Any type of work should be considered suitable or reasonable to a person seeking public assistance.”31
The Southern contingent lost a battle, however, when the Nixon administration reworked the original FAP bill (after it died in the Senate in 1970) and reintroduced it as H.R. 1 in 1971. The original bill had stipulated that FAP recipients could be assigned to any job paying the “prevailing wage” and permitted states to administer the program. This provided latitude to Southern administrators seeking to preserve the existing hierarchies in the region’s labor market, where the “prevailing wage” for domestic work in Mississippi was $4 a day.32 But in an appeal to labor and Northern liberals, the revised bill mandated federal rather than state administration and asserted that family breadwinners had the right to reject any job paying less than $1.20 an hour (the federal minimum was $1.60 at the time).33 These income levels would significantly force wages up throughout the rural South, which had the lowest average hourly earnings ($1.08) in the nation.34 FAP would provide a federal income to a poor family, even if a parent rejected many of the jobs then available—unless local employers boosted wages for farmhands, dishwashers, domestics, and other positions not covered by the federal minimum wage, to reach the FAP minimum of $1.20.35
Table 3.1 House Votes on Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan, 1970 and 1971
Source: Author’s calculations based on vote totals reported in Congressional Quarterly Almanac 26 (1970): 16H; and Congressional Quarterly Almanac 27 (1971): 35H.
Note: On the two key FAP-related votes in the House, Northern Democrats were overwhelmingly in favor, Southern Democrats were overwhelmingly opposed, and Republicans were split. The first vote was on final passage of H.R. 16311, which passed 243–155 on April 16, 1970. The second vote was on a motion by Representative Al Ullman (D-Ore.) to delete the FAP provisions from the 1971 Social Security Amendments (H.R. 1). The Ullman motion was rejected 187–234 on June 22, 1971.
Despite numerous attempts by the Nixon administration to address Southerners’ concerns, opposition remained strong. On the two direct votes on FAP in the House, Southern Democrats voted against the plan by large margins, with 81 and 70 percent opposed. Northern Democrats were 86 and 72 percent in favor; Republicans were nearly evenly split. In the Senate, the pattern was similar, though there were no direct up-or-down
