The Workfare State. Eva Bertram

      The administration’s original legislation provided benefit levels that sought to ensure adequate (if minimal) support, defined as “a reasonable subsistence, compatible with decency and health, to dependent children.”²³ Southern Democrats in Congress opposed this provision, however. According to Abbott, they “feared that northern standards might be forced on the South in providing for Negro and white tenant families,” and the clause was stripped from the bill.²⁴ Instead, the final legislation stated only that ADC was to enable each state “to furnish financial assistance, as far as practicable under the conditions of the state.”²⁵ A similar clause was eliminated from the program for the elderly poor, Old Age Assistance. But the committee leaders’ particular disregard for the ADC program was revealed when final benefit levels were determined: ADC benefits were the lowest of the three categories. Edwin Witte, executive director of the CES, later acknowledged that this may have been a mistake, but he “did not feel that it was wise to raise this point, lest we lose this aid altogether.”²⁶

      The original administration bill also contained a broad standard of eligibility for ADC. Following recommendations by the FERA, the administration initially defined dependent children as those for whom there was “no adult person, other than the one needed to care for the children, able to work and provide a reasonable subsistence.” This definition arguably would have laid the groundwork for federal assistance to virtually all poor children under working age, including those in two-parent families, and it would have exempted the caretaker parent—usually the mother—from waged work. Josephine Brown explained, “‘Aid to Dependent Children’ as conceived by the FERA meant general relief or assistance on a family basis to all families having children under sixteen.”²⁷ However, Doughton’s House Ways and Means Committee removed the implicit work exemption for the adult caretaker. The Senate Finance Committee further circumscribed eligibility by asserting that the children must have been deprived of parental support “by reason of death, continued absence from the home, or physical or mental incapacity of a parent.”²⁸ These changes not only limited the program’s reach. They also left unsettled the question of work obligations. The final federal legislation did not require work of poor mothers and was intended to support caregiving, but it did not explicitly prohibit states from imposing work rules. Moreover, the program’s low benefits would force many families to combine welfare and work to make ends meet.

      Conflict also arose over what appeared to be an unobjectionable bureaucratic clause in the administration’s bill that provided for federal regulations “necessary to effectuate the purposes of this title.” Perceiving this as a threat to state control and patronage jobs, the House committee scaled back the provisions, and the administration assented. The removal of this provision and federal oversight over other specific standards limited federal administrators to approving or disapproving state ADC programs in their entirety, rather than demanding piecemeal changes. Federal officials would have to choose between accepting a flawed state plan with objectionable restrictions on aid, or rejecting the plan altogether and thereby denying federal aid to all poor single-mother families within that state.²⁹

      The new system of public assistance was thus attenuated by compromises demanded by Southern legislators—concessions that would leave it vulnerable to subsequent workfare initiatives. New Deal public assistance still rested on a welfarist foundation, though a fragile one. Eligibility was based above all on need. There was no federal requirement that poor families earn wages in order to receive aid. Although states could determine their own standards of need, a federal guarantee ensured that matching funds would be provided to meet each state’s need as it fluctuated with economic conditions. Some federal standards also remained in place. To receive funding, each state was required to submit an administrative plan for its ADC program, to be approved by the federal Social Security Board. Plans had to meet certain requirements—affirming, for example, that the program was available throughout the state and administered by a single statewide agency. States also had to provide for fair hearings for those denied assistance, a principle federal administrators saw as essential to defending the individual entitlement to aid.³⁰ As the Social Security Act became law, the question was whether the thin welfarist foundation of the new public assistance programs would be challenged and undermined, or shored up and strengthened over time.

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      The years following the Social Security Act’s passage brought a marked expansion in the new program for poor families. ADC’s growth was troubled and uneven, however, leading to frustration among its welfarist advocates. Jane Hoey, who led the Social Security Board’s Bureau of Public Assistance (BPA), was anxious to see the program fully implemented as quickly as possible. Central to the agency’s welfarist vision was an immediate goal of securing the involvement of all states, and all counties within them. Hoey calculated that ADC was likely “still caring for only a fraction of the needy children for whom Federal funds might be made available” in 1939, and she was impatient.³¹ The BPA wanted states to build ADC up more rapidly, and to adopt more generous and inclusive eligibility criteria.

      For their part, many state administrators saw ADC largely as a source of federal funds to support—but not reform—their existing state-run mothers’ pension programs. Deep-rooted state interests often ran against the expansionary vision of federal administrators. Most states faced serious fiscal constraints and worried about their funding obligations under the new assistance programs.³² Many officials wanted to keep programs small, affordable, and under their control. This trend was widespread in the South, where economic elites expected to maintain unfettered control over local workforces, leaving racial hierarchies at the heart of the region’s labor relations unchallenged. Increased public assistance threatened to disrupt these long-standing social and economic arrangements by providing an alternative income source to poor families with current or potential workers.³³ State and local officials thus jealously guarded their administrative prerogatives, and throughout the South, state public welfare commissioners coordinated their efforts to limit federal oversight.³⁴

      As federal funds began to flow, Southern states displayed a distinct pattern of policy preferences, illustrated most clearly in the size and scope of the three assistance programs. Between the 1930s and 1960s, Southern states built up programs for the elderly poor that were among the largest in the country by rate of recipients (per 1,000 elderly residents). Their programs for the blind and disabled poor were also sizable.³⁵ Yet Southern states’ programs for poor families were quite small, in terms of numbers of families supported and program costs, despite the region’s high family poverty rates. Although benefit levels in all Southern public assistance programs were meager, the region’s ADC programs were more restrictive in their reach, and they provided the lowest average benefits in the nation.³⁶

      Table 1.1 Southern States’ Old Age Assistance (OAA) Programs, 1960 and 1961