The Workfare State. Eva Bertram
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 of poor black families did. Wages and working conditions for those at the bottom of the labor market were the worst in the nation, particularly for blacks. According to the Labor Department, the percentage of black workers forced to accept part-time jobs, poorly paid and irregular, was twice as high in the South as elsewhere in the United States.17
In this economic context, even the low benefit levels promised under FAP would have a sweeping impact. Of the nearly four million households that would receive FAP payments, more than two million were in the South: under FAP, the percentage of families with incomes less than $2,000 in the South would approach that of other parts of the country for the first time.18 Estimates from the Nixon administration and members of Congress suggested that FAP would make more than one-third of Mississippi’s population eligible for public assistance, along with one-quarter of Kentuckians and Louisianans and roughly one-fifth of the populations of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina.19 FAP would triple the welfare rolls in thirteen states, railed Senator Harry Byrd, Jr. (D-Va.).20
As Southern elites recognized immediately, providing welfare assistance to six to seven million additional Southerners, primarily in working-poor families, would alter the economic choices available to workers, changing the character of the low-wage labor market.21 In correspondence to Southern lawmakers, local business leaders reported difficulties in finding and retaining “unskilled labor,” especially in food and service industries. They worried, as a business leader in Little Rock wrote, that “our inability to employ our labor needs” may be due not to “a shortage in the potential work force but perhaps an unwillingness on the part of many people to work, preferring instead to receive benefits from various places such as welfare, unemployment compensation, food stamps and the like.”22
FAP also threatened to upset the balance of political power in the South by providing a new base of economic security for blacks. A majority of FAP benefits would continue to go to white families, according to administration estimates.23 But, as an official of the anti-integration Citizens’ Councils stated, FAP “would enormously increase the voting power of the poor people, and in the South an awful lot of poor people are Negroes.”24 Among other things, FAP’s income guarantee would limit the effectiveness of economic reprisals—such as reductions in pay or loss of employment—that many employers used to intimidate blacks from voting. This meant, wrote Steve Van Evera in New South in the fall of 1971, that FAP could give black political power “the greatest boost … in the rural South since the Voting Rights Act of 1965.”25 When a 1970 survey of Southern opinion on FAP was published in the Wall Street Journal, the vast majority, the paper reported, “agree[d] with Senator Herman Talmadge, the Georgia Democrat, that the bill ‘would undermine the best qualities of this nation’” and “bring significant changes in the Southern way of life.”26
On Capitol Hill, lawmakers argued that increased access to public assistance would be a disincentive to work. Representative Phil Landrum (D-Ga.) told a reporter, “There’s not going to be anybody left to toll these wheelbarrows and press these shirts. They’re all going to be on welfare.”27 Long and others also worried about the larger labor market implications of FAP’s guaranteed income, including potential upward wage pressures. Arguing for his own alternative to FAP, Long emphasized to fellow conservatives that unlike FAP, his plan would not disrupt the existing wage structure in the low-wage sector. He carefully listed forty-one distinct jobs in which a person might continue to earn less than the federal minimum wage under his plan, including in public sector positions, “small retail stores,” “small service establishments,” “agricultural pursuits,” and “domestic service.”28
In the face of FAP’s challenge to the existing order, its modest work requirement appeared to be little more than a cruel joke to Southern conservatives. They saw quickly what Nixon aide Patrick Moynihan was unable to convey to Northern liberals who opposed FAP’s work mandate as too tough: under the FAP requirement, guaranteed assistance would continue to flow to other family members even if the head of the family refused to take an available job.29 The only penalty for refusing work was the loss of the breadwinner’s share of the family grant. After decades of local work rules, Southerners were accustomed to more stringent controls on welfare recipients’ labor.
Some in the Nixon administration believed Southern leaders’ interest in maintaining cheap labor supplies fueled their dogged attempts to tighten work requirements. One exasperated HEW official questioned whether Long’s devotion to the idea of imposing strict work obligations on welfare recipients had less to do with the alleged erosion of the work ethic among poor mothers—and more to do with the availability of domestic labor for the Southern elite. Regardless of costs or family circumstances, he emphasized, “[Long] will reply, ‘That’s okay, you can’t put a value on those children seeing a mother get up at 5:30 to go to work.’ Doing what? Picking armadillos off the highway? … I think that … what Long and others are really concerned about [is] that if this bill goes through they won’t be able to get a maid down in Louisiana.”30
Southerners’ concerns about FAP’s impact on employment helped fuel the protracted legislative tug-of-war over work provisions described in the previous chapter. Southern Democrats joined Republicans in stripping the