were scaled back.116 Southern conservatives won the next round, however. When House and Senate leaders met in a conference committee to iron out differences between their two bills, the conference agreement reflected the harsher House version, rather than the more liberal Senate version, on almost every important issue.117
Opponents ratcheted up the pressure. The National Association of Social Workers (NASW) contacted every senator to demand that new conferees be appointed. Telegrams were fired off to President Johnson from George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO, and Walter Reuther, president of the Industrial Union Department, urging opposition and a veto if necessary. As Congress prepared to adjourn in December, liberal reformers became convinced that the best option was to postpone final action to allow for an extended debate in the next session. However, Long devised a legislative maneuver with fellow conservative Democrat Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) and Republican Everett Dirksen (R-Ill.). They moved to call up the conference report reflecting the House language and win passage on a voice vote—at a time when the Senate chamber was virtually empty of the bill’s opponents, thwarting liberal plans to filibuster the legislation. Furious, the NASW sent a telegram to the president asking that he eliminate the punitive elements of the bill.118
The Johnson administration faced a difficult choice: fight to retain the core New Deal conception of welfare developed and championed by party liberals since the 1930s, or accept the move toward a model of restricted and work-conditioned aid favored by party conservatives. Administration officials were not inclined to wage a decisive battle with Southern Democrats over welfare reform, and the administration accepted the turn toward workfare. HEW had not expected the freeze to be included in the final package, and many officials worried about the punitive orientation of the new law. But HEW leaders elected not to join liberal welfarists and labor leaders in publicly pressing the president to veto the legislation. Many in HEW agreed with the need for more work and training, even if they preferred the use of incentives rather than requirements to increase participation in those programs.119 Others in the administration may have held stronger reservations, but were simply unwilling to expend further political capital on the issue. “The Johnson administration stretched a long way in civil rights legislation and its war on poverty,” concluded historian Blanche Coll. “This much being done, and having offered the elderly and the poor generous medical care, the executive branch was not inclined to buck Congressman Mills and Senator Long in their drive to put AFDC mothers to work.”120
Although the WIN amendments were signed into law, the freeze provision had drawn enough public criticism to persuade Johnson to delay its implementation, and it was ultimately repealed by Congress in 1969, before it ever went into effect.121 There was no delay, however, in implementing the amendments’ work-related measures. A program was created that sought to prepare AFDC recipients “for work in the ‘regular economy’” and to restore their families “to independence and useful roles in their communities.”122
* * *
At the outset of the 1960s, the political initiative on welfare had rested with liberal Democrats in the White House, and a newly elected John Kennedy had galvanized the nation for a battle against poverty. By the end of the decade, Southern Democrats in Congress were charting the course in public assistance reform, toward workfare and restricted support for AFDC families. In the intervening years, two liberal administrations had pursued expansionary strategies that ultimately helped drive welfare policy in a conservative, work-based direction. They had undercut the existing New Deal rationale for public assistance and the fragile intraparty compromise on aiding the “unemployable poor.” They had developed and oversold reforms in the AFDC program that were expected to reduce the welfare rolls and that emphasized the importance of recipients’ self-support, fueling the pro-work arguments of welfare critics. And through initiating work programs (however small) as part of their social services strategy for AFDC recipients, they had created a justification and opportunity for conservatives within their own party to develop a policy initiative (WIN) that challenged core aims of welfarist public assistance.
In the end, welfare politics in the 1960s yielded contradictory outcomes. Developments early in the decade (particularly the Public Welfare Amendments of 1962) were seen by many as the culmination of the liberal welfarism of the War on Poverty, and they were described that way by President Kennedy. Broader political developments in the late 1960s, moreover, made AFDC by the end of the decade into the closest approximation of a genuine welfarist entitlement in the program’s history. Indeed, some welfare scholars see this period as the only one in which the program provided a meaningful entitlement to eligible families.123 Welfare rights drives and Supreme Court rulings knocked down barriers to access, and the percentage of eligible families actually receiving assistance climbed dramatically, from an estimated 33 percent in the early 1960s to more than 90 percent by 1971.124 AFDC benefits, though still meager in most states, rose steadily through the decade, and in-kind assistance, including Medicaid, low-income housing assistance, and food stamps, also expanded.125 Yet precisely at this moment, Congress and the White House shifted the program onto a workfarist rather than welfarist track at the federal level, a track that would eventually lead to the elimination of the entitlement and its replacement with a workfare alternative.
CHAPTER 2
Welfarists Confront Workfarists: The Family Assistance Plan
As the 1968 presidential race took shape, welfare reform emerged as an unavoidable campaign issue for both parties. In addition to congressional complaints about AFDC’s rising price tag, a growing chorus of opposition arose from state and local officials facing grave fiscal crises.1 These included prominent Republican governors from states such as California, New York, Illinois, and Pennsylvania; more than one-fourth of the AFDC caseload burden was carried by these four states alone.2 “If you were going to run for President of the United States, you had to have a welfare reform program,” said Martin Anderson, who became research director for Richard Nixon’s campaign in 1968. But if welfare policy was familiar territory for the Democrats, it was, he observed, a “somewhat treacherous issue for a Republican candidate.”3 Anderson and other staffers were charged with developing policy proposals to aid the poor. Nixon’s team produced plans combining program improvements and work measures, and the campaign staff believed they had achieved their goal: “The Democrats lost an issue, the press seemed baffled, and Nixon was very pleased with himself.”4
On November 5, with the long economic expansion of the 1960s slowing, Johnson standing on the sidelines, and the country divided over war in Vietnam and racial tensions at home, Nixon won a narrow victory against Hubert Humphrey. The limits on the new president’s power were clear from the outset. Democratic majorities controlled Congress, 243–192 in the House, and 58–42 in the Senate. Nixon had run a carefully calibrated race, touting a long list of positions designed to appeal to the “forgotten middle” in American politics. These included law and order in America’s cities and a peace strategy for Vietnam. On the social welfare front, Nixon called for returning power to state governments—a reaction to what he saw as the excesses of the Great Society—and a commitment to “liberate the poor from the debilitating dependence on government.”5
The president’s conservatism led many to assume that he would follow the path charted by congressional passage of WIN, consolidating a shift toward greater work obligations for AFDC recipients and further restricting the reach of public assistance. Instead, Nixon’s advisers crafted a plan to expand cash support for the poor and take public assistance reform well beyond the confines of AFDC. The most striking feature of Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan (FAP) was its radical proposal to guarantee an income floor for all poor families, including two-parent working families. After a three-year struggle in which the proposal came surprisingly close to passing, FAP died in Congress. A small avalanche of expert opinion and analysis followed, seeking to make sense of its rise
