ill-defined “suitable home” restrictions, a holdover from Progressive Era mothers’ pension programs. These state rules—regarding a mother’s home life, child-rearing practices, and sexual relations—left significant discretion to caseworkers.38 Many states used the restrictions to refuse or limit aid to unmarried mothers. “Suitable home” rules drew prominent early criticism from Winifred Bell, who wrote a classic firsthand study of ADC in its initial decades.39 Extensive scholarship since then has exposed the ways that suitable home rules were used to exert social control over poor women.40
Table 1.2 Southern States’ Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), November 1961
Source: “Current Operating Statistics,” Table 14, Social Security Bulletin 25, no. 3 (March 1962): 34; the data are for November 1961. Similar data for recipients are reported in Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1962, Table 403, page 298; similar data for average family benefits are reported in Table 404, page 299.
Note: In contrast to the Southern programs for the elderly and disabled poor, Southern state ADC programs did not rank high nationally (by recipients or payments), and their average benefits were the lowest in the nation.
Another strategy, and an important precursor to workfare, was to use employment rules to govern eligibility and benefits. States often granted local officials the discretion to determine a mother’s “employability.”41 Many women were denied ADC assistance on the grounds that they were in fact employable and should be earning wages instead. Many others were instructed or compelled to earn wages to supplement their ADC grants, through temporary suspensions of aid or the provision of insufficient benefits.42 Decisions to deny or limit aid were sometimes made regardless of whether mothers were actually able to secure jobs or sufficient wages.43 Though it is difficult to assess the numbers who were working, studies of closed cases in the 1950s and early 1960s showed that around one-third of ADC mothers worked for wages, either full-time, part-time, or seasonally.44
Like suitable home restrictions, employment rules were more prevalent in the South and disproportionately used to exclude black families. A Southern public aid field supervisor observed:
The number of Negro cases is few due to the unanimous feeling on the part of the staff and board that there are more work opportunities for Negro women and to their intense desire not to interfere with local labor conditions. The attitude that “they have always gotten along,” and that “all they’ll do is have more children” is definite…. Communities … see no reason why the employable Negro mother should not continue her usually sketchy seasonal labor or indefinite domestic service rather than receive a public assistance grant.45
An investigation of complaints about ADC in Louisiana reached similar conclusions: “In some areas, it is contended that public assistance results in reducing the unskilled labor supply in employment where women and older children form a principal part of the labor supply … The fact that roughly two-thirds of the children receiving ADC are nonwhite influences attitudes toward the program.”46
Federal administrators pushed back against these and other state practices that undermined the BPA’s welfarist aims. The agency’s institutional leverage was limited, however, and its primary response was to issue new regulations and guidance. For example, BPA officials issued a series of requirements in 1947 that state agencies not deny any individual the opportunity to apply for the program, and that they provide assistance to every applicant deemed eligible.47 The BPA’s Handbook of Public Assistance was eventually over five inches thick with federal guidance.48 On the employment question, the Handbook stated clearly that the ADC program and staff should “make it possible for a mother to choose between staying at home to care for her children and taking a job.”49 Jane Hoey expressed serious concern about the failure to adequately realize these goals when recipients left welfare for work or combined the two due to low benefit levels. Inadequate assistance payments rendered “meaningless” any choice between work and benefits, she asserted.50
Recognizing that states faced fiscal pressures to limit aid programs, federal administrators also increased the federal financial contribution to ADC.51 This strategy measurably helped to expand the program to cover more families. In a review of ADC’s first twenty-five years, Ellen Perkins at the Bureau of Family Services (BPA’s successor) would later note that increased federal funding produced a significant rise in state assistance standards in these years, which made more families newly eligible.52 Federal funding also helped generate greater coverage of nonwhite families. Between 1937 and 1940, some 14 to 17 percent of all ADC recipients nationwide were black; by 1948, the proportion of nonwhite families was 30 percent.53
Overall, assistance for poor families thus saw a slow but steady welfarist expansion in its first three decades, despite resistance from a number of states. In Washington, meanwhile, intraparty differences over public assistance were only deepening. Several leading administration officials continued to defend and prioritize social insurance over public assistance in deliberations over policy reforms. More than once, major welfarist expansions and reforms to strengthen the New Deal framework for public assistance were considered—but federal officials drew back, instead repeating earlier assurances that the assistance programs would shrink as social insurance grew.54 In Congress, the frustration of Southern Democrats over the trajectory of public assistance was rising. The sentiment was captured by Senate Finance Committee chair Walter George of Georgia, who insisted in 1950 that proposed reforms should simply replace public assistance with social insurance.55
Liberal Expansions and the Southern Reaction in the 1960s
The role of the post-New Deal generation of Southern Democrats is less familiar than that of the Southerners who shaped the Social Security Act at its origins.56 Led primarily by Wilbur Mills of Arkansas in the House and Russell Long of Louisiana in the Senate, who entered Congress in 1939 and 1948, respectively, this cohort would spearhead many of the first major legislative efforts to introduce workfare reforms in public assistance. Like their predecessors, they derived their influence in part from the sweeping prerogatives afforded to senior committee members in Congress before the institutional reforms of the early 1970s. The House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee had primary jurisdiction over public assistance policy. In the four decades following the act’s passage, Southerners chaired the House Committee in thirty-six of forty years, and the Senate Committee in thirty-eight of forty years.57
Table 1.3 Congressional Committee Chairs, 1933–2015
| House Ways and Means | |
| Robert L. Doughton (D-N.C.) | 1933–1947 |
| Harold Knudson (R-Minn.) | 1947–1949 |
| Robert L. Doughton (D-N.C.) | 1949–1953 |
| Daniel A. Reed (R-N.Y.) | 1953–1955 |
| Jere Cooper (D-Tenn.) | 1955–1957 |
| Wilbur D. Mills (D-Ark.) | 1957–1975 |
| Al Ullman (D-Ore.) | 1975–1981 |
| Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.) |
1981–1994
|
