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The End of Liberalism: Narrating Welfare's Decline, from the Moynihan Report (1965) to the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (1996)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2009

William Graebner
William Graebner
Affiliation:
State University of New York, College at Fredonia
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Extract

Between 1965 and the end of the century, welfare—that is, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)—expanded dramatically; came under attack from conservatives, libertarians, and liberals; and then, in the 1990s, was virtually eliminated as a federal program through legislation that had broad, bipartisan support. Throughout that process of growth and declension, social scientists played central roles in shaping perceptions of welfare, most significantly by examining the impact of welfare on the work ethic, on family structure, on gender relations, on poverty, and on inner-city, black communities. This is an enormously complex story, and I have engaged it by focusing on four influential texts, each by a prominent social scientist: Daniel P. Moynihan's The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965), otherwise known as the Moynihan Report; Charles Murray's Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (1982); Martin Anderson's Welfare: The Political Economy of Welfare Reform in the United States (1978); and David T. Ellwood's Poor Support: Poverty in the American Family (1988). Although this approach inevitably oversimplifies somewhat, it also makes possible a more intensive critical reading of these key historical documents.

Type
Critical Perspectives
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , April 2002 , pp. 170 - 190
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 2002

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References

Notes

1. U.S. Department of Labor, Office and Policy Planning and Research, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, March 1965 (N.p., n.d.), 1–3 (quotation on p. 3).

2. Moynihan Report, page preceding Table of Contents (“crumbling”), 6 (“disorganized”), 19 (“pathological”).

3. Moynihan Report, 16, 47 (“tangle of pathology”).

4. Blassingame, John W., The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (1972; rev. and enlarged ed., New York, 1979), 285–331.Google Scholar

5. Lasch, Christopher, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (New York, 1984), 112.Google Scholar

6. Ibid., 113.

7. Goffman, Erving, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Anchor Books ed., Garden City, N.Y., 1961).Google Scholar

8. Moynihan Report, 47.

9. Ibid., 16. On the dozens, see Gates, Henry Louis Jr., “2 Live Crew, Decoded,” New York Times, 19 06 1990.Google Scholar

10. Moynihan Report, 16, 19, 20, 25, 29.

11. Ibid., 39 (quotation), 34–38.

12. Adapted from Graebner, William, The Age of Doubt: American Thought and Culture in the 1940s (Boston, 1991), 92.Google Scholar

13. Scott, Daryl Michael, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996 (Chapel Hill, 1997), xii, 129, 135–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. The Warren Report: Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (N.p.: The Associated Press, n.d.), 160. Historian Richard Hofstadter used the term “political pathology” to describe nonrational styles of political discourse—and, hence, to establish those discourses as outside the consensus—in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965). Two decades later, Moynihan, then a Senator from New York, applied Hofstader's framework to the right wing of the Republic Party. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics Revisited,” Public Interest 81 (1985): 107–27. See also Fenster, Mark, Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture (Minneapolis, 1999), 3–21.Google Scholar

15. Gabbard, Krin and Gabbard, Glen O., Psychiatry and the Cinema (Chicago, 1987)Google Scholar; Walker, Janet, Couching Resistance: Women, Film, and Psychoanalytic Psychiatry (Minneapolis, 1993)Google Scholar. See also Lunbeck, Elizabeth, The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America (Princeton, 1994).Google Scholar

16. The point is nicely made in the “Officer Krupke” number in West Side Story (film version, 1961). On how youth gangs were understood in the framework of psychopathology, see Schneider, Eric C., Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings: Youth Gangs in Postwar New York (Princeton, 1999), 12–18.Google Scholar

17. Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900; London, 1953).Google Scholar

18. Holland, Max, “After Thirty Years: Making Sense of the Assassination,” Reviews in American History 22 (1994): 191–209.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19. Moynihan Report, 5.

20. Gilbert, James, A Cycle of Outrage: America's Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York, 1986), 185–188.Google Scholar

21. The quotations are from Steinberg, Stephen, “The Liberal Retreat from Race,” New Politics 5 (Summer 1994), Internet version, at www.wilpaterson.edu/~newpol/issue17/steinb17.htm (pp. 5–6)Google Scholar. See also Scott, Contempt and Pity, 151.

22. Katz, Michael B., Improving Poor People: The Welfare State, the “Underclass,” and Urban Schools as History (Princeton, 1995), 70, 71.Google Scholar

23. Scott, Contempt and Pity, 182 (“racism”), 181 (“innate inferiority”), 188 (“welfare state”), 198 (“emerging consensus”).

24. Murray, Charles, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (New York, 1984), 162Google Scholar; Anderson, Martin, Welfare: The Political Economy of Welfare Reform in the United States (Stanford, 1978).Google Scholar

25. Murray, Losing Ground, 154–55. There is a hint of the pathology argument in Murray's discussion of the way in which the national government and the National Welfare Rights Organization, by removing the welfare stigma and denying the importance of personal responsibility, damaged black self-confidence (178–91).

26. Katz, Improving Poor People, 63–65.

27. Scott, Contempt and Pity, 162; Gutman, , The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (New York, 1976)Google Scholar; Blassingame, The Slave Community.

28. Murray, Losing Ground, 44 (“benign,” “system … blame”), 46.

29. The classic study, and perhaps the origin of the phrase, is Ryan, William, Blaming the Victim, rev. ed. (New York, 1976).Google Scholar

30. Murray, Losing Ground, 58–59.

31. Ibid., 129–30, and chap. 9, “The Family.”

32. Anderson, Welfare, 15, 19–25, 37. Rivlin's CBO would play an increasingly important role in providing information for welfare policymakers, especially those on the right. In the 1980s, Rivlin would be a member of the Working Seminar on Family and American Welfare Policy, chaired by Michael Novak, director of Social and Political Studies for the American Enterprise Institute. See Novak, et al. , The New Consensus on Family and Welfare: A Community of Self-Reliance (Washington, D.C., 1987).Google Scholar

33. Anderson, Welfare, 38, 39.

34. Ibid.

35. Anderson, Welfare, 43.

36. Moynihan Report, 43, 44.

37. Murray, Losing Ground, 148–53; Anderson, Welfare, 102–5, 119.

38. Anderson, Welfare, 90–91.

39. See Rand, Ayn, The Fountainhead (1943; New York, 1971), 686–689.Google Scholar

40. Murray, Charles, “The Local Angle: Giving Meaning to Freedom,” Reason Magazine, 2 02 1999, Internet version at www.reasonmag.com/murray25speech.html.Google Scholar

41. Anderson, Welfare, vii; Murray, Charles, What It Means to Be a Libertarian: A Personal Interpretation (New York, 1997), xiii.Google Scholar

42. Scott, Contempt and Pity, 153–54; Graebner, Age of Doubt, 106–7.

43. Anderson, Welfare, 98–100.

44. Ibid., 163.

45. Mink, Gwendolyn, Welfare's End (Ithaca: 1998), 35, 23, 40, 36, 42–43.Google Scholar

46. For evidence that the 1960s were the target of the politics of consensus, see Novak et al., The New Consensus on Family and Welfare, where the value of “self-control” is contrasted with an earlier era in which “self-control and impulse restraint were debunked as ‘square’” and “‘self-expression’ was portrayed as a ‘higher form of consciousness’” (14).

47. Ellwood, David T., “Welfare Reform as I Knew It: When Bad Things Happen to Good Policies,” The American Prospect 26 (May–June 1996): 22–29Google Scholar. The citation is to the Internet version, at http://www.epn.org/prospect/26/26ellw.html (1). Also, Barbara Vobejda and Judith Havemann, “2 HHS Officials Quit over Welfare Changes,” Washington Post, 12 September 1996, A01, Internet version at washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/welfare/quit.htm; and Mary Jo Bane biography, at http://www.excelgov.org/chap_hc_n2.htm.

48. Schram, Sanford F., Words of Welfare: The Poverty of Social Science and the Science of Poverty (Minneapolis, 1995), xGoogle Scholar: Ellwood, “Welfare Reform,” Internet version, p. 1.

49. Rouse, Kelley, “Living with Conscience: The Edleman Resignation,” The Shore Journal, 22 09 1996, Internet version at http://www.shorejournal.com/9609/kjr0922a.html, pp. 1–2Google Scholar. See also E. J. Dionne Jr., “Resigning on Principle …,” Washington Post, 17 September 1996, A15, Internet version at 206.132.25.71/wpsrv/politics/special/welfare/stories/op091796.htm

50. Morris, Michael and Williamson, John B., Poverty and Public Policy: An Analysis of Federal Intervention Efforts (Westport, Conn., 1986), 59Google Scholar; Schram, Words of Welfare, xi, 55–57; Ellwood, David T., Poor Support: Poverty in the American Family (New York, 1988), ix.Google Scholar

51. Schram, Words of Welfare, 10, 131, 219 n. 47, 13. For examples of the appropriation of liberal research to conservative ends, see Novak et al., The New Consensus on Family and Welfare, 9 (on Mary Jo Bane), and Lowell Gallaway and Richard Vedder, “The Impact of the Welfare State on the American Family,” prepared for the Joint Economic Committee, 1996, Internet version at http://www.house.gov/jec/welstate/vg-5/vg-5.htm, n. 18, citing Ellwood and Bane's 1982 research on AFDC and family structures.

52. Ellwood, Poor Support, ix–x.

53. Ibid., 6 (“precious values,” “help themselves,”), 16–17.

54. Ibid., 237 (“incentive to work”), 127 (“conflicts with work”), 104.

55. Ellwood, David T., Divide and Conquer: Responsible Security for America's Poor, Occasional Paper Number One, Ford Foundation Project on Social Welfare and the American Future (New York: Ford Foundation, 1987), 37 (“woman and child”), 3–4, 19Google Scholar; Ellwood, Poor Support, 87–88, 109–10, 14–15. On Ellwood's view of work, see also Ellwood, “Welfare Reform as I Knew It,” 2 (“From the moment someone walks through the door [of a welfare office], every signal ought to be that work is the ultimate goal and expectation”).

56. Handler, Joel F., The Poverty of Welfare Reform (New Haven, 1995), 5–6, 149–50.Google Scholar

57. Ellwood, Poor Support, 42 (“exaggerated”), 22 (“structure of families”), 73 (“macro-economic policy”).

58. Ibid., 22–23, 26.

59. Ellwood, Divide and Conquer, 11–12, 15; idem, Poor Support, 72–73.

60. Ellwood, Poor Support, 8 (list), 11 (“reasonable responsibility”), 73 (“trickledown”), 96–98. Martin Anderson traces the term “trickle down” to a single reference by Reagan appointee David Stockman, reported in the Washington Post. Otherwise, he argues, no one in the Reagan administration, including the president, ever used the term. See Martin Anderson, “Social Welfare Policy: The Objectives of the Reagan Administration” (Stanford, n.d.).

61. Ellwood, Poor Support, 77–78.

62. Ibid., 194, 189, 195.

63. Ibid., 212–14 (Dash, Kane), 196–97 (“bad values”), 199 (“ghetto residents”), 225–26 (“responsibility and initiative”). The Working Seminar on Family and American Welfare Policy, a conservative group that included Charles Murray and Lawrence Mead, was attracted to Auletta's work because it supported the idea of a black underclass suffering from behavioral problems. See Novak et al., The New Consensus on Family and Welfare, 11, 36, 219.