program approved by the House back into the Senate bill.”68
In fact, it took more than “a big lobbying job” to win Southern conservative support. It took a shift in the political and economic interests of Southern elites, and the persistent pressure of one of their leaders in the Senate, Russell Long. By the early 1970s, demographic shifts had changed the logic of public assistance in the South, and Long understood this. Waves of migration beginning in the 1940s had brought primarily young African American workers and their families to the North. This was spurred in part, Long noted, by “mechanization of the farm,” which had “cut back drastically on the availability of jobs.”69 Large numbers of elderly blacks remained behind, most of whom were no longer able to work for wages. Rural Southern counties were increasingly saddled with the twin burdens of a diminishing tax base and a growing public assistance burden. One Mississippi county, for example, saw its elderly population expand from 5 to 11 percent between 1940 and 1970.70 In Long’s state of Louisiana, roughly one-third of the elderly population received Old Age Assistance for the poor, and Louisiana’s OAA program had grown to the third largest in the nation.71 Indeed, of the thirteen largest OAA programs, eight were in the South.72
By the time SSI was considered in Congress, therefore, Southern leaders faced a new reality. Concerns over local control of assistance for the elderly and disabled poor had diminished or been superseded by the burden of increased payments. But if these demographic changes led some policymakers to see the proposed SSI reform as less of a threat, it required the political savvy of Russell Long to see in SSI an opportunity to advance the interests of conservative Southerners in defeating FAP and promoting workfare.
For two years, Long had used his power as Finance Committee chair to block FAP. During this protracted struggle, Long developed a parallel strategy to that of delay. He would defeat FAP by proposing a sizable expansion of funding for the two categories of poor he believed should receive public assistance: those physically unable to work, and the working poor.73 The first would eventually become SSI; the second would become the EITC.
By 1972, with FAP languishing but not yet defeated, Long made a critical move. In September, his committee announced its support for the House proposal to federalize aid to the elderly and disabled—reversing its previous position and paving the way for approval of SSI.74 As Long later explained to his biographer, he believed that supporting federalization of the so-called adult programs for the elderly and disabled would eliminate any chance that the “family support” provisions of FAP would ever be enacted: “To keep them from coming back with something that was going to make the whole nation into a welfare state, I felt that the way to spike their guns on that would be to take all the money they estimated spending on this family program and apply that to the aged.”75
With Long and his committee no longer an obstacle, SSI was included in the omnibus Social Security legislation passed later that year. The creation of a major new federal assistance program, SSI, was thus due in no small measure to the divergent workfare campaigns of two conservative Southern leaders who had long been protective of states’ rights: Mills’s drive to impose work requirements on AFDC recipients, and Long’s persistent attempts to scuttle the Family Assistance Plan.
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