the social welfare expansions of the Great Society period, mentioned as a consolation prize after the disintegration of FAP, or treated as a mere administrative change. And despite increasing recognition of the EITC’s importance as an antipoverty measure, the politics of its passage are rarely incorporated into the larger story of welfare policy.4
Far from years of stalemate, the early 1970s saw a distinct phase of welfare state development led by antiwelfare Southerners, one that disrupts the neat demarcations between expansion and contraction, and between the respective roles of liberal Democratic welfare state “builders” and conservative Republican “retrenchers.” It marked a conservative turn, but it was not an episode of retrenchment: it was a period of welfare-state building, and, in fact, it produced an expansion of programs for the elderly, disabled, and working poor. Far from a series of minor and unrelated initiatives, moreover, the three 1970s initiatives recast public assistance policies—to require work from those on AFDC, to reward work among low-wage workers, and to exempt from work only those too old or ill to earn wages.
Three conclusions emerge from a close study of the legislative and political history. First, the initiatives reflected a political response by Southern congressional Democrats to Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan, which threatened to expand the welfarist model of public assistance. As this chapter will show, FAP triggered a counterreaction by Southern Democratic lawmakers, and these programs were its leading edge. To create the three programs, Southern Democrats moved to “hive off” favored elements of the Nixon FAP proposal, modify them as necessary, and secure passage through independent legislative vehicles. This had the immediate political effect of undercutting moderate and conservative support for FAP, carefully cultivated by the administration on the basis of precisely these provisions.
Second, although Southern Democratic leaders had many reasons to oppose the Republican administration’s plan, their statements and strategies reveal that a core concern was the challenge FAP posed to social, political, and economic arrangements in the South. Key Southern leaders were convinced that Nixon’s proposal threatened to destabilize local low-wage labor markets: by directing federal cash assistance to current and potential workers, FAP would provide those workers with an alternative means of livelihood and the ability to refuse low-wage jobs or reduce work hours. Each of their three favored legislative alternatives, in contrast, promised to leave labor market relations largely intact by ensuring that the able-bodied poor were compelled to enter the workforce and by subsidizing—rather than disrupting—low-wage labor markets. The initiatives were in this sense profoundly conservative, even though they marked expansions, and they protected traditional Southern economic and political interests.
Third, these initiatives, taken together, reoriented the purposes of federally supported income assistance. The struggle over public assistance has long been a debate over whether and how to aid three categories of poor Americans: (a) those who are poor because they cannot work, (b) those who are poor because they will not work, and (c) those who are poor even though they are working.5 The New Deal framework sought to direct assistance to the first category and to withhold aid from the second category; those in the third category (working but poor) received no public assistance, though they benefited from other New Deal legislation.6 FAP proposed to erase these distinctions by installing an income floor under all poor families. The Southern conservative counterreaction assertively redrew its own distinctions. The piecemeal reforms introduced by leading Southern legislators—such as Senate Finance Committee chair Russell Long (D-La.), House Ways and Means Committee chair Wilbur Mills (D-Ark.), and Senator Herman Talmadge (D-Ga.)—created a new public assistance model. It provided aid to a much smaller population judged to be physically unable to work, through SSI; imposed work requirements on those judged able but unwilling to work, through WIN II; and offered a new entitlement to those who were poor even though they were working, through the EITC. This established the foundation of the workfare approach. By the mid-1970s, programs for the poor had been expanded, but in ways that accorded new priority to the criteria and imperative of work.7 This chapter opens with an analysis of the role of Southern politics in the rise of work-fare, then examines the political developments leading to the creation of the three programs in the 1970s.
The Fight to Control Welfare in the South
Why would conservative Southern lawmakers, who were generally opposed to both a large federal role in public assistance and the creation of new programs for the poor, spearhead an expansion of the federal welfare state? Southern leaders’ motives and interests in public assistance policy were neither uniform nor unchanging.8 Their role in building a new workfare regime is best understood in the context of relief’s place in the region’s social and economic order, and of Southern leaders’ reaction to FAP.
From the 1930s through the 1960s, Southern political leaders were largely successful in defending the prerogatives of state authority in public assistance programs. But by the late 1960s, Southerners were beginning to lose many of their traditional assistance-related means of control over their disproportionately black low-wage labor forces and the size and costs of state welfare rolls. The Civil Rights Act had banned discrimination in distribution of federal funds, limiting local and state discretion, and Supreme Court rulings had explicitly struck down several favored tactics for controlling welfare eligibility and benefits.9 Welfare rolls rose quickly as eligibility restrictions were lifted. Many conservatives were feeling besieged and disarmed, and congressional leaders such as Long condemned court decisions that limited their states’ capacities to restrict welfare.10 The new cohort of younger leaders elected in the wake of the civil rights battles and hailed as representatives of the “New South,” meanwhile, largely tracked the positions of political elders such as Long, Talmadge, and Mills on federal public assistance.11 Even as the region’s social order was transformed by black migration, economic expansion, and the extension of voting rights, welfare in the South remained controversial, tied to struggles over the region’s low-wage labor force and persistent racial hierarchies.
When Richard Nixon unveiled his expensive new social welfare initiative in a televised address in August 1969, therefore, Southerners were watching closely, and other leaders were watching the South. As the Nixon administration awaited Congress’s reaction, “the major question,” recalled Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of FAP’s architects in the administration, “was how the South would respond.” Moynihan was banking on Southern support. The South had changed, he reasoned, and political leaders might see FAP as an opportunity to bring billions in federal resources to address Southern poverty, and to bridge divides of race and region through an agenda of “economic liberalism.”12 Indeed, Moynihan had made the case within the Nixon administration that FAP could defuse racial tensions over public assistance. AFDC was losing public support in part because it was increasingly identified with African American recipients, he argued; FAP would change the equation by bringing millions of the mostly white working poor into the nation’s aid system.13 Robert Finch, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, advanced the same argument in the administration’s initial bid for support from Congress.14
But the administration’s hopes for Southern support were never realized. The overwhelming majority of Southern lawmakers opposed FAP. Two aspects of the plan drew repeated fire. The first was the principle of a federally guaranteed income. The promise of federal aid to families on the basis of income levels would mean an enormous infusion of cash assistance to the region’s poor through the federal social welfare system. The second was the principle that most family members would receive some aid whether or not the family head was working. Southern leaders worried that this would lead workers in low-paid sectors to work less—or not at all.15 “Bluntly put,” wrote analyst Kevin Phillips in a July 1970 column, as FAP sat in the Senate Finance Committee, “the program would strike at the rural socioeconomic and political power base of Dixie’s conservative Democrats.”16
If the stakes seemed high, it is because the numbers were striking. One-half of all poor families in the nation lived in the South, and two-thirds
