policy needed to cure.16 Part of the cure could be found in spending more on services that welfare clients sometimes desired and sometimes resisted.17 The organized welfare clients who were most recognized in the period were those from the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), advocating with and for impoverished blind adults who received federal Aid to the Blind. NFB fought unwanted services and interference in people’s choices by social workers and rehabilitation counselors. They sought welfare reforms that broadened eligibility, raised income and property ceilings imposed on people applying for aid, reduced supervision of their romantic and consumer choices, and removed the presumption that they would exhaust the economic support from their relatives before the government would help them.18
Gendered arguments for welfare reform built on ideas about flawed maternal and paternal behavior. The idea that paternal child support was vital to the well-being of impoverished children, and that collecting it was a good use of governmental resources, led to the Notice to Law Enforcement Officials (NOLEO) policy of 1950. The Truman administration and many Democrats in Congress approved this provision, which aimed to shape the behavior of impoverished women and men, or perhaps, more realistically, simply to drive women who were not on good terms with their children’s fathers away from the rolls.19 The NOLEO provision demanded that state welfare offices share with police the names of men who had deserted or abandoned mothers who received welfare. The mothers who refused to share their partners’ names or prosecute them for child support—whether out of concern for the men or fear of the consequences of pursuing them—lost eligibility for public aid. The provision applied to over one-quarter of families who received ADC benefits. Within a decade of its implementation, an estimated five thousand women had chosen in effect to give up government help by not disclosing the names of their partners.20
Among the most controversial reforms of the period were those that spoke to anxieties about trade unions and the political left, but which also violated the professional standards of the field of social work. Chief among these was the Jenner Amendment, which Congress, with both houses under Democratic control, passed and President Truman signed in 1951.21 The amendment guaranteed that no state would lose the federal portion of its funding for ADC if it permitted welfare department personnel to publicize the names of people who received benefits, thus violating professional standards of confidentiality.22 Democratic representative Burr V. Harrison of Virginia fought for the amendment on the grounds that “criminals, illegitimate children, prostitutes and Cadillac owners [we]re receiving welfare payments” because their names were secret.23 He distinguished sharply between the disproportionately white, supposedly more deserving, beneficiaries of old-age pensions and Unemployment Insurance, and the disproportionately nonwhite recipients of ADC.24 “Behind an iron curtain of secrecy and concealment,” he claimed, “we have today a miniature welfare state … that spends public money for luxuries for the undeserving and for the financing and encouragement of improvidence and illegitimacy.”25
The most successful expansionist reforms in the 1950s and early 1960s sought to improve clients by funding social services. The problem with the emphasis on services was that it suggested that poor people were psychologically, as much as financially, needy—and that part of poor people’s rehabilitation inhered in their learning to make ends meet despite their economic poverty. In 1950, Congress and the Democratic administration created a new welfare program, Aid to the Permanently and Totally Disabled (APTD).26 In 1954, Congress passed new rules that allowed ten million agricultural and domestic workers to gain eligibility for welfare aid.27 In 1956, the national government authorized a new social insurance program (non-means-tested and tied to waged work) centered on disability. The scale of Social Security Disability Insurance would far surpass that of means-tested programs such as APTD and ADC. Social Security amendments in that same year shifted the emphasis of ADC toward rehabilitation by adding social services to the mandate of the program.28
States and cities were more active in welfare reform than was the national government. Here, again, differences among Democrats were as significant as those between Democrats and Republicans. With national officials playing a muted role in supervising or overruling them, state and local politicians made policy to preserve racial and class hierarchies, react to migration, and enforce (or at least advertise) normative standards of gendered and sexual behavior.29 Beginning with Georgia in 1951, over half of the states reformed the definition of a “suitable home” under ADC to exclude unwed mothers and “illegitimate” children from receiving benefits. States that took this action included those in the Democratically controlled (and Jim Crow) South, as well as midwestern states, such as Michigan, which experienced inmigration by African Americans and working-class whites after World War II.30 By 1962, there were investigative units dedicated to enforcing the “suitable home” rule and other moralistic, gendered provisions under welfare policy in eight states and eighteen large cities.31
In the 1950s and well into the 1960s, heavily rural states in the South, all under Democratic control, pursued some of the most restrictive welfare reforms. The two leading sources of these policies were the felt need of certain white supremacist politicians to respond to civil rights activism, and the changing demands of employers in an era of out-migration and new technology. Public assistance was hardly alone as a realm of policy officials used to shore up white and planter dominance: Agricultural policy, too, helped sustain white supremacy and planter aristocracy in the Deep South. Local officials responded to civil rights activism by cutting access to commodity food, often the only government aid agricultural and domestic workers regularly received.32 In the late 1960s, many southern African Americans theorized that states introduced food stamps—which in those days cost cash that rural people rarely had—in place of commodity food as punishment for civil rights activism, with the intention to starve them or drive them north.33 Restrictive public assistance reforms had particular staying power because they drew from gender and sexual morality, while also being built on anti–civil rights and proemployer forces. The best-known example of a state welfare cutoff of this kind occurred in Louisiana in 1960. Twenty-three thousand children, 95 percent of them African American, lost subsistence aid because the homes of their unwed mothers were deemed “unsuitable.”34 Similarly, Alabama passed a package of welfare reforms into law as the civil rights movement began to post real gains.35 Even after passage of the national Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, local authorities across the South manipulated public assistance to punish people for their activism.36
The mix of expansive and restrictive welfare reforms, and divisions these sparked among Democrats, was even more complicated in the 1960s than previously. However, two themes from the prior decade that were also critically important in 1990s welfare reform continued: an emphasis on services in conjunction with cash aid, based on a sometimes unstated belief that mothers who were poor failed to earn their livelihoods because they were effectively disabled; and concern about the sexual behavior and romantic choices of women who received ADC. In 1961, a Democratic secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare ruled that states could not deny welfare on the basis of the so-called unsuitability of the home of a child born outside marriage. But the Kennedy and Johnson administrations did not back up the ruling by exercising their authority to cut federal funding to states that refused to follow it.37 Social Security amendments in 1962 turned ADC into Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). This move recognized the labor of maternal care. However, legislators who created AFDC also did so in part because they saw impoverished mothers as deficient and government as an agent of rehabilitation.38 The reforms introduced by President Kennedy followed medical and disability models to emphasize “prevention and rehabilitation.” Without spelling out the argument in detail, the president suggested that, like some disabled people, mothers who could not make the economic system work for their families could receive a course of professional intervention and then “get … off assistance and back into useful, productive roles in society.”39 While ostensibly sympathetic to impoverished parents, the emphasis on rehabilitation flowed all too easily into mandates for waged labor. With the support of social welfare advocates in Washington, D.C., national policy makers introduced work mandates into public assistance policy
