5
The Welfare Rights Movement
In appraisals of the postwar black movement, much is made of the fact that the main economic beneficiaries were members of the middle class (or those who were prepared by education to enter that class). But in fact the black poor also made economic gains, although not through the occupational system. One major expression of the postwar black movement was the rise in demands for relief, especially after 1960 and particularly in the large urban centers of the North. A great many of the southern black poor who were driven from agriculture in the 1940s and 1950s did not find jobs in the northern cities; extreme hardship rapidly became pervasive. But that hardship was subsequently eased by the outpouring of relief benefits which the turbulence of the sixties produced. The turbulence of the sixties also enabled many more poor whites to obtain benefits, so that the American lower class as a whole gained from black protest in this period.
The magnitude of the gain can be measured by the numbers of additional families aided and by the additional billions of dollars distributed through the relief system. In 1960 there were only 745,000 families on the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) rolls and they received payments amounting to less than $1 billion; in 1972 the rolls reached 3 million families and the payments reached $6 billion.
Accounts of the civil rights era are curiously myopic on this point; the matter is not even mentioned. Except for the rioting that swept from one city to another, one would have to conclude from these accounts that the urban black poor were inert. This oddity is all the greater given the tendency of many analysts to define the riots as a form of rebellion; by similar reasoning, the great rise in relief insurgency can be understood as a rebellion by the poor against circumstances that deprived them of both jobs and income. Moreover, the relief movement was in a sense the most authentic expression of the black movement in the postwar period. The many hundreds of thousands who participated were drawn from the very bottom of the black community. They were neither integrationist nor nationalistic; they were neither led nor organized. This movement welled up out of the bowels of the northern ghettos so densely packed with the victims of agricultural displacement and urban unemployment. It was, in short, a struggle by the black masses for the sheer right of survival.
As this broad-based relief movement burst forth in the early 1960s, some black people (and a few whites) banded together in an organization dedicated to attacking the relief system. Just as unemployed groups sprang up during the Great Depression and eventually formed the Workers’ Alliance of America, so in the middle 1960s welfare rights groups began to appear and then joined together in the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). In this chapter our purpose is to examine the extent to which NWRO contributed to the relief movement—to the huge rise in demands for relief and the explosion of the relief rolls that followed.
NWRO is of interest for another reason as well. It was formed at a time when the southern civil rights movement had all but ended and when many activists were turning northward, drawn by the increasing turbulence of the black urban masses. This turbulence, together with the concentrations of black voters in the north, encouraged the belief that political power could be developed through mass organization. The disruptive protests which had characterized the southern movement, in short, were quickly superseded by an emphasis on the need for “community organization” in the northern ghettos. NWRO was one expression of that change, for its leaders and organizers—while animated by the spirit of protest—were nevertheless more deeply committed to the goal of building mass-based permanent organizations among the urban poor. There were other such efforts in the same period, but none gained the national scope of NWRO.1 An analysis of the experience of NWRO thus affords some basis for appraising the viability of this political strategy.
Virtually nothing has been written about NWRO. During its brief life it received relatively little support from civil rights groups and it has since received little attention from historians or social scientists.2 The analysis in this chapter is therefore based almost entirely on our own observations, for we were intimately involved in the affairs of NWRO: we participated in discussions of strategy, in fund-raising efforts, and in demonstrations.3 We were strong advocates of a particular political strategy—one stressing disruptive protest rather than community organization—which was a continual source of dispute among NWRO’s leadership, as will become evident later in this chapter. To what extent our involvement and partisanship may have distorted the analysis which follows is for the reader to judge.
Aid to Families with Dependent Children was created under the Social Security Act of 1935.4 By 1940 all states had enacted the necessary enabling legislation and people were beginning to be admitted to the rolls. But the main thing to be understood about this widely hailed reform is that few of the poor benefited from it; welfare statutes and practices were designed to enforce work norms and to insure the availability of low-paid laborers by restricting aid. All able-bodied adults without children, as well as all two-parent families, were simply disqualified by federal law; state and county statutes and practices disqualified many more of the remaining poor. Cost was also a factor in keeping the rolls down. The federal government paid part of relief costs; states and localities paid the remainder. Local officials thus had a strong incentive to make relief difficult to obtain.
In the 1960s and early 1970s the relief rolls greatly expanded,5 especially in northern states and localities. The force underlying this expansion was the rise of a relief movement.
As we noted in chapter 4, economic distress worsened among large segments of the poor after World War II. Unemployment became pervasive in agriculture, especially in the South, and urban unemployment was also high. Unemployment declined briefly during the Korean War but then rose abruptly. Blacks were especially hard hit. Official nonwhite unemployment stood at 4.5 percent in the last year of the war, rose to 13 percent in the recession of 1958, and remained above 10 percent until the escalation of the war in Vietnam. In the northern urban ghettos, unemployment reached depression levels. “For example, 41 percent of the Negro men in one census tract in Detroit, wholly populated by Negroes, were jobless in 1960; in certain census tracts in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Baltimore—where 90 percent or more of the inhabitants were Negro—the rates ranged from 24 percent to 36 percent.”6
But hardship did not lead poor people to apply for public aid in large numbers. The ethic of self-reliance and the denigration of the pauper are powerful controlling forces. Moreover government did not respond to economic distress: of those few families who did apply for aid, roughly half were simply turned away. The result was a negligible rise in the relief rolls—from 635,000 families in 1950 to 745,000 in 1960, an increase of only 110,000 families (or 17 percent) during a decade in which millions of the displaced agricultural poor migrated to the cities. These people simply endured their hardships.
But that was shortly to change. One factor was the emergence of poverty as a national political issue. The recessions of the late 1950s figured prominently in the presidential campaign of 1960. Kennedy repeatedly called for “an economic drive against poverty” (Schlesinger, 1006), and when the ballots were counted, an embittered Nixon attributed his defeat in no small part to Eisenhower’s economic policies, which had failed to prevent recessions, particularly in the year of the presidential campaign itself.7 Within a few days after he assumed office, Kennedy forwarded legislation to the Congress proposing “to add a temporary thirteen-week supplement to unemployment benefits … to extend aid to the children of unemployed workers … to redevelop distressed areas … to increase Social Security payments and encourage earlier retirement … [and] … to raise the minimum wage and broaden its coverage …” (Sorensen, 397).
Although Kennedy’s concern with economic problems was mainly a response to his broad working-class constituency, it was to some degree a response to his black constituency. From the moment he took office, he needed to defend himself against civil rights critics who believed he was reneging on his pledges to send a civil rights bill to the Congress:
When civil rights leaders … reproached [Kennedy] in 1961 for not seeking legislation, he told them that an increased minimum wage, federal aid to education and other social and economic measures were also civil rights bills (Schlesinger, 976).8
At the start, then, the Kennedy Administration’s emphasis on poverty was a way to evade civil rights demands while maintaining black support.
But the civil rights struggle intensified, and as it did blacks became more indignant over their condition—not only as an oppressed racial minority in a white society but as poor people in an affluent one. The civil rights victories being won in the South would, after all, be of greatest immediate benefit to southern blacks and particularly to southern blacks who were already in, or were prepared to enter, the middle class. By the early 1960s dozens of rural counties in which blacks were finally winning the right to vote or to take any seat they wished on a bus no longer contained many blacks to do either. Agricultural unemployment together with punitive southern relief practices which kept displaced agricultural workers off the rolls had compelled the migration that inexorably diminished the ranks of the rural black poor. In the cities, unemployment, underemployment, low wages, and relief restrictions created new hardships. A civil rights revolution was occurring but poor urban blacks had little to show for it.
By 1962 and 1963 many civil rights activists had begun to shift their emphasis to economic problems. They organized boycotts, picket lines, and demonstrations to attack discrimination in access to jobs; rent strikes were organized to protest substandard housing conditions and rent gouging; urban renewal sites were overrun with protestors. Economic issues thus emerged as a major focus of discontent, and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963 gave national prominence to this discontent.
Even as the March on Washington was being planned, officials in the national government launched a new wave of rhetoric about economic injustice together with pronouncements regarding the importance of creating new programs to deal with poverty. The process of planning began in a cabinet meeting in June, just following the civil rights crisis in Birmingham and just before the March on Washington:
Kennedy devoted a large part of … [this meeting] … to a discussion of the problem of Negro unemployment, and he initiated a series of staff studies on that subject. Throughout the summer of 1963, professionals in the relevant executive agencies—the Council of Economic Advisors, the Bureau of the Budget, the Department of Labor and HEW … were at work producing what was shortly to become a flood of staff papers. In November President Kennedy advised … [his aides] … that he intended to make an attack on poverty a key legislative objective in 1964 … (Donovan, 23).
If Kennedy had launched a wave of rhetoric about poverty, Johnson swelled it to the proportions of a tidal wave following the assassination. In his State of the Union Address on January 8, 1964, he began by calling for an “unconditional war on poverty in America. [We] shall not rest until that war is won.” Later in January the president proposed to the Congress the Economic Opportunities Bill of 1964 (the antipoverty program),9 and throughout the spring of 1964 he campaigned vigorously for the antipoverty program among various interest groups: among labor leaders, business leaders, religious leaders, civil rights leaders. In speeches and press releases Johnson mobilized public opinion to support the program. The result was that “public awareness of poverty in the United States, virtually nonexistent a year earlier, [became] pervasive. But most important, Johnson had made the War on Poverty part of the national consensus” (Evans and Novak, 431). The Congress acted with extraordinary dispatch, and the president signed the bill in August, just before the presidential election.
What the antipoverty program actually did was to greatly expand an array of service programs initiated on a smaller scale during the Kennedy years. One of these Kennedy programs was the Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Offenses Control Act (1961) under which “community action programs” had been established in twenty cities. In addition the Manpower Development and Training Act had been legislated in 1962, followed by the Community Mental Health Centers Act (1963). Later in the decade the Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act became law (1966).
For a time these programs did not so much moderate unrest as provide the vehicles through which the black ghettos mobilized to demand government services.10 They activated a new leadership structure in the ghettos and they also activated masses of black poor. This occurred because some funds from these programs were permitted to flow directly into ghetto neighborhoods—a form of direct federal patronage to minority groups. And ghetto groups were encouraged by federal policymakers to use these funds to create organizations and to press their own interests, especially in the arena of municipal services and politics.
The role of the new service programs in stimulating applications for public assistance after 1965 was very large. As thousands of social workers and community aides who were hired by community action agencies across the country came into contact with the poor, they were compelled to begin to learn the welfare regulations and to learn how to fight to obtain aid for their new clients. To have done anything else would have been to make themselves irrelevant to those who were presumably their constituents. Quite simply, the poor needed money; the lack of money underlay most of the problems which families brought to antipoverty personnel in storefront centers and other community action agencies across the nation.
In short order antipoverty lawyers also became active in these efforts. Thus, when community action workers could not succeed in establishing a family’s eligibility for assistance, attorneys instituted test cases and won stunning victories in state courts and then in the federal courts, including the Supreme Court. Man-in-the-house rules, residence laws, employable mother rules, and a host of other statutes, policies, and regulations which kept people off the rolls were eventually struck down.11 The consequence of these court rulings was to make whole new categories of people eligible so that many who would previously have been turned away had to be granted assistance. Furthermore, as antipoverty staff began to discover that thousands of potentially eligible families populated the slums and ghettos, “welfare rights” handbooks were prepared and distributed by the tens of thousands, with the result that many more people were informed about the possibility of assistance. After 1965, in short, the poor were informed of their “right” to welfare, encouraged to apply for it, and helped to obtain it. A multifaceted campaign against welfare restrictiveness had formed with the federal government as its chief source of both resources and legitimacy.12
The mass rioting throughout the nation between 1964 and 1968 had a substantial impact on the new service programs. There were twenty-one major riots and civil disorders in 1966 and eighty-three major disturbances in 1967. July of 1967, for example, was a month of riots. In Milwaukee four persons died; in Detroit forty-three died. Disturbances occurred across the entire nation: in Cambridge, Maryland; in Lansing, Kalamazoo, Saginaw, and Grand Rapids, Michigan; in Philadelphia; Providence; Phoenix; Portland; Wichita; South Bend; Memphis, Tennessee; Wilmington, Delaware; San Francisco, San Bernardino, Long Beach, Fresno, and Marin City, California; Rochester, Mt. Vernon, Poughkeepsie, Peekskill, and Nyack, New York; in Hartford, Connecticut; in Englewood, Paterson, Elizabeth, New Brunswick, Jersey City, Palmyra, and Passaic, New Jersey. As the month of July ended a Civil Disturbance Task Force was established in the Pentagon, and the president established a “Riot Commission.” Just seven months later (February 1968), the commission called for “a massive and sustained commitment to action” to end poverty and racial discrimination. Only days before, in the State of the Union Message, the president had announced legislative proposals for programs to train and hire the hardcore unemployed and to rebuild the cities.
Given these momentous forces of mass protest and government conciliation, the service personnel in the programs of the Great Society had little choice but to turn more militant if they were to satisfy their constituents. Thus they no longer negotiated wih their counterparts in local agencies (the school systems, the urban renewal authorities, the welfare departments); they demanded responses favorable to their clients. They no longer held back on law suits that might be especially offensive to local political leaders and agency administrators; they sued and often won. And they no longer shied away from organizing the poor to protest the policies and practices of local agencies; they led them. This was one cause of the relief explosion of the 1960s.
With a rising curve of antipoverty rhetoric, of funding for new antipoverty services, and of ghetto rioting, applications for relief formed a similarly rising curve. Many of the poor had apparently come to believe that a society which denied them jobs and adequate wages did at least owe them a survival income. It was a period that began to resemble the Great Depression, for in both periods masses of people concluded that “the system” was responsible for their economic plight, not they themselves, and so they turned in growing numbers to the relief offices.
In 1960, 588,000 families applied for AFDC benefits. In 1963, the year that political leaders first placed poverty on the national agenda, 788,000 families applied—an increase of one-third. In 1966, the first year antipoverty programs were in full swing across the country, the number reached 903,000—up by more than half over 1960. In 1968, the year that rioting finally reached a crescendo, applications had doubled over 1960 to 1,088,000—and they exceeded one million in each year thereafter.13 A relief movement involving millions of participants had unmistakably emerged.
The rising curve of applications was matched by the curve of approvals. As more families applied, proportionately still more families were granted assistance. In 1960, 55 percent of applicants got relief. The figure reached 57 percent in 1963, 64 percent in 1966, and 70 percent in 1968. Approval levels in many northern cities were even higher; it is only slightly exaggerated to say that virtually any low-income family who walked into a welfare center toward the end of the 1960s received aid.
The liberalized practices of the relief system were also the result of a complex of forces. State and local welfare officials were influenced by the national rhetoric on poverty and injustice, and they were surely harassed by the staff of the new federal service programs into making more liberal decisions. Moreover, relief officials (and the political leaders to whom they reported) were frightened of rioting. Some of these riots, in fact, were directly related to welfare demonstrations or were provoked by welfare injustices. The riot in the summer of 1966 in Cleveland’s Hough area was precipitated by the demeaning treatment by the police of a welfare recipient who was trying to collect money to forestall the final indignity of a pauper’s funeral for another recipient who had just died (Stein, 3–4). In the spring of 1967 welfare rights groups in Boston staged a sit-in at the welfare department. When the police beat the demonstrators, they screamed from the windows to the streets below, triggering three days of rioting—the first in that especially violent summer.14 Generally speaking, public officials in the northern cities moved gingerly in those years: the police were schooled to avoid provocative incidents, urban renewal authorities were not so quick to bulldoze slum and ghetto neighborhoods, and welfare officials handed out relief more freely.
The mood of applicants in welfare waiting rooms had changed. They were no longer as humble, as self-effacing, as pleading; they were more indignant, angrier, more demanding. As a consequence, welfare officials—especially the intake workers who are the gatekeepers of the system—employed their discretion more permissively. Traditional procedures for investigating eligibility broke down: home visits were no longer made with any frequency, requirements that forms be sent to various agencies to determine whether the family might have collateral income or eligibility for other forms of assistance (veteran’s pensions, etc.) tended to be neglected. For all practical purposes, welfare operating procedures collapsed; regulations were simply ignored in order to process the hundreds of thousands of families who jammed the welfare waiting rooms.
Welfare agencies also became less harsh in dealing with those who obtained assistance. Termination rates began to drop, especially terminations for “failure to comply with departmental regulations”—a catch-all category that included anything from refusal to help locate a “responsible” father to failing to appear for an interview.
As a result of these changes the relief rolls rose precipitously. In 1960, 745,000 families received assistance; in 1968, the number reached 1.5 million. Then, between 1968 and 1972, the rolls surged to 3 million families—an increase of 300 percent over 1960. Money payments, less than $1 billion in 1960, reached $6 billion in 1972. Unacknowledged and unled, a relief movement had emerged, and it was achieving income gains for the participants.
In 1965 we had completed research showing that for every family on the AFDC rolls, at least one other was eligible but unaided. A huge pool of families with incomes below prevailing welfare grant schedules had built up in the cities as a result of migration and unemployment. If hundreds of thousands of families could be induced to demand relief, we thought that two gains might result. First, if large numbers of people succeeded in getting on the rolls, much of the worst of America’s poverty would be eliminated. Second, for reasons we will explain, we thought it likely that a huge increase in the relief rolls would set off fiscal and political crises in the cities, the reverberations of which might lead national political leaders to federalize the relief system and establish a national minimum income standard. It was a strategy designed to obtain immediate economic aid for the poor, coupled with the possibility of obtaining a longer-term national income standard.
These ideas were spelled out in a mimeographed paper entitled “A Strategy to End Poverty,”15 which we circulated among organizers and activists in late 1965. With turmoil spreading in the cities, with the prohibition against going on relief already being defied on a large scale by the poor, and with the resources of the antipoverty program available to be drawn upon, we argued that activists of all kinds should join in a massive drive to mobilize the unaided poor to disrupt the relief system all the more by demanding relief.
One person who was responsive to the idea of organizing in the welfare arena was George A. Wiley, whom we knew from CORE. He was at the time on the verge of resigning as CORE’s associate national director, mainly in opposition to the rising surge of black nationalist sentiment that was engulfing that organization in early 1966. George had been mulling over the possibility of undertaking a broad, multi-issue organizing effort among the northern urban poor, but had not settled on a definite plan. Our proposal, together with the fact that a few “welfare rights” groups had already formed (mainly under the auspices of local antipoverty programs, and mainly in New York City), suggested a way to begin.16
At that particular moment, civil rights activists, and especially northern activists, were shifting away from caste problems to economic problems. This, together with the rising insurgency among urban blacks signified by rioting, suggested that a powerful movement directed toward economic gains could be developed. The responsiveness of national political leaders in this period also suggested that victories could be won, that change was possible. But it was not clear how activists could, as a practical day-to-day matter of organizing, mount an attack on poverty by attacking its main cause—underemployment and unemployment. What our plan proposed instead was a way of attacking the lack of income resulting from unemployment; it was appealing to some organizers for that reason.
For George, the first question was whether welfare was a promising area in which to mount an initial organizing effort, as contrasted with housing or education or health. To consider that question he convened a series of small meetings with us and a few friends from the civil rights movement. These meetings took place during the spring of 1966 in New York City. Much of the discussion was about the workings of the welfare system itself and about the estimates we had made of the many hundreds of thousands of families with incomes below scheduled welfare eligibility levels in various northern cities. We had also gathered data showing that few of the families already on the rolls were receiving all of the benefits to which they were entitled.
At first, there was some skepticism about our assertions regarding the existence of a huge pool of eligible but unaided families. When George tried to obtain confirmation of these assertions by consulting prominent social welfare professionals, some of them advised him that our data were not valid and that we were engaged in a campaign of propaganda against the welfare system. (Some even said the data were faked.) Nor were there supporting data from other studies. Dominant cultural definitions of the deleterious consequences of relief-giving were so strong that it was simply not a question that researchers had asked. To resolve his uncertainties, George asked a close associate, Edwin Day, to replicate our studies. Day’s subsequent conclusion was that we had erred in being much too conservative in our estimates of the size of the pool of eligible but unaided families. A consensus was thus reached that campaigns to drive up the rolls and to create a welfare crisis were worth trying. George made this clear in a public debate in the late spring of 1966:
Well, I’d have to say that the appearance of the strategy by Cloward and Piven has represented a shot in the arm to a lot of the civil-rights activists around the country. A lot of us who have come out of the civil-rights movement have been concerned that there develop a significant movement in the northern ghettos, and a lot of people who have been trying to work in the ghettos in major urban areas have been really quite frustrated about finding significant handles for bringing about some substantial change in the living conditions of people there.
This idea of releasing the potential for major economic pressure through trying to encourage people to gain their rights in the welfare system is one that has had immediate response and has been enormously attractive to activists working in urban areas. I may say that a lot of us have been hampered in our thinking about the potential here by our own middle-class backgrounds—and I think most activists basically come out of middle-class backgrounds—and were oriented toward people having to work, and that we have to get as many people as possible off the welfare rolls. And I think the idea that for millions—particularly people who can’t work, people who are senior citizens or female heads of household—just encouraging them to assert their rights is a very attractive thing. I think that this strategy is going to catch on and be very important in the time ahead. In the history of the civil-rights movement the thing that attracted me is the fact that the substantial changes that have taken place such as the Civil Rights Act of ’64 and Voting Rights Act of ’65 particularly have come about as the result of major drives in one or more cities where substantial confrontations have taken place which have plunged the nation into significant crises. And I think that a crisis strategy has been the only one that has really produced major success in the civil-rights field (from “Strategy of Crisis: A Dialogue,” reprinted in Cloward and Piven, 1974).
Despite this initial enthusiasm, there were some differences over strategy that emerged during these discussions, and they all led back directly or indirectly to the general question of how the poor could exert political influence. In “A Strategy to End Poverty,” we had argued a perspective that ran counter to the conventional wisdom regarding the nature of the American political system; and our views about organizing also ran counter to traditional organizing doctrines. Three specific areas of disagreement emerged.
First, we argued against the traditional organizing notion that poor people can become an effective political force by coming together in mass-based organizations. We did not think the political system would be responsive to such organizations, even if large numbers of the poor could be involved on a continuing basis. We had been studying earlier efforts—the Workers’ Alliance of America, the southern civil rights movement, the northern rent strikes in the early 1960s. Organizational pressure did not seem to yield much but disruptive protests sometimes did.
We thought the welfare system was particularly vulnerable to disruption by the poor because of the large concentrations of potentially eligible families in the northern industrial states produced by migration and urban unemployment. These states and their localities were also the most exposed to ghetto discontent. At the same time, because of the method by which welfare was financed (states with high grant levels—mainly northern states—received proportionately less federal reimbursement than states with low grant levels), these same states were the most susceptible to fiscal distress if demands for welfare mounted. Finally, the northern industrial states were crucial to the fortunes of the national Democratic Party and so disturbances in these states could have large political ramifications at the federal level:
A series of welfare drives in large cities would, we believe, impel action on a new federal program to distribute income.… Widespread campaigns to register the eligible poor for welfare aid … would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments. These disruptions would generate severe political strains, and deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition: the remaining white middle class, the white working-class ethnic groups and the growing minority poor. To avoid a further weakening of that historic coalition, a national Democratic administration would be constrained to advance a federal solution to poverty that would override local revenue dilemmas. By the internal disruption of local bureaucratic practices, by the furor over public welfare policies, and by the collapse of current financing arrangements, powerful forces can be generated for major economic reforms at the national level.
In order to maximize the disruptive potential of such drives, we thought that whatever organizing resources could be obtained should be concentrated on developing enrollment campaigns in a small number of big cities in states of critical national electoral importance (e.g., New York, Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, California, Pennsylvania, etc.), thus improving the chances of creating a political crisis of sufficient importance to warrant intervention by national political leaders.
As for the poor themselves, there was every reason to believe that they would join in such a mobilization, for the statistics on rising welfare application rates demonstrated that they already were, separately but in concert, fulfilling the outlines of a disruptive strategy. All that remained, we argued, was for organizers to enlarge and sustain the disruptive behavior in which masses of the poor were unmistakably beginning to engage.
But organizers in the 1960s took a different view. They had inspected the American political landscape and observed that other groups were well represented by organizations that asserted their special interests. Homeowners formed associations to resist government actions which might lower property values, workers joined unions to advance labor legislation, and industrialists joined associations that pressed for favorable treatment of corporations by a host of government agencies. While homeowner associations were hardly as powerful as the American Petroleum Institute, that seemed less important at the time than the fact that other groups were organized and the poor were not. Accordingly it was argued that if the poor organized they too could advance their interests.
Of course, everyone recognized that organizations of the poor lacked the substantial resources possessed by other organizations which could be brought to bear on the political process—the control of wealth, of key economic activities, of the media, and the like. Still, the organizers said, this lack of resources could be compensated for by the sheer numbers which the poor represented. If large numbers could be organized, political influence would result. It was this perspective which tended to prevail in these early discussions.
A second and related area of disagreement had to do with the problem of controlling government responses to a welfare crisis. There were two points of difference. One concerned the possibility that government might respond with repressive measures. Everyone foresaw that rising welfare costs would arouse large sectors of the public to demand that mayors, county officials, and governors slash the rolls and cut grant levels. For our part, we did not think most public officials would accede to such demands while the ghettos remained in turmoil. Markedly repressive welfare measures would entail the risk that rioting might worsen. Blacks had also become a modest electoral force in the northern cities; deep slashes in either the rolls or grant levels could be expected to engender considerable antagonism among those voters.
But mainly we argued that even if the welfare rolls were cut, poor people as a group would not be worse off than they had been before the rolls expanded, when large numbers of families had been denied relief in any case. If many now succeeded in getting on the rolls only to be cut off again, they would at least have made a temporary gain.
For their part, organizers in these early discussions agreed that impulses toward repression would probably be tempered and that a temporary gain was better than no gain at all. But they also felt they had an obligation to protect the poor against any possibility of repression. The way to do this, as they saw it, was to create an organized body of welfare recipients who could bring pressure directly to bear on public officials, thus counteracting the pressures of groups who would call for restrictive welfare policies.
Organizers also thought that a large-scale poor people’s organization would be required to win a national minimum income from the Congress. This brings us to the second point in our disagreement over the question of how government would respond. We maintained that the way to bring pressure on government was through the disruption of the welfare system itself and through the electoral crisis that would probably follow. We thought that the role of crisis as a political resource for the poor had not been understood, either by political analysts or by organizers. What we meant by a political crisis was electoral dissensus—the extreme polarization of major electoral constituencies. When acute conflicts of this kind occur, political leaders try to promulgate policies that will moderate the polarization, in order to maintain voting majorities.
Since we all agreed that extreme repression was not a likely response, what then would mayors and governors do in order to manage the political divisions created by welfare disruptions? We thought they would try to deal with their problem by calling upon the federal government with increasing insistence to take over the welfare program, thus solving their fiscal and political problems. In other words, we said, a disruption in welfare could be expected to activate lobbying by other and far more powerful groups for a goal which the poor could not possibly hope to achieve were they simply to lobby themselves. (This is not very different from what did in fact happen; by the late 1960s political leaders in the major northern states became articulate spokesmen for federal action in the welfare area.17)
With what new policies would national Democratic leaders respond? There was no certain way of knowing, but there was some basis for speculation. Already faced with deepening cleavages among large blocs in the urban strongholds of the party—cleavages that would be rapidly worsened by a welfare crisis—Democratic leaders might be prompted to press for a national minimum income program to relieve urban conflicts (and to slow the migration that was fueling those conflicts):
Deep tensions have developed among groups comprising the political coalitions of the large cities—the historic stronghold of the Democratic Party. As a consequence, urban politicians no longer turn in the vote to national Democratic candidates with unfailing regularity. The marked defections revealed in the elections of the 1950’s and which continued until the Johnson landslide of 1964 are a matter of great concern to the national party. Precisely because of this concern, a strategy to exacerbate still further the strains in the urban coalition [by driving up the welfare rolls] can be expected to evoke a response from national leaders. If this strategy for crisis would intensify group cleavages, a federal income solution would not further exacerbate them.
But this perspective was deeply troubling to organizers. We were saying that the poor can create crises but cannot control the response to them. They can only hope that the balance of political forces provoked in response to a disruption will favor concessions rather than repression. To organizers, this amounted to asking the poor to “create a crisis and pray.” It seemed speculative and very risky. Consequently they felt that the strategy had to be modified to assure greater control by the poor over the outcome of a welfare crisis. The way to develop that control was by building a national mass-based organization. Then, as political leaders weighed alternative ways of dealing with the crisis, they would have to contend with a powerful pressure group that had its own remedies to put forward.
We could only agree that our proposal entailed risks. But we also thought there were no gains for the poor without risks. In this connection, the one case we invoked in support of a disruptive strategy—the civil rights movement—actually served to weaken our argument. Some of the people in these early discussions had been involved in the southern phase of the civil rights movement and were disenchanted with mass-mobilization and mass-confrontation tactics. They believed that these tactics—mass defiance of caste rules, followed by arrests and police violence—were wrong because they had failed to build black organizations in local southern communities. When an SCLC campaign ended, for example, and SCLC moved on to another city to mobilize further confrontations, the local people were left unorganized and vulnerable to retaliation by whites. The influence this criticism of the civil rights movement had upon the thinking of those who subsequently became welfare rights organizers has been noted by Whitaker:
Wishing to avoid what they perceived as the most debilitating mistakes of the civil rights movement—failure to create a strong, organized constituency and failure to develop internal sources of funds—the [NWRO] promoters concentrated their first three years’ efforts upon the creation of a national organizational structure and the recruitment of membership (120–121).
It could not be denied that from a conventional political perspective SCLC’s strategy was manipulative. SCLC did not build local organizations to obtain local victories; it clearly attempted to create a series of disruptions to which the federal government would have to respond. And that strategy succeeded. We did not think that local organizations of the southern black poor (even if they could have been developed on a mass scale) would have ever gained the political influence necessary to secure a Civil Rights Act of 1964 or a Voting Rights Act of 1965, and they probably would not have won significant local victories, either. It had taken a major political crisis—the literal fragmenting of the regional foundation of the national Democratic Party—to finally force those legislative concessions to southern blacks. Similarly, we argued that while building a network of welfare rights groups might result in some victories in contests with local welfare administrators, these local groups could not possibly build the political pressure from which a national income standard for all of the poor might result. Any hope for such a large outcome depended on mobilizing a major political crisis; it depended on producing a divisive welfare explosion that would threaten to fragment the Democratic coalition in the big northern cities. Our views, however, were not persuasive.
Finally, we maintained that political influence by the poor is mobilized, not organized. A disruptive strategy does not require that people affiliate with an organization and participate regularly. Rather, it requires that masses of people be mobilized to engage in disruptive action. To mobilize for a welfare disruption, families would be encouraged to demand relief. Just by engaging in that defiant act, they could contribute to a fiscal and political crisis. On the other hand, if they were asked to contribute to an organization on a continuing basis, we did not think most would, for organizers had no continuing incentives to offer.
To mobilize a crisis, we thought it would be necessary to develop a national network of cadre organizations rather than a national federation of welfare recipient groups. This organization of organizers—composed of students, churchmen, civil rights activists, anti-poverty workers, and militant AFDC recipients—would in turn seek to energize a broad, loosely coordinated movement of variegated groups to arouse hundreds of thousands of poor people to demand aid. Rather than build organizational membership rolls, the purpose would be to build the welfare rolls. The main tactics should include large-scale “welfare rights” information campaigns; the enlisting of influential people in the slums and ghettos, especially clergymen, to exhort potential welfare recipients to seek the aid that was rightfully theirs; and the mobilization of marches and demonstrations to build indignation and militancy among the poor.
Our emphasis on mass mobilization with cadre organizations as the vehicle struck organizers as exceedingly manipulative. Their perspective on organizing was imbued with values which they considered democratic. The poor had a right to run their own organizations, and to determine their own policies and strategies. Given this perspective, organizers defined two roles appropriate for themselves as outsiders in a poor people’s organization. First, they should act as staff, subordinating themselves to policymaking bodies composed exclusively of the poor. As staff, they would contribute their technical skills to the work of the organization. They would, for example, provide information on the technical aspects of various issues with which the organization was dealing—in this case, the extremely complex rules and regulations of the welfare system. They would also run training programs in methods for dealing with the welfare bureaucracy—how to negotiate with welfare officials, or how to organize demonstrations. Second, they would cultivate those with leadership potential, tutoring them in techniques of leadership in the expectation that the role of the organizer would wither away. This is the model that NWRO and most of the local WROs subsequently came to espouse. (The subordination of organizers went so far that at national conventions they were barred from attending meetings where the elected recipient leaders from the various states convened to establish overall policy for the organization.)
Our approach, then, conflicted at several points with the perspective of organizers. They were more sanguine than we about the capacity of the poor to exert influence through the regular channels of the political system, for they felt that the poor could be influential if they were brought together in a mass-based national organization. Furthermore they felt that a mobilizing strategy, as distinct from an organizing strategy, would give the poor insufficient control over resolution of the crisis that a welfare movement might succeed in creating. Finally, they were antagonistic to the idea of building “organizations of organizers” on the ground that it was a manipulative approach to the poor.
But they were left with a problem of substantial importance. How could the poor be induced to affiliate and to participate on a continuing basis in a welfare rights organization? What incentives could be offered? Despite all of the differences in perspective which we have noted, the paper we had been circulating held enormous interest for the participants in these early discussions and subsequently for organizers throughout the country who became involved in the welfare rights movement, because it appeared to provide an answer to that question. The answer was in one of the two types of data we had presented on benefit deprivation. Our main interest was in the estimates we had reached that only half of the eligible poor were on the rolls. But we had also shown that most of those already on the rolls did not receive all of the benefits to which they were entitled under existing regulations. Regarding this second point, we said:
Public assistance recipients in New York [and in many other states] are also entitled to receive “nonrecurring” grants for clothing, household equipment and furniture—including washing machines, refrigerators, beds and bedding, tables and chairs. It hardly needs to be noted that most impoverished families have grossly inadequate clothing and household furnishings … [but] almost nothing is spent on special grants in New York. In October 1965, a typical month, the Department of Welfare spent only $2.50 per recipient for heavy clothing and $1.30 for household furnishings.… Considering the real needs of families, the successful demand for full entitlements could multiply these expenditures tenfold or more—and that would involve the disbursement of many millions of dollars indeed.
Here, organizers thought, were the concrete incentives that might be employed to induce poor people to form groups and to affiliate in a national organization. If welfare departments, under the pressure of militant tactics by groups of recipients, could be forced to yield these “special grants” to large numbers of people, then the problem of how to attract the poor to a national organization appeared to have been solved.
This conclusion, it must be said, received clear support from events which were already occurring. As stated previously, a modest number of welfare groups had begun to form in the mid-1960s, mainly under the sponsorship of antipoverty programs. These groups consisted of existing recipients. What seemed to be making group formation possible was the availability of special grants, for protests at welfare departments were succeeding in producing cash grants for the protesters. Moreover, the amounts of money received sometimes ran as high as $1,000 per family; some families had been on the rolls for a number of years without ever having received special grants so that it took relatively large sums to bring them “up to standard.” The success of these special grant protests was decisive in settling the question of the strategy which the movement would follow. It was a strategy that could produce groups and groups would be the foundation of a national organization.
George Wiley also had the immediate and practical problem of dealing with the few welfare recipient groups that had already developed. If he were to lead a movement, he felt that he had to negotiate the right to lead existing groups. That pragmatic problem also helped to determine the course which welfare agitation would follow, for these groups were made up of existing recipients who were focused on special grants.
As it thus turned out, the strategy which NWRO, once formed, would pursue was dictated by the belief of organizers in the political efficacy of organizations of the poor. These beliefs were buttressed by evidence that a few recipient groups were already forming for the purpose of obtaining special grants, and by the promise that additional groups could be similarly organized. And if these groups were brought together in a “national union of welfare recipients,” George and others felt that the resulting poor people’s organization would be able to wield sufficient influence to compel a national income concession from Congress.
The decision was thus made to undertake the formation of a national organization, with benefit campaigns for existing recipients as the inducement to organization building. It was a fateful decision. Benefit campaigns for existing recipients became NWRO’s exclusive strategy. As events would soon show, however, a strategy of organizing existing recipients into a national network based on inducements such as special grants could not be sustained. For a few years, campaigns to obtain special grants spread like brush fires across the country; hundreds of groups did form and many hundreds of millions of dollars in benefits were obtained from local welfare departments. But just as suddenly the groups diminished—first in size, then in number—until none were left. Why this happened is clear enough. For one thing, once people received a special grant, many saw no further purpose in affiliating with the organization; moreover a number of state legislatures eventually abolished special grant programs, thus undermining the organizing strategy by shutting off the flow of incentives. In other words, the central dilemma of mass-based, permanent organizing theory—how to sustain continuing participation in the absence of continuing inducements to participation—had not been solved. It was not a new dilemma.
But this would all become clear only later. At the time our differences did not seem so large. While George and others were oriented toward developing a national union of welfare recipients, George did not reject the “crisis strategy”: mobilizing drives to double and treble the rolls could be mounted, he argued, once an organizational base of existing recipients had been created.
We agreed that drives among existing recipients to insure that they received all of the benefits to which they were entitled were worth undertaking. In fact, even as these discussions were taking place, we were already involved in organizing such drives in New York City. While other organizers envisaged these benefit campaigns as a way of inducing people to form groups, we were focusing on the hundreds of millions of dollars that could be extracted from the welfare system, thus contributing to a welfare crisis. But whatever the motive, all of us could agree on that particular tactic as a starting point. Most important of all, our discussions were animated by a belief that agitation among the poor around welfare issues had great potential for success, so that differences in strategy seemed less important than the imperative of action itself. In a word, the omens were good; everyone was eager to begin.
And so we took the first steps toward creating a national organization. As George was so fond of saying, “First you make a plan, and then you make it happen.”
The plan, briefly, consisted of three steps: to raise money for several staff members and an office in Washington, D.C.; to announce that a “National Welfare Rights Organization” was being formed; and to initiate the process of building the local, state, and national structure of that organization.
All things considered, these steps were taken with remarkable ease and rapidity. On May 23, 1966, George and a staff of four opened an office in Washington, D.C., called the Poverty/Rights Action Center. Some fifteen months later, in August 1967, a founding convention was held, and NWRO was officially formed, with George as its chief executive. In point of fact, however, NWRO existed almost from the day George announced its formation, in June 1966; the months between then and the founding convention in August 1967 were filled with a variety of activities oriented toward constructing and financing an intricate national structure.
Of the problems entailed in the formation of NWRO, the most difficult was developing support and resources. To raise money for staff and a national office required that the idea of a “welfare rights organization” gain some degree of legitimacy among potential funding sources and among prominent people who could influence funding sources.
At first, George attempted to interest the Citizens’ Crusade Against Poverty (CCAP) in becoming the sponsor. Initiated by Walter Reuther of the United Automobile Workers, CCAP brought together northern leaders—mainly unionists and officials in northern religious denominations—to counteract conservative groups who were seeking to limit the range and forcefulness of federal programs to ameliorate poverty. When George resigned as associate national director of CORE in February 1966, he took a job with CCAP. His first assignment was to build a coalition in support of minimum wage legislation in Congress. During the next few months, as he established contact with a variety of groups across the country, it became evident to him that groups were emerging in the northern ghettos and focusing on such issues as health care, education, the control of antipoverty programs, and, of course, the public welfare system. Since it appeared to him that these grassroots groups were dispersed, uncoordinated, and without an effective means of communicating with one another, he proposed that the CCAP sponsor and fund the formation of a national agency devoted to performing these functions, with a special emphasis on welfare rights organizing. When this proposal was turned down, George made the decision to establish an independent office to perform the same functions, with welfare rights as its initial focus.18
By late May there was about $15,000 in hand. We had obtained $5,000 from a small family foundation; George had received $5,000 from a wealthy contributor to the civil rights movement whom he had known from his CORE days, and he used his own savings of $5,000. With those funds, George and Edwin Day moved with their families to Washington and opened the P/RAC, making this announcement to the press:
Many activists have left major organizations and are scattered in a myriad of local programs across the country. The tenuous lines of communications which once connected them have been disrupted. We see ourselves as trying to service and help them develop a movement of the poor (Bailis, 15).
At the outset, George still intended P/RAC to act as the national coordinating agency for a wide range of poor people’s organizations seeking to influence federal departments and Congress. The stated objectives were these:
1. To develop nationwide support for major anti-poverty and civil rights measures (e.g., to press for “maximum feasible participation” of the poor in the anti-poverty program, and to generate support for a guaranteed annual income).
2. To develop nationwide support for significant local anti-poverty and civil rights movements.
3. To provide surveillance and pressures on federal agencies handling programs designed to help the poor (e.g., to monitor activities and policies of the OEO, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Labor, HUD, HEW, etc.).
4. To provide advice and assistance to local groups coming to Washington to lobby for support of their programs before federal agencies (Jackson and Johnson, 57).
However broadly its objectives may have been defined, P/RAC soon focused on welfare rights, partly because of our series of discussions, but much more importantly because welfare client groups were springing up by the summer of 1966 and thus George was prompted to move to weld them into a national body.
The first major opportunity to advance the formation of a national welfare rights organization was provided by groups in Ohio who had joined together in the Ohio Committee for Adequate Welfare. In February 1966 organizers from Ohio decided they would stage a 155-mile “Walk for Adequate Welfare” from Cleveland to the steps of the state capitol in Columbus, hoping thereby to generate support for higher welfare payment levels in Ohio. George and a few others worked feverishly in the weeks before the march to spread word of it among welfare groups around the country and to stimulate these groups to hold supporting demonstrations. A meeting was called in Chicago on May 21 of organizers known to be working with welfare recipients, most of them from Detroit, Ann Arbor, Columbus, Cleveland, Syracuse, and especially New York City (where a city-wide organization of WROs had already formed). The results were encouraging and George announced to the press that demonstrations would occur across the country on June 30, the final day of the walk.
On June 20 Reverend Paul Younger and Edith Doering, paid by the Cleveland Council of Churches to organize around welfare issues, led about forty welfare recipients and sympathizers out of Cleveland on the first lap of the 155-mile march to Columbus, there to present complaints about public welfare to Governor Rhodes. As the marchers passed through cities and towns on the route, local recipients, ministers, social workers, and other sympathetic citizens, sometimes hundreds of them, fell in line for a short distance. On the morning of June 30, when they finally reached Columbus, the forty marchers were joined by busloads of recipients from all over Ohio, and some 2,000 protesters led by George paraded down Broad Street to the capitol to argue the case against Ohio’s welfare system.
Simultaneous demonstrations occurred elsewhere. In New York 2,000 picketers, most of them recipients, marched in the hot sun while their children played in City Hall Park. And in fifteen other cities, including Baltimore, Washington, Los Angeles, Boston, Louisville, Chicago, Trenton, and San Francisco, some 2,500 people in groups of 25 to 250 demonstrated against “the welfare.”
The demonstrations received encouraging coverage in the press, including a statement issued by George announcing “the birth of a movement.” Shortly afterwards George called for a national meeting of organizers and recipient leaders to lay the basis for a national organization of welfare rights groups. The meeting convened in Chicago on August 6 and 7; some one hundred people attended, both recipients and organizers. The recipients were from groups that had already formed, ranging from the Mothers for Adequate Welfare in Boston to the Mothers of Watts; from Chicago’s Welfare Union of the West Side Organization composed of unemployed black men, to the Committee to Save the Unemployed Fathers of eastern Kentucky. The organizers were members of Students for a Democratic Society, church people, and, most prominently, VISTA and other antipoverty program workers. The conferees voted to establish a National Coordinating Committee of Welfare Rights Groups composed of one welfare recipient from each of the eleven states where welfare organizing had already led to the establishment of groups. This body was mandated to determine policy for the organization, to make recommendations for the further development of a national structure, and to promote and coordinate a series of nationwide welfare campaigns in the fall of 1966. These campaigns were intended to
… feature demands for the right [of welfare groups] to represent recipients before welfare administrations and at hearings; the right to organize and bargain collectively on behalf of recipients, and … demand benefits now being illegally denied recipients. The drive will include tactics such as pickets, sit-ins, school boycotts, and the pressing of demands for hearings and court actions. Violations of the law practiced by welfare administrations in denying benefits to recipients, invading the privacy of recipients, and failing to grant fair hearings will be exposed in the campaign (Jackson and Johnson, 59).
From the perspective of national organization building, this meeting was a huge success. George’s leadership was acknowledged; his proposal for a national coordinating body composed of recipient leaders was widely and enthusiastically accepted by the representatives of disparate groups of recipients and organizers; and local organizations agreed to join in nationally sponsored campaigns. A national poor people’s organization was clearly in the making.
This meeting, like others to follow in the first three years, was characterized by spirit, militancy, anger, and hope, which bordered on pandemonium. The chairpersons of the various sessions could not hold to the agendas or maintain parliamentary order. People just rose up from their seats—organizers and recipients alike—and lined up at the microphones, as many as twenty or thirty at a time. One after another they condemned “the welfare” for its abuses: for grant levels so low that nothing was left after the rent was paid, for capricious and punitive rejections and terminations, for invasions of homes, for insults to dignity. The early meetings were like rallies, full of indignation and full of joy that the occasion had finally come for the people to rise up against the source of their indignation.
New groups formed rapidly, mainly in the densely packed ghettos of the midwestern and northeastern cities. The civil rights struggle in the North provided a context that encouraged group formation, as this personal account reveals:19
When I first came on welfare, I was ashamed, because society has taught us to be ashamed … you are taught it from childhood. We were taught that welfare was begging, charity … so I hid it. I heard about the Milwaukee Welfare Rights Organization through a cousin of mine. She kept trying to get me to go to these meetings with her and I said, “No, I’d never go to anything like that.… ” In the meantime, Milwaukee was having civil rights marches … and my kids were growing up … so they told me that they were going on the marches for civil rights. Well, I was afraid of those kinds of things … but when the kids decided that they were going … I had to go with them.… I noticed that when we went on the marches, we were the ones being fired upon with rocks and bricks and sticks, but it was as if we were doing the provoking when they put it on the news. So I started reading the black papers. I started reading things in a different light.… Then I joined this [welfare rights] organization … (Milwaukee Welfare Rights Organization, 25–26).
NWRO stimulated this development all the more by producing and distributing thousands of brochures entitled “Build Organization!” The workers in antipoverty programs were especially responsive to the call to organize. Perhaps three-quarters of all welfare rights organizers were antipoverty workers, many of them VISTAs.
As client insurgency spread, further steps were taken to consolidate a national structure. In December 1966 the National Coordinating Committee met in Chicago and designated P/RAC as the headquarters of the National Welfare Rights Organization, thus further buttressing George’s claim to leadership of the mushrooming welfare rights phenomenon. In addition a conference was called for the following February in Washington, D.C. More than 350 recipients and organizers were attracted to this meeting, representing some 200 WROs in seventy cities and twenty-six states. A national legislative program was developed to be presented to HEW and to Congress. Workshops on a variety of subjects were held: “How to Form a Group”; “Staging a Demonstration”; “Raising Money”; “Techniques of Lobbying”; and the like. Plans were laid for a nationwide series of “special needs” campaigns (i.e., campaigns to obtain grants of money for clothing and household furnishings) to be conducted throughout the country during the spring, and to culminate in simultaneous local demonstrations once again on June 30.
Special grant campaigns followed throughout the spring and millions of dollars were obtained by recipients. As planned, simultaneous demonstrations once again occurred on June 30 and it fairly could be said that a national organization had come into being. Tim Sampson, who subsequently became NWRO’s associate director, assumed the major role in promoting these nationwide organizing campaigns.
Meanwhile the National Coordinating Committee had reconvened in April to adopt the membership and delegate rules that would lay the basis for a formal national structure. (Any group, it was decided, of at least twenty-five recipients that forwarded annual dues of $1 per person to the national office was entitled to elect a delegate to future national conventions.)20 The official founding convention took place in August 1967 in Washington, D.C. It is a measure of the extent to which local groups already conformed to the membership, dues-paying, and delegate-designating rules laid down by the National Coordinating Committee that 178 delegates and alternates representing approximately seventy-five WROs in forty-five cities and twenty-one states attended to adopt a constitution, elect national officers, and endorse a set of goals, all to form the National Welfare Rights Organization—the first national relief organization since the Great Depression. Many other welfare rights groups existed and some of them sent representatives to the conference as well. But they had yet to conform with national rules (electing officers, paying dues, etc.) and thus were barred from official participation. In time most would conform and affiliate.
Briefly, the overall structure consisted of a National Convention which was to convene every two years; it was to establish broad policy and elect nine officers who would compose an Executive Committee. During the off years, a National Conference would be held to formulate policy. Between meetings of these bodies, the National Coordinating Committee, which consisted of one delegate and one alternate from each state affiliated with NWRO, together with the members of the Executive Committee, would meet to establish policy. Generally speaking, the Executive Committee was to meet about eight times annually and the National Coordinating Committee about four times. NWRO rules required that all groups in each state convene to create a roughly parallel state structure and to vote for a state delegate and alternate to the National Coordinating Committee. In large cities such as New York similar coordinating and delegate bodies were also created. In a very short time, in other words, NWRO had developed a nationwide, statewide, and sometimes citywide system of structures.
As the membership data in the accompanying table reveal, however, this intricate national structure was created before a national mass base had emerged. In 1967, when the details of the structure were being completed, NWRO had 5,000 dues-paying families. In 1969 when the membership base reached its peak, about 22,000 persons paid dues:
The states with the largest membership were, in descending order, New York, California, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Virginia, Massachusetts, Ohio, New Jersey, and Illinois. When broken down by cities, New York City had by far the largest membership; there were more members in Brooklyn than in any other city in the country. Boston groups had the second largest total membership, while Detroit, Los Angeles, and Chicago completed the list of the five top cities (Bailis, 11).
But, distribution of members aside, the point is that NWRO’s dues-paying membership never exceeded the level of 22,000 reached in 1969; thereafter the membership rolls declined rapidly.
NWRO’s inability to enlarge its base, or to sustain the modest base it had succeeded in developing, was first and most dramatically revealed in New York. In 1967, 51 percent of NWRO’s membership was located in New York; when the national membership doubled in the next year, the proportion of the total membership contributed by New York dropped to 17 percent, which meant that the absolute number of members dropped as well. By the spring of 1969 the New York organization had collapsed. That was an ominous sign, to say the least. What it revealed is that NWRO’s organizing strategy could not overcome problems of organizational maintenance. Moreover precisely the same problems of maintenance beset the Massachusetts organization shortly after the New York organization declined; by 1970 the Massachusetts organization had also collapsed. Since New York City and Boston were by far the most important urban strongholds of the movement and since their organizing strategy was being emulated throughout the country, we turn to the question of why these organizations did not survive (and why dozens of other WROs which adopted a similar strategy also eventually failed).
Our analysis of NWRO’s demise has been undertaken in four parts. In the present section, the problem of maintaining a mass membership is considered. Then we examine, in turn, the problems created by the elaborate internal leadership structure on which the organization came to rely; the problems resulting from external leadership incentives; and, finally, the problems flowing from the ebbing of mass unrest in American society toward the late 1960s. Together these problems eventually destroyed the organization. In the interim before that happened, however, the organization was slowly transformed: political beliefs became more conventional, militancy diminished, and the membership base dwindled.
Welfare rights organizing throughout the country relied primarily on solving the grievances of existing recipients as an organizing technique. This approach usually worked to build groups, for grievances were legion. Families were often capriciously denied access to benefits, or failed to receive checks, or received less than they were entitled to, or were arbitrarily terminated, or were abused and demeaned by welfare workers. The promise that such grievances could be solved brought recipients together.
Grievances were dealt with in a variety of ways. In the beginning organizers often performed the grievance work, thereby demonstrating that the complexities of welfare regulations could be mastered and that welfare personnel could be made to give in.22 Gradually some welfare recipients were schooled in the regulations and in techniques of representing other recipients. Some groups placed tables in welfare waiting rooms or on the streets outside with signs announcing the offer of assistance to people who were experiencing difficulty in the centers. Some of the more structured groups established “grievance committees” to which families with problems were referred.
The most effective tactic was to stage group actions on grievances. A group of recipients descended on the welfare center to hold a demonstration, demanding that all grievances be settled before the group left, with the threat that a sit-in would follow if the demand were not met. These actions generally succeeded, for with the ghettos of the cities seething, welfare officials feared confrontations. Organizers and recipients understood this vulnerability and capitalized on it. If welfare officials tried to cope with demonstrators by saying that some of the grievances would be dealt with immediately but that others would have to wait, the demonstrators often refused to leave. They sensed the importance of standing together and they were alert to the dangers of being dealt with one by one in back offices removed from the tumult of the waiting rooms. Organizers and leaders usually tried to reinforce this intuition by reaching agreements in advance that no one would leave until everyone’s problems had been solved; during the demonstration, group pressure reinforced that agreement. This principle heightened solidarity,23 helping to engender the feeling that the welfare of each depended upon the welfare of all. It encouraged people to act altruistically, to act at the expense of their immediate self-interest. And, of course, this emphasis on the group acting together heightened the feeling that group struggle was effective. These general observations are corroborated by studies in various locales, as in the following example from Massachusetts:
When Massachusetts WRO grievance workers came across cases in which the prospects of success were particularly dim, they invited the member to accompany them to the next demonstration at her welfare office. In the heat of welfare office confrontations, many members proved to be more willing to help their fellow members than one would have guessed.… In part, they may have realized that they too might be involved in a similar situation in the future and would like others to pitch in and help them. But for the most part, the decision to stay and fight for others after one’s own demands were met appeared to represent a feeling of “community” emerging in demonstrations. In the heat of the confrontation situation, a high proportion of recipients appeared to derive satisfaction from declaring their solidarity with others involved in heated struggle with “the common enemy” and from seeing caseworkers backing down regardless of whether they personally gained tangible benefits or not (Bailis, 64).
The objective of these activities for most organizers and recipient leaders, as well as for the national staff, was to expand membership affiliation. In effect this meant insisting that recipients join a group, pay dues, and accept a membership card before their grievances would be attended to. The reasoning was that by conditioning assistance on affiliation, stable group membership would result. For the most part organizers and local leaders followed this dictum:
People who come in to the city-wide offices and want help are first asked to join DMWRO (Detroit Metropolitan Welfare Rights Organization). They join up on a group basis according to where they live. They are required to pay two dollars on the spot and their name is forwarded to the local group which is located in their area. One dollar goes to the local group for NWRO dues and the other dollar goes to DMWRO. They are also told when the next meeting is scheduled and where it is to be held. Then we see what we can do about their welfare problem if they have one (Martin, 158).
However, WROs did not become permanent. Nor is there any evidence that groups which strictly followed the procedure of conditioning help on affiliation, as against those which did not, lasted any longer; most lasted a year or two at best, whatever the organizing techniques. There are a number of reasons why this turned out to be the case.
First, most families who benefitted from a grievance action then dropped out of the group simply because they no longer needed assistance. To be sure, recipients returned from time to time as new grievances arose, but most did not participate in any continuous way in the life of the organization. “The basic problem with grievance work was that a settled grievance, like other fulfilled needs, left no further incentive to contribute to the group” (Bailis, 65). Moreover, as the welfare rights organizations created a body of recipients who were experienced in dealing with the welfare system, many of these individuals found that they no longer required the aid of the group in solving their individual problems or those of their friends and neighbors. They simply acted on their own, a circumstance that continually depleted the ranks of organized groups.
Second, grievance work required an enormous investment of time and staff or recipient effort:
A recipient called the office (in Chicago) and said her caseworker had cut her welfare off. I called the caseworker and told her what she did was illegal and asked if she had heard of the December 1969 law that recipients could not be cut off without notification. This was the Golliday decision. The caseworker said she would talk to her supervisor. I went by the recipient’s house and we went to the welfare office to file an appeal and talk to the caseworker. The caseworker was sorry but she couldn’t do anything. She said she cut the aid because the woman’s rent receipts had different signatures. The next day I got a VISTA lawyer to tell the caseworker about the new law. The caseworker still didn’t do anything and the lawyer told her he would go to court. Then the caseworker asked him to talk to the district office supervisor. The lawyer did and the supervisor released the woman’s check (Martin, 156).
Such work was also extremely tedious. There were satisfactions, to be sure, especially those deriving from the sense that one has rendered a service to another human being, and there were recipients who gained deep gratification from the effort. But on the whole the recipients who enjoyed this work were not numerous, and as the months and years dragged by it became increasingly difficult to sustain grievance activities except by continually training new cadres to replace those who wearied and dropped out.
Grievance activities were perhaps less tedious when the entire group was involved. But this method literally absorbed the whole of the group’s energies and resources. However useful this strategy may have been in maintaining solidarity and in securing favorable responses from the welfare system, it nevertheless severely limited the scale of grievance work and thus the success of organizing itself. Consequently groups showed little expansion of membership once a level of fifty to one hundred had been reached.
It might also be noted that grievance work was a natural avenue to positions of leadership, for serving others provided a way of building a constituency. But once the grievance worker had succeeded in being elected to office, she usually came to be preoccupied with the responsibilities and satisfactions of that office. And since the leadership of these groups tended to be stable, new grievance workers could not similarly entertain the hope of winning office through service to others. This circumstance made the drudgery of grievance work all the less attractive.
Finally, one consequence of the grievance strategy was the gradual evolution of formal arrangements with welfare departments for the solving of these problems. Just how this came about will be taken up in a subsequent section. It is sufficient to say here that once such arrangements developed, groups needed to rely less and less upon collective action in order to secure responses from the welfare system. The consequence was to subdue militancy, to create recipient leaders who had a large investment in the maintenance of their privileged relationship to the welfare system, and to diminish efforts to organize new members.
In summary, individual grievance strategies produced a rapid proliferation of WROs across the country in the period between 1966 and 1970. But these groups rarely exceeded one hundred members. Moreover the membership of these core groups showed high turnover. Thus individual grievance work failed to build a mass membership.
If individual grievance work did not appear to have the potential for building a mass membership, action on collective grievances did appear to, at least for a while. These actions were based on the regulations of some welfare departments which provided special grants, in addition to regular food and rent grants, for clothing and household furnishings as needed. Few people knew about these provisions, even fewer applied for them, and still fewer received them. Since these were forms of assistance for which large numbers of recipients were ostensibly eligible, they presented the possibility that collective actions could be mounted to solve hundreds and perhaps thousands of grievances at one time, thus bringing large numbers of families into local WROs with a minimum of organizing investment.
Experiments with this form of collective grievance action were first conducted in 1965 by a few organizers affiliated with Mobilization for Youth on New York’s Lower East Side.24 They were extremely successful: when confronted with fifty or one hundred recipients demanding special grants, the district welfare offices in New York City conceded and checks were issued. By the spring of 1967 the tactic had spread to most of the antipoverty agencies in the city and to some settlement houses and churches as well. Literally thousands of people joined in special grant demonstrations. As these actions multiplied, a central office was created to stimulate the growth of more demonstrations throughout the city and the New York City-wide Coordinating Committee of Welfare Groups was formed.25
For organizers the main purpose of these campaigns was to build a permanent organization of welfare recipients. Thus the campaigns were intended to “enable local groups to establish their organizational validity among their constituents, and to establish their role as the representative of individual clients at the local welfare center …” (Birnbaum and Gilman, 1). This way of thinking partly reflected a concern with controlling the outcome of a welfare crisis. As one organizer put it, “Without ‘client power,’ when the system is bankrupt, we are still dependent on those in power to establish a new system” (quoted in Sardell, 47).
The special grant campaigns and the formation of the City-wide organization generated enormous excitement among activists and AFDC recipients. Weekly meetings called by City-wide were attended by larger and larger numbers of recipients, antipoverty organizers, and antipoverty attorneys. At these sessions the spirit of a movement began to develop; training sessions in the details of conducting special grant campaigns were conducted, and plans for demonstrations—either simultaneously in dozens of district offices or jointly at the central welfare offices—were agreed upon. In addition tens of thousands of kits of special grant campaign literature were distributed—the main piece being a mimeographed checklist of the items of clothing and household furnishings people were supposed to have (according to welfare regulations). These checklists were distributed by local organizers, people filled them out and returned them, and they were then bundled up and presented to district welfare office directors in the course of countless demonstrations.
As new individuals or groups heard about the campaigns and made inquiries of City-wide, they were generally advised to proceed in the same way:
City-wide strategists developed a formula for local groups to use in their organizing efforts. Groups’ members were to leaflet outside welfare centers and to talk to clients about welfare entitlements. Recipients would be encouraged to join local groups and to attend meetings where “welfare rights” and special grants would be discussed. Special grant forms would be filled out and the group would return to the welfare center with the forms and hold demonstrations for immediate action on the grants (Sardell, 55).
Recipients were also encouraged in this period to file a “fair hearing” request form with their special grant form. This put the welfare department on notice that if the special grant request were denied, justification for that decision would have to be made at a hearing held before a state official. In 1964 there had been fourteen fair hearings throughout the entire state; sixteen in 1965 and twenty in 1966. However, under the impact of City-wide’s fair hearing strategy in 1967, 4, 233 fair hearing forms were filed:
In 1967 there was a virtual explosion in fair hearings requests. This explosion resulted primarily from the activities of the organized client movement. Almost all new requests were from New York City.… This increase in requests led to the appointment of four additional hearings officers and, in December 1967, the opening of the New York City Office of Fair Hearings. Clients were represented at the hearings by lawyers, volunteer law students, and some trained lay advocates.… Over 3,000 hearings were scheduled between September and January. However, 90 percent of these hearings never occurred. Oftentimes, local centers contacted clients before the dates scheduled for their fair hearings and granted their requests for special grants. In one-half of the cases in which hearings were actually held, clients received substantially all of their requests, while most of the remaining clients received at least partial grants (Jackson and Johnson, 114).
By the late fall of 1967 this organizing formula had produced a mass movement among welfare recipients in New York’s ghettos and barrios.
The militancy in this period was high. AFDC mothers (often with their children in tow) staged hundreds of sit-ins and confrontations at the district welfare offices in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx. These local demonstrations ranged from 25 to 500 persons. When demonstrations at the central welfare offices were called, from 500 to 2,000 appeared. Social workers, welfare workers, and other sympathizers sometimes joined in. Sit-ins, which often accompanied the demonstrations, sometimes lasted for several days. Scores of arrests occurred, although generally city officials were loath to arrest recipients in those turbulent times; instead, they issued checks. By the spring and summer of 1968, when the special grant campaigns reached their zenith, the welfare department had found it necessary to establish a “war room” in its central offices filled with telephones and staff members whose job it was to keep abreast of the constant demonstrations taking place in the city’s several dozen district offices.
George was so impressed with the organization-building potential of these campaigns that the national organization began to push this strategy across the country. In the spring of 1967 the national office prepared special kits of colorfully printed materials to be used by local groups (“DEFEND YOUR FAMILY!”; “MORE MONEY NOW!”), and worked vigorously to promote campaigns. Soon there were national campaigns in the late summer for school clothing, in the fall for winter clothing, in the spring for Easter clothing or school graduation clothing. Household furnishing campaigns also proliferated, spurred in part because so few recipients had adequate bedding and other items.
However, Massachusetts was the only state, other than New York, where genuinely large-scale campaigns resulted.26 Millions of dollars resulted from the campaigns in Massachusetts beginning in the summer of 1968. “Welfare Department figures indicated in the Boston area alone, $250,000 was disbursed in July, $600,000 in August, and $3,000,000 in September” (Fiske, 37, 96). When the Massachusetts commissioner of welfare was called before a legislative committee in mid-August to justify this enlarging outflow of welfare monies, he replied: “If anyone had been at Roxbury Crossing in June 1967, when a riot occurred, he would have noticed some of the same elements here at the welfare office on July 30, 1968” (quoted in Fiske, 34). Still, there was considerable difficulty getting checks issued. One welfare center issued checks and then voided them; another placed police blockades before its doors, allowing only ten recipients to enter at a time; other offices simply shut down in response to client turbulence. The militancy of the demonstrations also intensified:
Thus … when fifty recipients returned to Roxbury Crossing Center (in November) twelve telephones were ripped out, eight offices were “ransacked,” social workers were “verbally abused,” and one was shoved against the wall. The nonprofessional union members were instructed to walk-out under police escort; forty social workers left immediately for the State Welfare Headquarters to protest their harassment; and the police escorted the director out of the center at 12:30 p.m. Thus another office closed early for the day (Fiske, 56).
The demonstrations throughout Massachusetts were the most consistently militant of any in the country. One demonstration in Springfield led to a riot. Fiske again quotes an organizer:
When the director announced that people would be arrested if they didn’t leave the Center, the protesting recipients asked the students to go outside. Once outside, there were no bullhorns and no one directing the masses. When the paddy wagon arrived, the protestors outside thought the recipients inside were being arrested and, consequently, started rocking the paddy wagon. The police started shoving people inside and then drove through the crowds at a dangerous speed. The crowd became enraged and started throwing rocks and bottles at the wagon (89).
At that moment, the Springfield riot began, and Bill Pastreich, MWRO’s chief organizer, was arrested for the twelfth time, with bail set at $3,000.
As special grants campaigns mushroomed throughout the country, local and state governments began to respond by instituting “flat grant” systems. It was an inevitable development. By this simple device the rising costs of special grant disbursements were curbed and the welfare rights organizations were severely crippled. New York State was first to institute this “reform,” for a vast reservoir of potential claimants still existed to be tapped, posing what the New York Times editorially called a “threat to [New York City’s] treasury.” To keep the lid on welfare costs welfare officials in New York City began to redesign the special grant system, proposing to “reform” it by substituting an “automatic grant” of $100 per year payable in quarterly installments of $25 to each recipient.
In June the State Board of Social Welfare approved the plan, allowing it to go into effect on September 1. The reasons were candidly given when Hugh R. Jones, chairman of the State Board of Social Welfare, announced that the automatic grant reform would both “stabilize outgoing expenditures” and “very seriously handicap” the welfare recipients’ organization. Throughout the summer and fall discussions were held among City-wide WRO leaders and advisors to develop a strategy to counter these developments. Three options were considered at one time or another. One was to continue to mount militant demonstrations in the local centers to keep the welfare system in chaos and to threaten the possibility of wider chaos in the ghettos if the plan were implemented. This strategy was attempted, but half-heartedly. A second option—one which we proposed—was to mount a “spend-the-rent” campaign. By spending their rent welfare recipients could circumvent the income reduction represented by the automatic grant; what the city and state saved, the clients would more than recoup. In the heat of the moment this option was approved, but the recipient leadership did nothing to implement it. For a few weeks the threat of a rent strike campaign served certain rhetorical purposes.
Instead, the recipient leadership opted for a lobbying campaign in Albany, the state capital. In large part this decision evolved because of promises of support by various middle-class groups in the city: some church confederations, several upper-middle-class women’s civic groups, women’s peace groups, a confederation of settlement houses, and the like. Throughout the fall of 1968 City-wide mobilized for the lobbying campaign which culminated in a “bus caravan” to Albany where political leaders generally avoided meeting with recipient delegations. The lobbying campaign was put together at great expense of time and money and totally consumed the resources of the City-wide organization. The response by the legislature was to cut grant levels about 10 percent.
The last major protest demonstration occurred on April 15, 1969. About 5,000 persons, most of them welfare workers, antipoverty staff, students, and other sympathizers, assembled in Central Park for a rally and then marched down Fifth Avenue. On 42nd Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues, the demonstrators sat down, clogging traffic for several hours, and Hulbert James, New York’s chief welfare rights organizer, was pulled down from a lamp post from which he was addressing the crowd and charged with inciting to riot. That demonstration was the end of the resistance campaign in New York. By then local WROs were already weakened and the relief centers had been largely abandoned. The course of events was no different in Massachusetts:
The relationship between the institution of the flat grant and welfare rights organizing was treated fairly candidly in Massachusetts. The MWRO activities received considerable coverage in the newspapers and on radio and television.… Many people in Massachusetts apparently associated welfare rights demonstrations with rising welfare costs and assumed the former caused the latter, all of which served to make welfare an increasingly controversial public issue. A number of state legislators gained publicity by investigating alleged welfare fraud and by introducing bills to cut welfare costs. The governor made his ability to resist welfare demonstrators and his institution of the flat grant a major issue in his re-election campaign in 1970. Three of his radio advertisements mentioned welfare demonstrators and one of them was entirely devoted to an explanation of the flat grant (Bailis, 142).
As in New York, the Massachusetts welfare rights group joined together with sympathetic liberal groups in the Massachusetts Welfare Coalition. This coalition was composed mainly of religious and social welfare groups and lacked sufficient influence to block the flat grant decision. The welfare rights organization in Massachusetts soon fell into disarray. Other states also instituted flat grants in this period; it was a simple and successful way to simultaneously undermine organizing among the poor and curb welfare costs.
There was one major difference in the approach to building welfare rights groups in New York and Massachusetts, a difference about which much was made by organizers throughout the country in this period. In New York, little stress was placed on creating dues-paying groups (except in Brooklyn under the leadership of organizer Rhoda Linton); the opposite was the case in Massachusetts. George strongly favored the latter procedure. The issue first arose in 1967 after NWRO was officially formed and a program of nationwide special grant campaigns had been announced. George’s view was that welfare recipients should not be afforded access to special grant information, forms, and assistance unless they first joined a group and paid dues. A number of us in New York opposed this requirement, believing that the impact on the welfare system would be much greater if information about the availability of the special grants was disseminated as widely as possible through antipoverty agencies, settlement houses, churches, and civil rights groups. In New York, our view prevailed, and the subsequent campaigns were much looser affairs than occurred in most other places.
In Massachusetts, however, a different model of organizing developed. It became known widely in welfare rights circles as the “Boston Model,” and it was just as widely emulated throughout the country. Strict emphasis was placed on formal group affiliation as a prerequisite to receiving any form of assistance. Sometimes, for example, special grant applications were not distributed to recipients until they were actually on the welfare premises as part of a demonstration. It was assumed that stable, enduring groups evolved from this approach. However, the detailed inquiry by Bailis of events in Massachusetts reveals that stable groups did not in fact develop. Often they did not survive from one special grant campaign to another:
The Boston Model organizing drives almost invariably produced successful first meetings and first confrontations. But few of the local groups created in those drives were able to maintain their momentum—or their membership—for very long. Despite a spectacular birth and a vigorous youth consisting of well-attended meetings and militant demonstrations, the typical MWRO affiliate soon moved into a period of doldrums, marked by a lingering death. The life cycle was a relatively short one.… For most of its history, the MWRO was able to disguise its inability to maintain local group strength by concentrating its efforts upon repeated Boston Model organizing drives and thus constantly created new groups to replace those that were falling by the wayside. These new groups helped to maintain the MWRO membership rolls, to provide the bulk of the participants in statewide demonstrations, and to keep the welfare rights movement in the headlines (55).
Moreover, Bailis asserts that “most MWRO affiliates were moribund long before the institution of the flat grant” in Massachusetts (60).
The “Boston Model” required a much greater investment of organizing resources than was true of the “mobilizing model” followed in New York. MWRO successfully attracted a large number of students to perform organizing tasks; it also had a VISTA training contract, and the VISTAs were trained in welfare organizing. In New York, there were relatively fewer organizers. But no matter: WROs did not persist in either state, and that is the main point.
The collapse of welfare rights organizing in New York and Massachusetts was deeply troubling, both because some of the nation’s most liberal political leaders held office in those states, and because the organized recipient bases in both states were NWRO’s largest. If a strategy of building a mass membership by extracting special grants from the welfare system failed under these conditions, what then of the fate that awaited organizing efforts in places with more conservative political leaders and fewer recipients?27 The groups that remained were widely scattered throughout the United States; few contained as many as fifty members. In fact by 1970 these groups had also begun to falter. One reason was the development of an elaborate organizational structure, and the constraining influence of this structure on NWRO’s leadership.
The development of an organizational structure had immediate consequences for welfare rights groups. The ease and rapidity with which the organization came into being validated the belief in mass-based organization doctrine, in the potential for political influence through organization. Although most WROs had only a small duespaying membership—ranging from twenty-five to seventy-five members—there were upwards of 500 groups throughout the country toward the late 1960s, each of which was permitted to send at least one delegate and alternate to national conferences and conventions. Consequently, these national meetings were populated by hundreds of recipient delegates and alternates, and by equally large numbers of organizers, all of which conveyed the impression that the welfare rights struggle was being conducted by grassroots forces of massive proportions. (Welfare rights demonstrations throughout the country also received a fair amount of press coverage and this, too, helped buttress convictions regarding the viability of traditional organizing doctrine.) Thus it was generally thought that the welfare rights struggle was burgeoning, was vital, was making gains, despite the demise of mass benefit campaigns. But the truth is that the development of a complex organizational structure at the neighborhood, city, state, and national levels was an inhibiting force from the outset. In particular, it inhibited the expansion of membership.
The elaboration of organization meant the elaboration of leadership positions on the neighborhood, city, and state levels. Once groups had formed and affiliated with NWRO and leaders had been duly elected, these leadership positions became a source of intense preoccupation and competition. Considering the hard and dreary lives which most welfare recipients had previously led, the rewards of prestige and organizational influence which accrued to those who could win and hold office were enormous. An equally enormous investment in the politics of leadership naturally followed. These circumstances constrained the expansion of membership, for the leaders came to have an investment in membership stasis.
Recipient leaders at all levels of the organization had to be periodically reelected; new members represented a threat. Struggles for leadership succession might ensue; existing leaders might be toppled. Once a group had formed and developed an acknowledged leadership stratum, therefore, the leaders tended to focus on cultivating and strengthening their ties within the group. City and state representatives were similarly preoccupied; they concentrated on cultivating and strengthening their ties with local leaders in their city or state. Consequently leaders resisted new membership organizing ventures, as this example reveals:
The Massachusetts Welfare Rights staff pressed for a provision in the state-wide organization’s by-laws that voting strength for each local group at the annual conventions would be proportional to the number of dues-paying members it had in the hope that this would give all recipient leaders seeking higher office an incentive to build their membership. Unfortunately, once that higher office had been attained, and until just before the next convention, there was little reason for most recipient leaders to pay much attention to maintaining or expanding their groups. Some lay leaders opposed staff efforts to revitalize their groups partly because of their fear that the new membership faction might hold potential challengers to the incumbent’s chairmanship. At times, leaders of a dwindling group agreed to new organizing drives but stipulated that no new local elections be held. In such cases, stalemates occurred; the MWRO staff refused to help recruit new members under these conditions.
Opposition to staff plans for major new organizing drives in those sections of Boston’s black ghetto that had not yet been organized was opposed by the predominantly black MWRO leadership who, in part, feared the creation of new centers of power in the organization. In one case, such a drive took place only because the MWRO Executive Board members felt sure that those who would be elected leaders of the new group would respect their seniority. In another, the worst fears of the Executive Board were realized when the chairman of a newer black group in Roxbury challenged and defeated the incumbent MWRO statewide chairman at the 1970 MWRO convention (Bailis, 72–73).
Problems of leadership maintenance were also the chief cause of resistance among WROs to organizing recipients from other relief categories—such as the aged and working poor. In 1968 we had published an article entitled “Workers and Welfare” in which we estimated that hundreds of thousands of working poor families were eligible for relief supplements from “general assistance” programs in the welfare systems of the northern states. In some of these states, such as New York, a large family with a minimum wage income could obtain a wage supplement that would have doubled its income. We thus advocated campaigns to swell the general assistance rolls.28 In conversations with both George and other leaders, however, it became clear that there was no longer any interest in producing a welfare disruption. The earlier idea that a welfare recipients’ organization would also become the vehicle for mobilizing drives to recruit potential recipients to the relief rolls was all but forgotten. Instead exclusive priority was placed on building the existing organization, for by this time George and others were convinced that a mass-based national union of welfare recipients was in fact coming into being. He thus chose “to play down disruptive tactics, at least for the time being, and [to put] a first emphasis on building up a dues-paying organization … (Steiner, 290).29
But George was excited about the possibility of organizing among people in other relief categories, such as the working-poor and aged recipients. He was beginning to believe that NWRO’s membership base was too narrow, that an organization consisting exclusively of AFDC recipients would inevitably fail to attract substantial support from groups with influence and money and other resources. And it would inevitably be hampered in its efforts to exert political influence by the stigma associated with AFDC mothers. The broader base he envisioned would not only consist of other categories of relief recipients, but of the unemployed as well. He also wanted to expand from the focus on welfare issues to include agitation around other governmental programs that affected the poor (such as publicly assisted health programs). Moreover, George had developed a network of contacts and goodwill which led him to think that many groups (for example, existing organizations of the aged, of tenants, and of the unemployed) could be brought together in a single national structure under his general direction. It was a vision of mass-based, multi-constituency, multi-issue, permanent organization writ large. But that is not our point. The point is that he wanted NWRO’s recipient leadership and central office staff to endorse the concept of incorporating new groups.
Largely at his urging, therefore, the recipient delegates at NWRO’s convention in 1969 voted to extend formal membership eligibility to all people with incomes below NWRO’s adequate income standard, which was then $5,500 for a four person family; previously, only AFDC recipients had been eligible for membership. George was elated: “The big thing is … that membership is going to be based on income from now on. Any family that gets less than $5,500 a year can join. I think these people will join. We want to reach all poor people; we’ve got to grow …” (Martin, 129). This theme was reiterated in his opening address one year later at the convention in Pittsburgh:
Our political strength hasn’t really been felt yet. We’ve been organizing, building, and demonstrating for an adequate income for all Americans, whether they’re on welfare or not, and we’re serving notice that we expect to escalate that strategy. We’re going to have even more people in our movement, and we’re going to attack more of the real problems in this country, like the lack of adequate health care. We have got to get it together on health rights and medical care and with the people who don’t make an adequate income but don’t get welfare either, and with the aged, and with the disabled—all those people who don’t know their rights yet (Martin, 130).
While it is true that the national recipient leadership and much of the organizing staff acquiesced to the changes in constitution and rhetoric, it was also true that they had no incentive to act on them. It took little organizational acumen to anticipate that a diversified constituency would lead ineluctably to struggles for leadership. Persons from other relief categories, for example, differed by age or by sex from AFDC recipients, and they were oriented to different problems involving different relief programs. Had they been brought into the organization, they would surely have pressed for the nomination of leaders with characteristics similar to their own, and with interests similar to their own. Organizing drives among these categories would have enlarged and diversified the membership base, to be sure, but the very existence of an elaborate formal leadership structure precluded that possibility. Consequently, resistance to the implementation of proposals for new organizing drives was mounted at all levels of the organization, a circumstance which George took note of during an interview in 1970:
We are trying to branch out beyond ADC mothers but we’ve had little success so far.… The ADC mothers, naturally enough, are interested in ADC issues and they control the organization right now. They are not going to make a real effort to go out and organize the working poor. It’s not in their immediate self-interest, though it is in their long-run interest. All people, poor people included, do not willingly give up power that they have worked for and still have. Especially for poor people, when it is probably the only power they have and it isn’t much (Martin, 32).
One approach to this dilemma was to have staff organizers begin developing new groups without the cooperation of NWRO’s recipient leadership, and then to precipitate power confrontations. George spoke of this possibility in the same interview:
Issues develop around a constituency. Welfare issues developed around a welfare constituency. We’ll have to organize people like the aged and the working poor and bring them in so they will be making demands on the organization just like the ADC mothers are doing now. We really have to subsidize this ourselves. The staff will have to organize groups like the working poor without much help from the mothers, and then bring the organized groups into NWRO to challenge the mothers. Through a challenge like this, some kind of accommodation will be worked out (Martin, 132).
At the time, however, George took no such drastic action, and restricted his efforts to cultivating relationships with other organizations. Then in 1972 he attempted to capitalize on these relationships by calling for a “Children’s March for Survival.” This event was designed to bring together a broad coalition of child-oriented groups to lobby in Washington, as his appeal for support of the impending march revealed:
Children suffer from poverty, and because of poverty, from hunger. Children suffer from racism. Children suffer from war, from an exploited environment, from poor schools, and from poor health. We will gather to condemn policies and programs of the Nixon Administration and the Congress which perpetuate these conditions and in many ways worsen them.
We condemn:
— the veto of the Child Care Bill
— cuts and restrictions in child feeding programs
— delays in health, housing, and education programs
— and most of all—the proposal of the so-called
Family Assistance Plan instead of real welfare reform
We call today for a Children’s March for Survival to focus national attention on the problems of children and to begin an action plan to save our nation’s children.
The march occurred on March 25; about 40,000 people gathered at the Washington Monument. The composition of the march reflected the internal struggle taking place in NWRO. About 80 percent of the participants were children from the Washington, D.C., schools. They had been encouraged to attend by militant black Washington school board officials who had gained office on the crest of black unrest in the late 1960s. Another 10 percent were children bussed into Washington by workers from child-care centers in surrounding states. Another 10 percent were middle-class sympathizers from groups involved in children’s rights, hunger, and peace issues. It is doubtful that welfare recipients comprised one percent of the crowd. The recipient leadership, in other words, did not view this demonstration as their own; nor did many organizers, with the result that little support was received from those WROs that were still functioning at the local level.
In the end George backed away from the effort to expand the membership base by diversifying it, concluding that the fight could not be won without destroying NWRO itself in a factional struggle. Instead he resigned from NWRO in December 1972 and announced that he and Bert DeLeeuw (a longtime aide) were going to undertake the formation of a multi-constituency organization to be called the Movement for Economic Justice. His resignation was a direct outgrowth of this conflict with NWRO’s established leadership.30
As a matter of fact, the concept of membership itself had by the 1970s lost much of its meaning. In organizing doctrine, membership means something more than merely formal affiliation through the payment of dues. It also means active participation in the life of the organization—in demonstrations, for example. Mass participation is ostensibly the functional equivalent of the political resources (such as wealth) which interest groups elsewhere in the social structure possess. As organizers sometimes put it, poor people have numbers. Membership, in short, means regular participation by masses of people.
But NWRO’s history reveals that membership eventually came to mean little more than formal affiliation through the payment of dues, and in the end there was not much emphasis placed even on the maintenance of the dues system. What mattered was winning and holding office. An illustration will make the point. In the summer of 1970, a recipient leader in New York City, who was then an officer of the national organization, undertook a “school clothing campaign.” It was, from every perspective, a sad affair. The New York City-wide Coordinating Committee of Welfare Rights Groups had for some time been nothing more than a shell, consisting mainly of an executive committee composed of a few recipient leaders from the various boroughs who were still hanging on to their positions although most of the members of the groups which had originally yielded them these positions were gone. This group met irregularly, and its meetings consisted mainly of bickering over the distribution of such funds as the organization was still able to raise.
In the fall of 1970 word was passed through what little welfare rights infrastructure remained in New York City that it would be possible for poor people to obtain a grant of money for school clothing from funds available to the Board of Education under the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Some 14,000 people signed forms requesting a grant, having been required in advance to sign a NWRO dues card and to pay the annual fee of $1.00. Little effort was then made to integrate these thousands of people into the few welfare rights groups that remained, or to organize them into new groups. However 14,000 dues cards resulted from the campaign, and permitted this particular recipient leader to win still higher national office at the NWRO convention in the summer of 1971, since the fractional weight of ballots cast by NCC members in electing national officers was determined by the number of dues-paying members in their respective states. This was one example of the extent to which the goal of a mass membership had been subordinated to leadership strivings. In these different ways, then, the proliferation of organizational leadership positions constrained the expansion of organizational membership. Simply put, organization prevented organizing.
By the late 1960s, it was clear that NWRO was in grave difficulty. Mass-benefit campaigns were faltering; the leadership was also inhibiting the expansion of membership. Consequently the national staff was virtually paralyzed; it simply did not know what to do in order to resuscitate its constituency. The only plan available was to expand to new groups, such as the working poor and the aged, but we have already described the intense resistance by established leaders to this course of action. For all practical purposes, NWRO was becalmed.31
Nevertheless NWRO’s organizational apparatus expanded in the period between 1969 and 1972. The national budget rose, the national staff grew, and NWRO’s national reputation enlarged. That this could be so was a consequence of a swelling tide of support from outside sources. Within a year or two after NWRO formed in 1967, various groups—churchmen, public officials, social welfare organizations, unions, civil rights groups, foundations, media representatives—began either to initiate relationships with NWRO or to respond to overtures for relationships. In this way organizational resources were obtained—public legitimation, money, the appearance of influence.
But this enlarging flow of resources did not lead to enlarged organizing; it undermined organizing. As NWRO gradually became enmeshed in a web of relationships with governmental officials and private groups, it was transformed from a protest organization to a negotiating and lobbying organization. This transformation was total; it occurred at the national level and among local groups everywhere. In the end it produced a leadership deeply involved in negotiating and lobbying, but on behalf of a constituency that was organized in name only.
The success with which NWRO developed relationships with a variety of groups was due mainly to two forces. The more important was the larger black movement and the responsiveness being shown it. NWRO could easily capitalize on this. It was a national organization and large numbers of representatives from local groups attended national conventions, so that NWRO could present itself as the representative of the welfare poor. Moreover, the vast majority of NWRO’s membership was black; this, too, helped to identify NWRO as an expression of the larger black movement and enabled NWRO’s leadership to seek aid from supporters of the black movement.32
The growth of support for NWRO was also aided by the emergence toward the late 1960s of a “welfare crisis.” One form which governmental responsiveness toward the black movement in America had taken was to allow the welfare rolls to expand, and the expansion was rapid after 1965. In our terms this meant that defiance of the prohibition against the dole was escalating, partly as a result of the activities of the antipoverty program. Tens of thousands of welfare rights brochures were being distributed from storefront offices; thousands of VISTA and other antipoverty staff members were helping people to establish their eligibility; scores of legal services attorneys were initiating litigation against the welfare system. It also seems reasonable to believe that the many who were successful in getting on the rolls encouraged others to make the attempt. The very density of the welfare populations which had by this time built up in the cities suggested the likelihood of such a cumulative effect. A survey of slum families in ten central city neighborhoods in late 1966 revealed that almost half—47 percent—of the surveyed families reported income in the previous year from welfare or other non-job sources.33 In the words of a report prepared by the Urban Coalition in 1969, “The welfare system continues to be the major growth industry of the slums and ghettos.…”
In late 1967 Congress enacted a series of amendments to the Social Security Act intended to slow the rise in the rolls. The states were required to establish work training and referral programs for recipients defined as employable. Participation in these programs was made compulsory, a condition of receiving assistance. (However, local welfare administrators did not enforce these new measures; they feared the political repercussions in the ghettos of large-scale efforts to force mothers and children off the rolls.) To insure that the states would exert themselves to cut the rolls, Congress also enacted a “freeze” on AFDC reimbursements. Under the freeze each state was to receive future federal reimbursements only in an amount calculated by a formula fixed at the ratio of AFDC children to the total population of children in the state as of January 1967. In other words a state with a rising ratio of children in impoverished female-headed families would, whatever the causes, nevertheless in future years be obliged either to reject new applicants, to lower grant levels and spread the same money among a larger number of cases, or to raise more revenues to pay the entire cost of the increased caseloads. (However, after Congress enacted the freeze, state and local officials protested vigorously, with the result that the Johnson Administration postponed the effective date of the freeze, and the Nixon Administration did the same, until it was forgotten.)
A variety of more comprehensive proposals to deal with the welfare crisis were also put forward in this period. President Johnson, in his Economic Message of January 1967, promised to establish a Commission on Income Maintenance Programs (which he later did, and when the commission reported in the fall of 1969, it called for a national minimum income standard of $2,400 for a family of four). In March 1967, on the occasion of the one-hundredth anniversary of the New York State Board of Social Welfare, the cream of America’s corporate leadership was summoned to an Arden House conference by Governor Rockefeller to consider remedies for the welfare crisis. The participants debated various income reforms—such as children’s allowances, uniform national standards in AFDC payments, and a negative income tax—finding merit in them all.
Professionals in greater number and with greater vigor also began to advocate income maintenance reforms. As Congress debated a variety of restrictive measures and enacted some in 1967, OEO funded a negative income tax experiment among a sample of poor people in New Jersey, and not many months later, the Social and Rehabilitation Service of HEW allocated funds for similar experiments. In the spring of 1968 some 1,200 prominent economists signed a joint statement calling on Congress “to adopt this year a national system of income guarantees and supplements.” When the report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders appeared in March 1968 it too called for a “National System of Income Supplementation” which would provide a minimum income for all families on welfare as well as for the working poor.
Moreover, the issue of income maintenance found its way into the presidential campaign of 1968. The Democratic platform stated that: “To support family incomes of the working poor a number of new program proposals have recently been developed. A thorough evaluation of the relative advantages of such proposals deserves the highest priority attention by the next administration. This we pledge to do.” Eugene McCarthy, in the course of the Democratic primary contests, argued that the federal government had a responsibility to “determine a minimum income which it will assure for all Americans.” And only days before his election, Richard Nixon, noting the great disparities in welfare payment levels from one state to another, which ostensibly encouraged migration from South to North, advocated the adoption of “national standards.” The rising welfare rolls, in short, inexorably forced the question of welfare reform onto the national political agenda.
NWRO could capitalize on this development because many people—from members of the press to public officials—had reached the incorrect conclusion that “NWRO was largely responsible for raising the number of people on welfare in six years from less than [1 million families to over 3 million], and in quadrupling appropriations made to Aid to Dependent Children families. Friends and enemies alike credited NWRO with a major role in this explosion of welfare aid” (Meier and Rudwick, x). Consequently three kinds of resources became available to NWRO.
First, legitimacy came to be conferred upon the welfare rights struggle itself. The rise of a black movement (especially rioting) in the North had helped to focus attention on the economic plight of the black masses. Given the persistence of black unemployment and underemployment, some modestly influential groups began to reach the conclusion that government had a responsibility to provide income to the poor. One result of this shift in attitudes was increasing approval by these groups of the idea that people had a “right” to welfare. To the extent that NWRO was publicly defined as leading the fight to make this right a reality, it gradually came to enjoy the support of these groups—notably, small foundations which generally supported the civil rights struggle, the leadership of several national religious denominations, segments of the social welfare community, some civil rights leaders, political leaders identified with the “struggle against hunger,” and a small number of wealthy individuals.
To say that the welfare rights struggle enjoyed some legitimacy is not to say that it enjoyed much. Welfare rights never became ennobled by the honor of its cause. With a few exceptions, powerful and prestigious figures, whether black or white, did not flock to its demonstrations (as they had to those of the civil rights movement in the South), nor did they contribute money to finance organizing, nor lend their influence to further welfare rights demands. This was to remain a movement of paupers, of a pariah class. The civil rights movement was widely extolled as a force strengthening the American character and American values by furthering the highest democratic ideals; the welfare rights movement was widely denounced as a force weakening the American character by undermining the most cherished value of self-reliance. Such legitimacy as it enjoyed—and it was meager at best—was due less to recognition of the injustices perpetrated by economic arrangements and by the welfare system than to the widespread sympathy which “the black cause” in general had aroused in American society during the 1960s. Still, as the welfare crisis ballooned, NWRO did receive a measure of recognition and that was important in sustaining the organization for a brief time.34
A second form of support was financial. In this later period civil rights groups, religious institutions,35 social welfare organizations, and various foundations began to make money available to NWRO in larger amounts. For the first two years NWRO had struggled to find funds to sustain its operations; deficits ran into the tens of thousands of dollars; the payment of salaries in the national office often lagged behind by several months. By 1968, however, funds became available; the national operating budget rose to more than $250,000 annually in 1969. These monies made possible frequent regional and national meetings of recipient leaders and organizers, and the hiring of a large national staff.
Some money, it should be noted, came directly from government. The occasion for the largest grant arose from the enactment in 1967 of the amendments to the Social Security Act which required the states to establish vocational training and placement programs for AFDC mothers in the hope of reducing welfare costs. Suspecting that HEW would not implement this program as fervently as its sponsors wished, Congress assigned the task to the Department of Labor. That department, in turn, anticipated the possibility that considerable trouble might be provoked in the urban ghettos if the state employment agencies began forcing women off the relief rolls and into the labor market on a large scale. When NWRO proposed that it be commissioned and funded to hire a staff to monitor local employment programs, the better to ensure the willing participation in the program by AFDC mothers, the Labor Department quickly agreed. NWRO leaders publicly justified the arrangement as a way of ensuring that the rights of AFDC mothers would be respected, but privately they viewed it as a way of greatly expanding the national staff. A larger staff, they felt, even one tied to the federal agencies, would support and stimulate the growth of local affiliates. And so a grant of more than $400,000 was accepted from the outgoing Johnson Administration. Robert Michels would have found Gilbert Steiner’s defense of this arrangement rather naïve:
If the government can buy the support and the outreach efforts of the organized welfare leadership elite for half a million dollars, it will be a great bargain. If Wiley can sustain his organization with a great bloc of federal money, he can live to fight another fight.… There is no reason why Wiley should have rejected the federal gold. Claims of the Philadelphia WRO chapter that the contract involved selling out to the Establishment have more emotional than rational appeal.… The money means more to [Wiley] than to the Department of Labor, and the high-level recognition of NWRO’s importance facilitates organizing (294).
The third resource which various groups provided NWRO was political status—the appearance of possessing conventional political influence. As the welfare crisis mushroomed, organizations of various kinds became responsive to NWRO, with the result that NWRO’s leaders and organizers became confident that the opportunity for the welfare poor to win concessions by lobbying had finally presented itself. And there was certain evidence that this was so. The welfare crisis led to the proliferation of hearings, forums, conferences, and meetings devoted to the subject of relief giving. Some were convened by private groups, others by public and political figures, but all were devoted to debate over welfare reform. Each of these occasions appeared to be an opportunity for the welfare recipient’s point of view to be heard. Although NWRO frequently crashed meetings to which it had not been formally invited, the late 1960s brought an increasing volume of formal invitations for the leadership to appear. Public officials faced with the problem of holding back angry taxpayers nevertheless also tended to try to be responsive to NWRO, for they had the problem of restoring civil order in the cities. Consequently they too reached out to recipient groups to establish relationships and to initiate dialogue. As a matter of fact NWRO’s recipient leadership found itself being invited to international conferences:
Leaders are involved in conferences and meetings to the point where they have been known to find themselves with conflicting conference dates. Mrs. Tillmon, the national chairman, was unable to make NWRO’s 1968 National conference held in Lake Forest, Illinois, because she was a delegate representing poor people to the International Conference of Social Welfare in Helsinki, Finland, meeting at the same time. In a “memorandum to all affiliated groups,” which sounded bureaucratic enough to have come out of HEW itself, Mrs. Tillmon delegated authority and announced appointments to committees of the conference (Steiner, 289).
Attendance at these foreign meetings was even justified to the NWRO membership on the grounds that a “new international welfare rights organization” was being talked about:
I’ve been out of the country [to attend peace conferences] three times—in 1967 to Paris, in 1968 to Stockholm, in 1970 to Bogota. I just got back from Bogota.… These things I go to are important and they are for NWRO—for you, all of you, not me. In Bogota, they talked about setting up a new international welfare rights organization. This would mean NWRO would be in all kinds of different countries and would have a lot more power. This is the kind of thing I’m doing, working for you and trying to make your organization something (Martin, 109).
Superficially, these symbols of recognition suggested that NWRO had become something of a political force. Gilbert Steiner, for example, read the signs that way:
Objectively, it can be noted that the welfare clients’ organization has weathered its theoretical and practical problems to the point where its director is known, recognized, and consulted by the secretary of health, education, and welfare and resented at other high levels in that department; its chairman, an AFDC mother, sits with bureaucrats, scholars, and lobbyists in all-day conferences to plan welfare changes … (285).
But the truth was quite different. As NWRO’s integration with other groups progressed, the political beliefs of those in the leadership stratum became more conventional, the militancy of the tactics they advocated weakened, and the professed goal of membership expansion receded. We will first describe these effects at the national level, and then at the local level, for the way in which external incentives shaped the orientation and direction of the national and local organizations varied somewhat.
NWRO was rapidly transformed as relationships with political figures and various private groups developed. Its efforts to influence administrators, legislators, political leaders, and private groups soon overwhelmed investments in all other areas. For all practical purposes NWRO became a lobbying organization.
The emphasis on lobbying progressed in stages. NWRO first entered state and national legislative arenas; it then began to build a “welfare coalition” consisting of a variety of national organizations that shared its perspectives on welfare reform; finally, it entered the arena of Democratic Party politics. The process began in 1967 with the welfare amendments then before the Congress as the major target. A modest demonstration was called in Washington in September and NWRO’s top leadership testified before Congress and staged a sit-in in the chambers of a congressional committee (the first in history, it is said). This was the much-publicized occasion on which Senator Long (Democrat, Louisiana), chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, denounced AFDC mothers as “brood mares.”
From this beginning NWRO began to seek relationships with a variety of organizations in the hope of developing support for its legislative efforts. One of the early occasions for coalition was provided by SCLC’s “Poor People’s Campaign” in the spring and summer of 1968. NWRO launched the first demonstration—a Mother’s March on May 12 (Mother’s Day)—during which George and Coretta King led some 5,000 demonstrators through the still-charred ruins of that section of Washington where rioting and burning had broken out following the assassination of Martin Luther King. During the ensuing months, until SCLC’s poor people’s campaign finally became mired in the mud and in the complexities of the federal bureaucracies, NWRO coordinated many of its lobbying activities with those of SCLC.
Another highly visible occasion to broaden its external support presented itself in the fall of 1968 when the president convened a White House Conference on Hunger and Malnutrition. The NWRO leadership was so successful in presenting its case to the participants that a resolution was passed calling for a guaranteed annual minimum income of $5,500 for a family of four, much to the embarrassment of the president.
The antiwar movement was a logical locus for coalition-building. NWRO quickly became a prominent constituent of the antiwar movement, not because it could muster many demonstrators for national or local rallies, but because NWRO’s presence enabled antiwar groups to link the issues of imperialism and war abroad with the government’s failure to deal with poverty and injustices at home. Most major antiwar demonstrations featured one or more NWRO leaders on the speaker’s platform and some local WROs sent a few delegates.
Militancy, as might have been expected, declined as a result of this heavy investment in coalition-building and lobbying. By 1970 recipient leaders who had begun their careers storming relief centers could hardly keep pace with their speaking schedules in one local, state, or national forum after another. They had become celebrities and they behaved accordingly. Here is a striking but not atypical example:
The Massachusetts Conference on Social Welfare, a private social work-oriented organization, made it a practice to select the chairman of the MWRO to serve on the Board of Directors. When the governor of Massachusetts decided to institute a “flat grant” welfare system, he chose a meeting of the Massachusetts Conference on Social Welfare to make his announcement. The chairman of the MWRO chose to sit on stage near the podium from which the governor spoke rather than lead a group of her members to that podium to disrupt the speech (Bailis, 73).
The forces that shaped the orientation and direction of the national leadership were also at work at the local level. Local WROs also received resources that shaped their beliefs and tactics. Sympathetic individuals and organizations publicly identified themselves with the welfare rights struggle, yielding a measure of legitimacy. Anti-poverty agencies, churches, settlement houses and other organizations, including a few unions,36 provided meeting rooms, organizers, access to printing supplies and machines, and money.
However, the most important integrative relationships at the local level were those formed with the welfare system itself. These relationships were a powerful force in transforming WROs from protest to lobbying and service organizations. Welfare officials reached out to protesters in the hope of restoring calm, and protest leaders reached out to government officials in the hope of achieving reforms. Thus as groups of recipients caused repeated disruptions of welfare procedures by picketing, and by sit-ins and demonstrations, welfare officials began to search out organizers and recipient leaders to initiate “dialogue” and, as often as not, organizers or recipient leaders demanded dialogue. The result, everywhere in the country, was the development of procedures for the negotiation of grievances. Many welfare departments established advisory councils composed of recipients; sometimes recipients were appointed to policymaking boards.
If some local WROs were wary of these arrangements (at least at first) and therefore chose to maintain a certain distance from government, then welfare officials sometimes formed independent recipient organizations to which they tried to attract the leadership of the WROs. The most elaborate development of this kind occurred in New York City. The department of welfare established a division of “Community Relations” staffed by “community coordinators” or “community organizers” (who were usually young black or Latin graduates of schools of social work). These staff members then went into the slums, ghettos, and barrios to organize “client advisory committees” which met monthly to discuss grievances and advise welfare officials on policy changes. The welfare department organizers also assiduously cultivated the leaders of existing WROs throughout the city, hoping to get them to join as well, and over time they succeeded in winning over a number of recipient leaders. The kinds of political attitudes which were acquired or reinforced through this process are exemplified in the following excerpts from the remarks of a client advisory committee member as quoted in a monthly newsletter:
I feel there are obviously two ways to work—either to be adamantly demanding, issuing ultimatums, making use of opportunism and perhaps exaggeration in order to press a point—or the slower, admittedly, but perhaps more effective eventually, way of using the techniques of gathering together, speaking frankly, continuing to ask, to question, to discuss, to learn, bringing faith and belief in each other and high hopes in our hearts that we will be fairly heard—and our recommendations and proposals, when found to be valid, acted upon.
The dawning of this new era of mutuality and exchange was signaled by the appearance of articles in leading professional journals extolling the beginning of free and open communication between giver and receiver. And just as it had done in the 1930s, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania negotiated a model agreement with welfare recipients as a result of a hearing in October 1968. It stipulated that:37
The Executive Director of each county shall instruct the supervisor of each District Office to make available upon request by the County Welfare Rights Organization:
a. Space when available in the reception or waiting area and a table and several chairs to accommodate members of the Welfare Rights Organization in reasonable number.
b. A pay telephone in the reception or waiting area convenient to the use of Public Assistance applicants and recipients and members of the Welfare Rights Organization, and designated by a clearly visible sign for their specific use.
c. One complete current copy of the Pennsylvania Public Assistance Manual for the specific use of Public Assistance applicants and recipients and members of the Welfare Rights Organization.
d. Members of the Welfare Rights Organization of the County are entitled to access in reasonable numbers to the District Office to occupy the table, to maintain on and near the table signs identifying them and announcing their availability to assist applicants and recipients, to pass out in the reception or waiting area literature and leaflets announcing their availability and function, and to accompany any applicant or recipient who requests assistance in any dealings with Public Assistance personnel.
e. No Public Assistance personnel shall refuse or delay interviews or otherwise differently treat any applicant or recipient who is assisted by a member of the Welfare Rights Organization, but rather, all Public Assistance personnel shall cooperate with members of the Welfare Rights Organization and shall recognize them as representatives of the client whenever the client so wishes.
Such agreements, whether formalized in writing or not, became well-nigh universal.
The development of these grievance procedures had a large influence on the political beliefs that dominated the local WROs, for these arrangements went far toward reaffirming for leaders and organizers the conviction that they represented a powerful organization. It was not remarkable that welfare officials, confronted by turbulent interference with the operation of their programs, moved to grant the disrupters a symbolic role in the system, for it was a time-honored method of restoring calm. What was remarkable was the ease with which the method worked. Each such “victory” was the occasion for self-congratulations among recipient leaders who, upon reading in the press of their appointments to advisory committees or upon receiving written invitations to negotiating sessions or upon being invited to testify at legislative hearings, envisaged the emergence of a new period of justice for the welfare poor. To be listened to by the powerful conveyed a sense that they were at last wielding a measure of influence, that progress was being made, that reforms would follow.
Another consequence of these arrangements was a decline in militancy. Government officials agreed to deal with the WROs but they exacted a price. Sometimes the price was so subtle as to make it appear that none was being asked. It may merely have consisted in an implicit understanding, all too readily acknowledged by recipient leaders and organizers, that the proper path to welfare reform was through negotiation by leaders and not protest by unruly mobs. Sometimes the terms were more explicit and included the understanding that the welfare rights organization would desist from abrasive actions. The agreement reached in Pennsylvania, which was mentioned earlier, provides a good case in point. Groups were not simply given open access to the welfare offices and to welfare officials; they were expected in exchange to do nothing to disrupt office routines or to interfere with the “rights” of clients to be left alone:
Courtesy and Behavior
It is suggested that agreements with the welfare rights organizations recognize that there are obligations with reference to behavior incumbent upon public assistance personnel and welfare rights organization representatives. Welfare rights organization representatives are expected to take no steps designed to intimidate, harass, embarrass or threaten public assistance personnel.… As representatives of clients, they are being provided with certain prerogatives, but these are not unbounded.
Solicitation of Applicants and Recipients
It is appropriate for county boards to reach agreements about the limits of welfare rights organization representatives accosting, interrupting, or importuning applicants or clients.
Settlement of Disputes
It is suggested that county executives may wish to reach agreement with welfare rights organization groups on the immediate settlement of a dispute which threatens or which has disrupted work to the point where staff cannot reasonably continue to work.38
As WROs became enmeshed in arrangements of this kind, the demonstrations, picketing, and sit-ins which had dominated the birth of WROs were gradually abandoned. Even the militancy of the rhetoric deescalated. Association with government officials who were “sympathetic” and “reasonable” and “oriented toward the problems of recipients” produced a large number of recipient leaders and organizers who came to affirm the efficacy of persuasion and negotiation. In early 1970, for example, a group of organizers and recipient leaders decided to attempt to revive direct action in New York, and began one morning in the crowded waiting room of a Harlem welfare center. The best-known figure in the group was a recipient who held a national office in NWRO. Upon learning that she was present, the director of the center offered to conduct her on a personal tour of the entire operation. It is a measure of the extent to which leaders had come to be controlled by such gestures that she accepted and was not seen again for several hours.
Integrative relationships of this kind not only blunted militancy, they also interfered with the expansion of membership and even weakened the ties of existing members to the group. Negotiations absorbed the energy and time of leaders and organizers. The more the investment in these procedures, the less the investment in enlisting new members. Moreover formal relationships with welfare officials had the effect of making membership superfluous. Before such relationships became the rule it was not unusual for fifty or one hundred recipients to burst into a welfare center and demand that their grievances be settled on the spot. This tactic often worked and when it did, it was the group that had proved its strength; everyone depended upon everyone else. But once grievances came to be dealt with through negotiations between welfare rights leaders and welfare officials, group action no longer seemed necessary, and group consciousness disintegrated. The sense of participation in something larger than oneself, the sense of belonging to a movement, was gradually lost.
And now a final but crucial point. As NWRO and its local affiliates moved into the maze of legislative and bureaucratic politics, the failure to sustain, much less to expand, the membership base among the poor was obscured. For as the membership base dwindled and became less militant, the resources which NWRO secured continued to enlarge. In effect it became possible for NWRO to function without a mass base, without a broad constituency. The sympathy and fear generated by the black movement, together with the emerging crisis over welfare, enabled NWRO to present itself to elites as the representative of a large segment of the black poor and thus to obtain the legitimation and money required for the maintenance of its organizational structure. In effect, external resources became a substitute for a mass base.39
But the availability of external resources upon which the organization depended was not a response to organization; it was a response to widespread black unrest. Once unrest began to subside, these external resources were withdrawn. The result was organizational collapse, as we shall now see.
If the developments already described had not caused the decline of NWRO, the decline of black unrest would have. As it was, the ebbing of black unrest dealt the death blow to an organization that was already greatly weakened.
Toward the late 1960s the black movement which began in the South in the mid-fifties subsided, and the movement organizations it had spawned were dying if not already dead. For one thing much of the leadership of the black movement (as we noted in chapter four) was being absorbed into electoral politics, into government bureaucracies, into the universities, and into business and industry; correlatively the ideology of protest was repudiated and the efficacy of electoral politics was affirmed. As a result the cadres of organizers dwindled, their ranks diminished by the concessions won.
While there is no way of marking the exact time when the tide of unrest turned, the year 1968 might be considered such a point. It was the last year of major urban rioting (in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination); it was also the year that the presidency passed from a liberal to a conservative leadership. With Nixon’s accession to power the class and racial injustices that had figured so prominently in the rhetoric and action of earlier administrations, and that had encouraged protest among the black poor, gave way to rhetoric and action emphasizing law-and-order and self-reliance, with the effect of rekindling shame and fear among the black masses. A white backlash against black gains had developed and conservative leaders acted to stimulate it all the more as a means of building support. By the election of 1972 this rhetoric reached a crescendo, much of it focused specifically on the last vestige of black defiance—the still rising welfare rolls. In the presidential campaign of 1972 Republican-sponsored television advertisements warned the American people that if McGovern won the election he would put half of the population on welfare. Nixon exhorted Americans in his inaugural address not to ask what government could do for them, but what they could do for themselves, and then he rapidly popularized the slogan “Workfare not Welfare.” A mobilization against the black poor was occurring, with the welfare poor a particular target.
Not all was simply rhetoric. Acting through its various executive departments the Nixon Administration also cut the flow of resources to ghetto organizations and reversed earlier policies which had yielded concessions to the poor. The Office of Economic Opportunity came under siege from the administration. Within a year or two the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare began to issue more restrictive policies and regulations in an effort to squash the substantive and procedural rights which welfare recipients had won through protest or that antipoverty attorneys had won through litigation. One of the most significant steps it subsequently took—a step unmistakably signaling the end of an era of welfare liberalism—was to introduce a system of substantial financial penalties to be imposed upon states when “quality control” studies showed that more than 3 percent of those receiving welfare were “ineligible.” As those familiar with the welfare system maze know, low ineligibility levels can be achieved only at the price of keeping much larger proportions of eligible families off the rolls.
Political leaders at other levels of government joined in, either because new officials had come to power with a social philosophy which resonated with the new mood of the times or because continued incumbency by existing leaders demanded accommodation to that mood. Governor Rockefeller had already perhaps outdone them all with his bizarre proposals to refuse welfare benefits to any newcomer to New York State who could not find decent housing or health care, followed by highly publicized investigations of “welfare fraud” conducted by a newly created office of Inspector General (headed by a millionaire of inherited wealth who despised the welfare poor). In California Governor Reagan garnered a national reputation by mounting similar anti-welfare campaigns. (New York and California, it should be noted, contained more than half of the nation’s welfare recipients.) One of the most celebrated anti-welfare events of the period occurred in Nevada, where the Department of Welfare launched a major campaign against “welfare cheaters.” On January 1, 1972, 21 percent of Nevada’s welfare population did not receive their welfare checks and 28 percent more received reduced checks. This came about because the welfare department decided to deal with the “welfare crisis” by conducting an “audit,” consisting of mobilizing virtually the entire work force of the department to interview employers and neighbors of the poor and to study the records of the social security and unemployment compensation agencies for any evidence of unreported income in the preceding five or more years. For most recipients the first notice of the audit was the failure of their checks to arrive, or the arrival of checks for smaller amounts. The reason given, in subsequent notices to recipients, was simply “overpayment” or “ineligibility.”40 Many other states cut welfare payment levels or introduced eligibility restrictions between 1970 and 1972, although not on such a large scale.
One immediate consequence of this changing political climate was to dry up many of the resources—especially government resources—upon which local WROs had drawn. As funds for the Great Society programs were cut (and diverted into “revenue sharing,” for example), the ranks of organizers were decimated. The welfare rights organizers who remained found that local administrators of the Great Society programs had become fearful and would no longer support organizing efforts.
Under these influences the militancy of the welfare poor all but vanished. As we noted earlier, most local groups across the United States had been formed by grievance work. But by the early seventies the few organizers who remained found that welfare administrations were stiffening their resistance to demands by organized recipient groups. The new national rhetoric diminished their responsiveness to the poor and the passing of rioting and other forms of mass protest diminished their fear of the poor. If once welfare officials had been oriented toward the great turbulence in the streets beyond their office doors, now they were oriented to the growing signs of restrictiveness contained in regulations being issued from Washington and from their respective state capitals. Given both of these conditions local recipient groups won less and less, and the fewer the victories the more difficult it became to sustain participation by even the more committed and loyal recipients. Month by month the belief grew that the fight was being lost—even, perhaps, that it was no longer worth being fought. Consequently more organizers and recipients drifted away.
It was also true that many local WRO members themselves had lost whatever inclination they might once have had to help other poor people. Their special relationship to the welfare system still sometimes served their individual needs, aiding them in solving their own problems and even in obtaining special grants. In a rapidly changing political climate, especially with public welfare expenditures becoming a target of public ire, these remaining members became fearful and drew inward, trying to protect their privileged access. The narrowest possible self-interest and the ideological justification for it thus came to dominate the few fragmented groups that survived.
Under these circumstances, it would have taken a strenuous, devoted, and resourceful program by the national leadership to try to buttress failing morale at the local level. In truth there is no reason to believe that the effort could have succeeded. The fires of protest had died out and organizers probably could not have rekindled them. The endless debates over the best means of building a mass-based permanent organization no longer mattered: whether by single- versus multi-issue organizing, or by single- versus multi-constituency organizing, or by decentralized versus centralized staffing patterns, or by placing less emphasis on material incentives in attracting members versus placing more emphasis on “educating” and “radicalizing” the membership. The fact is that an era of protest had inexorably come to a close.
But it was not an analysis of the forces making for the probable futility of local organizing by 1970 that turned the national leadership away from the membership base. It was the promise of “welfare reform” and of the organizational and leadership rewards which would become available in the course of a struggle for reform.
In a nationwide radio and television address on August 8, 1969, President Nixon announced a series of proposals for welfare reorganization. The Nixon proposals—known as the Family Assistance Plan (FAP)—called for the elimination of the AFDC program and its replacement with a program that would have guaranteed every family an annual minimum income at the level of $1,600 for a family of four, to be paid for by the federal government. Moreover, the proposed program included the working poor (i.e., two-parent families) who would be made eligible for wage supplementation by a formula that disregarded the first $720 of earned income for purposes of determining eligibility, and imposed a tax rate thereafter of 50 percent, until the family of four had a total income from wages and welfare of $3,920, at which point supplementation would be discontinued.41
The proposals created a considerable stir. The main features appeared liberal, and in some ways were. The proposal for a federal minimum income standard and for wage supplementation would have mitigated some of the worst poverty in the South. The proposal would also have relieved states and localities of at least some of the fiscal burden of the rising rolls.42 These were the aspects of the overall plan which tended to be featured in the press, and it was these aspects which attracted liberal support for FAP.
In other major respects the plan was not liberal but regressive, and the longer-term implications of the more regressive provisions were less apparent to most observers. The plan would have wiped out the procedural rights which recipients had won through protest and litigation in the 1960s—for example, the right to a hearing if terminated from the rolls. It also contained provisions to enforce work among those deemed “suitable” for employment and would have required these “employable” recipients to take jobs at less than the minimum wage.
The most urgent and the most straightforward political problem with which Nixon was trying to deal in proposing relief reform was the clamor among local officials for fiscal relief, a clamor generated by rising budgets in the states, counties, and cities. Pressure for reform was a direct consequence of the fact that the American poor had made a modest income gain through the welfare system in the 1960s. Enormous political pressure had built up at the state and local levels in response to the resulting fiscal strains; in his televised address, the president acknowledged that the rising rolls were “bringing states and cities to the brink of financial disaster.”
Two broad constituencies had developed around this issue: those who simply wanted to cut back the gains made by the poor by slashing both the rolls and grant levels, and those who wanted to see the burden of paying for relief costs shifted to the federal government. The latter constituency was by far the more powerful; it contained the bulk of the nation’s mayors, county officials, and governors. They wished to be spared the politically onerous and potentially dangerous necessity of cutting back welfare. Thus “the explosion in family benefit recipients put welfare, a subject typically shunned by the White House, on the agenda of President-elect Nixon,” according to two journalists, Burke and Burke, who covered these events. “Republican governors wanted relief from Washington and from their party’s president-to-be” (41). Referring to the long congressional struggle which then ensued over the proposals, these same authors go on to note:
The only strong and unqualified pressure for H.R. 1 came from those who wanted welfare change not for reasons of philosophy, but rather for the promise of fiscal relief. These were many of the nation’s governors and county officials. To these men, frustrated by ever-rising welfare budgets, the structural reforms of H.R. 1 were relatively unimportant. What they wanted was money, and H.R. 1’s federal floor for current welfare recipients would supply it (179).
But while FAP would have provided some fiscal relief for states and localities, that objective, taken by itself, could have been achieved in any number of ways. The federal government might simply have arranged to pay relief costs, for example, while leaving the system otherwise intact. As it turned out, something like that happened. When relief reform failed, Congress enacted instead a multibillion dollar program of general “revenue sharing.” In other words the clamor of state and local officials clearly dictated a federal response to the fiscal crisis, but it did not dictate the specific changes in the welfare system proposed under FAP.
In point of fact the FAP proposals were not designed mainly to ease fiscal strains. They were mainly designed to halt the growth of the AFDC rolls. Internal memoranda prepared for the president predicted a continuing steep climb in the rolls unless the system was redesigned. Stated another way, the growing dependency of the American underclass was defined as having its roots in the welfare system. There were two ways in which welfare practices were thought to produce this condition.
First, it was argued that existing relief policies provided a disincentive for self-reliance since recipients who worked were required to report their earnings which were then deducted from monthly grants. The conventional wisdom held that this “100% tax” discouraged recipients from working their way off the rolls, generating perpetual dependency. Second, the rising rolls were considered to be a problem not only because they discouraged work, but because the ready availability of benefits presumably undermined the family system of the poor. Fathers were believed to be deserting in order to make mothers and children eligible for relief. “Fiscal abandonment,” some called it, and the president was advised that this circumstance generated a continuous stream of new relief applicants.
Various “pathologies” among the poor—mainly crime and civil disorder—were also attributed to welfare. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a presidential advisor, played a large role in promulgating this diagnosis to the larger public and apparently he persuaded the president as well. The family assistance plan, he said, “was made … as part of an over-riding short-term strategy to bring down the level of internal violence” (12). The chain of reasoning was that crime, civil disorder, and other social pathologies exhibited by the poor had their roots in worklessness and family instability which, in turn, had their roots in welfare permissiveness. This chain of reasoning is vividly revealed in a summary of the views expressed by a group of “administrators, academicians and intellectuals” with whom Moynihan met to discuss the welfare crisis in the big cities, New York City being the particular focus of attention:
The social fabric of New York City is coming to pieces. It isn’t just “strained” and it isn’t just “frayed”; but like a sheet of rotten canvas, it is beginning to rip, and it won’t be too long until even a moderate force will be capable of leaving it in shreds and tatters.… Among a large and growing lower class, self-reliance, self-discipline, and industry are waning; a radical disproportion is arising between reality and expectations concerning job, living standard, and so on; unemployment is high but a lively demand for unskilled labor remains unmet; illegitimacy is increasing; families are more and more matrifocal and atomized; crime and disorder are sharply on the rise. There is, in short, a progressive disorganization of society, a growing pattern of frustration and mistrust.… This general pathology, moreover, appears to be infecting the Puerto Rican community as well as the Negro. A large segment of the population is becoming incompetent and destructive. Growing parasitism, both legal and illegal, is the result; so, also, is violence. (It is a stirring, if generally unrecognized, demonstration of the power of our welfare machine.) (Moynihan, 76; emphasis added.)
As for this “stirring … demonstration of the power of our welfare machine” going “unrecognized,” that was, of course, far from being true. Everyone believed that relief-giving destroys the poor. Conservatives said it; middle-of-the-roaders said it; and liberals said it. The well-off said it and the bulk of the poor would have said it had they been asked. On this point there was unanimity.
Armed with this analysis, relief reformers set out to rehabilitate the culture of the poor. The key to reducing “parasitism” was to redesign relief arrangements so as to enforce work. Moreover, by restoring the discipline of work, family stability would also be reinforced and various social pathologies curbed. This was the overarching objective of FAP and, given the analysis on which it was based, one can understand why a deeply conservative president confronted by extraordinary manifestations of social and civil disorder as he assumed office might have been led to embrace welfare reform.
In fact the objectives underlying this effort at relief reform bore a striking resemblance to the objectives underlying earlier periods of relief reform. The fundamental conditions that gave rise to the reform impulse were also historically familiar. The periodic expansion of relief-giving in western industrial countries has frequently been associated with agricultural transformations that uprooted the peasantry and drove them into the cities and towns where many languished without work. With people loosened from traditional controls and not enmeshed in new institutional patterns, social disorder worsened and took form finally in the widespread civil disorder that forced elites to create relief arrangements or to allow an existing system to expand. Then, with quiescence restored, the “social pathologies” of the poor were redefined as having their cause in overly permissive relief arrangements, not in defective socioeconomic arrangements.
As often as not this social theory has led to the poor being expelled from the relief rolls on the ground that by no other means can they be forced to overcome the habit of idleness. Nixon would ostensibly have done it differently. FAP provided a variety of measures intended to buttress work motivation. On one side, as we said earlier, there were incentives—a modest income disregard of $720 annually, coupled with a tax rate allowing half of additional earned income to be retained to a maximum of $3,920 for a family of four. On the other side, there were sanctions—the denial of benefits to those who declined to work. Moreover, to insure the absorption of the poor into the labor force, the bill provided that recipients could be compelled to work at jobs significantly below the minimum wage. Through these measures the state would have intervened in the secondary labor market, subsidizing low-wage employers and insuring a disciplined supply of workers.
Over time these arrangements might well have come to be used to force the poor to take any work at sub-minimum wages, one way of stemming the projected rise in the rolls which so troubled Nixon and his advisors. And that brings us to a crucial question: How harshly would the work requirements be administered once the turbulence of the 1960s had passed and with it the fear of the poor? On this question there was ample reason to be concerned, particularly after Nixon’s first year or two in office.
There was, first, the evidence of Nixon’s orientation toward the existing welfare system. Even as the congressional struggle over welfare reform was beginning, Nixon’s appointees in HEW proceeded without fanfare to institute a host of new rules and regulations designed to make relief benefits more difficult to obtain and to keep. As time passed these regulations became increasingly restrictive, and the preoccupation was unmistakably one of reducing the rolls.
There was, further, the evidence of the Nixon Administration’s economic policies. An administration concerned about the condition of the poor would not have initiated the policy of allowing unemployment to rise as a counter to inflation. By the end of 1970, the first year of debate over welfare reform, the nation had been plunged into the worst recession since World War II. And while the recession deepened, Moynihan wrote: “It cannot be too often stated that the issue of welfare reform is not what it costs those who provide it, but what it costs those who receive it” (18). It was a curious point to make during a period of rapidly rising unemployment; one might rather have called for an easing of relief restrictiveness in order to enable the poor to survive the impact of Nixon’s anti-inflation policies. This general callousness toward unemployment, coupled with restrictive relief policies, suggests strongly that Nixon asked for welfare reform in the belief that a system of government coercion could succeed in driving the rolls down.
Finally, there was the gradually evolving evidence of Nixon’s own conduct during the prolonged debate in Congress over welfare reform. form. With the passage of time he abandoned his proposed method of reducing the rolls in favor of a much more politically popular method, namely, to inflame public opposition to the welfare system and to let others (governors, county officials, and mayors) respond to the uproar by slashing the rolls. As he shifted from the one method to the other he withdrew support for his own plan even though victory in Congress was at hand.
To be sure, there was considerable congressional opposition to FAP, not because the plan was restrictive but because it was not restrictive enough, particularly as it would have applied to the South. Support for the plan came largely from the industrial states in the North which had suffered the brunt of the rising rolls. Southern representatives tended to prefer to see the relief rolls slashed, for the South still relied on the lowest paid labor supply in the nation, despite the out-migration of many of its displaced poor. Even an income standard as low as $1,600 for a family of four would have undermined the southern wage structure. Accordingly southerners played the leading role in defeating the plan, using their considerable power in the congressional committee structure to work for its defeat.43
However, the opposition of the South could have been overcome had the president persevered, but he did not. Publicly Nixon appeared to give continued support; in the day-to-day dealings between his administration and Congress, however, it progressively became clear that his commitment to the plan was weakening. At critical junctures, when compromises between liberals (led by Abraham Ribicott, the Democratic senator from Connecticut) and conservatives seemed possible—compromises that would have raised the annual minimum income by a few hundred dollars and softened the work provisions—the president refused to sanction them.
The last and the most illuminating of these events occurred in June 1972. An option paper had been prepared for the president by the Office of Management and Budget, the Departments of Labor and of Health, Education, and Welfare, and the staff of the Domestic Council. “Three choices were analyzed: (A) stand pat with H.R. 1; (B) compromise with Long; and (C) compromise with Ribicoff” (Burke and Burke, 184). The option paper went on to note that option (C) is “the only possible strategy which can get us a bill.” At this juncture most observers agree that the president could have won the day had he compromised with Ribicoff and the liberals. However he chose not to win. “President Nixon announced his decision on June 22, 1972, five days after the Watergate break-in. Nixon told a news conference that he would stay by his ‘middle position’ in support of the House-passed H.R.1,” for which the option paper said only twenty Senate votes could be won (Burke and Burke, 185). Through a parliamentary maneuver, the Ribicoff compromise plan did come before the full Senate on October 4, 1972, but without presidential support it was defeated 52 to 34.
By this juncture the president had discovered that there was political capital in the welfare issue, and probably more capital in the issue itself than in the legislation he had introduced. By the unrelenting emphasis on the “pathology-generating” features of relief-giving, Nixon and Moynihan had played to the growing climate of relief-restrictiveness, if they had not done much to create it. As he previewed his 1972 presidential election campaign Nixon thus decided “that it would be wiser to have an issue than an enacted plan” (Burke and Burke, 185).
The lack of genuine support by the White House for a compromise welfare reform bill, together with the president’s exploitation of the welfare issue to garner votes in the presidential campaign, angered and dismayed many liberals who had supported welfare reform. They, too, came to distrust Nixon’s motives. One of them was Hyman Bookbinder, Washington Representative of the American Jewish Committee, who wrote Moynihan on November 14, 1972:
I knew that HR-1 was dead about six months ago. It was clear that the Administration felt it could not be saddled with a welfare program during an election year … but my continuing participation in the support effort persuaded me that the bill never had the hearty backing it required from Pennsylvania Avenue. The several generalized Presidential pronouncements were welcome but they were made less than credible because of administrative inflexibility and intransigence on modest improvements that were being proposed.…
But now, Pat, I come to the real purpose of this letter. While I do not approve of the catering to anti-welfare prejudices that are engaged in for political advantage, I can at least understand them. There are subtle considerations of timing and emphasis in any legislative effort. But what concerns me is that these anti-welfare prejudices have become so ingrained and so widespread that no real progress may be possible. And, above all, my reading [of the President’s remarks] persuades me that he is himself the victim of some of the harshest prejudices and misinformation … (emphasis in original).44
Given all of these factors, there was reason to believe that FAP, had it been enacted, would have been administered in keeping with other Nixon policies, all of which were antagonistic to the poor. Stated in simplest terms, it was the relief explosion of the 1960s that had precipitated official efforts at reform. As a result of that expansion millions of people had come to receive benefits. Poverty in the United States had been substantially reduced and a step toward something like a national minimum income had in fact been taken. It was these gains that were the object of “reform.”
In the interim between the introduction of FAP in 1970 and its final defeat in 1972 the issue of welfare reorganization was high on the national political agenda. Despite the furor we advised George that NWRO should not plunge into the congressional maelstrom. We thought NWRO continually overestimated its effectiveness in the lobbying process. At the time NWRO had virtually no grassroots base left; far from remedying that circumstance (if it could have been remedied), the congressional struggle over the president’s proposals would surely be a long and exhausting one, and just as surely it would divert the whole of NWRO’s resources away from its base. Instead we thought that NWRO should turn back to the streets and welfare centers, with the aged and the working poor as new targets. The barrage of publicity over Nixon’s proposals to supplement low wages might give a new legitimacy to campaigns to mobilize the working poor to obtain supplements through general assistance programs in the northern states.
As before, we argued our view by pointing to the continued defiance among the unorganized poor themselves. While the black movement as a whole was ebbing in this period, applications for public assistance remained high, and approval levels were still high as well. Although organized recipient groups were beginning to encounter resistance from welfare administrators in the changed political climate following Nixon’s election, the eligibility process still remained relatively open. The impact of years of protest on policies and practices would take time to be reversed. Significant cases dealing with eligibility restrictions were reaching the Supreme Court in this period and the decisions being handed down were still favorable. HEW could not implement restrictive policies all at once. In fact, under the impact of the Nixon recession, the rolls were rising even more rapidly than before.
But George decided otherwise. In reaching this decision he was constrained by a number of organizational problems. He was not, to begin with, unaware of the diminishing membership base and of the weakening militancy of local groups. It was therefore far from clear that an infrastructure existed that could develop organizing campaigns among new groups; it was also not clear that a sufficient grassroots base remained to mount resistance campaigns against the rising tide of welfare restrictiveness. To have announced either kind of campaign, only to have it fail, would have revealed NWRO’s weakness at its base. In any case he could not turn the organization toward multi-constituency organizing (e.g., toward the aged or the working poor)—not, that is, without the killing internal struggle with the established recipient leadership that had prevented such a turn at earlier points.
On the other hand, there were strong inducements to join the fray over welfare reform. NWRO had a large national office staff by this time. The operation was expensive to maintain, especially in a political climate that made fund-raising increasingly difficult. The congressional struggle over welfare reform promised to give NWRO high visibility, thus enhancing its ability to raise funds. Finally, the interest of many groups and of the press in the issue of welfare reorganization promised to give extraordinary visibility to the representatives of a relief recipients’ organization who joined in the lobbying process. The opportunity to achieve a large measure of national recognition for NWRO’s top leadership was at hand and that was a powerful incentive. The decision, then, was to lobby.
One measure of the lure of recognition and of organizational rewards which the pending debate over welfare reorganization held for NWRO is the fact that there was, at the outset, considerable uncertainty among the leadership as to whether the family assistance proposals should be supported or opposed. However, that did not matter as much as the chance to lobby mattered. The NWRO intended to seize the opportunity to enhance its waning visibility; the substance of its position could be developed over time.
A somewhat uncertain decision was first reached to support the bill. The objective was to improve it: to raise the minimum payment level (“UP THE NIXON PLAN!”), to eliminate workfare penalties, and to introduce various substantive and procedural rights. By the summer of 1970, however, NWRO turned against FAP and tried to defeat it (“ZAP FAP!”).45 Thereafter it worked assiduously to produce analyses of the veritable mélange of alternative bills and amendments that were placed before Congress, and it distributed these analyses widely through its newsletter and other mailings; it lobbied incessantly with individual congressmen; it helped organize anti-FAP caucuses within Congress; and, finally, it tried to rally local WROs across the country to devote themselves to lobbying activities, such as buttonholing their local congressmen and participating in various demonstrations in the nation’s capital. From the fall of 1969 onward, in short, NWRO devoted a substantial part of its resources to trying to shape the course of welfare legislation in Congress.
How effective was NWRO’s campaign against welfare reform? The answer to this question is obviously central to the argument of this book. NWRO itself took generous, if not full, credit for the defeat of the bill. But the facts lead to the opposite conclusion; its influence was negligible.
The only point at which NWRO had some, but hardly critical, influence on an important outcome occurred in the vote of the Senate Finance Committee in November 1970, after the House had first passed the bill. The Senate Finance Committee defeated the plan 10 to 6, and the majority included three liberal Democrats who might have been expected to support the bill (Eugene McCarthy, Minnesota; Fred Harris, Oklahoma; and Albert Gore, Tennessee). NWRO lobbyists claim that they influenced the votes of both Harris and McCarthy, and judging from other forms of support which these particular senators gave NWRO over the years, this claim is reasonable. However, Gore’s vote was not influenced by NWRO. He had just been defeated after thirty-two years in the Senate, in part because he had been a special target of Republican midterm campaign strategists; his vote was retaliation against the Nixon Administration.46 Therefore, were it not for NWRO, that early and important committee vote might have been 8 to 8. Under the rules of the committee, however, a tie vote is a losing vote, and thus the bill would not have been reported out, whether NWRO had lobbied or not.47
In June 1971 the House (by a smaller margin) again enacted a version of the bill. Once more the crucial struggle was played out in the Senate where Long’s committee bottled up the bill. NWRO’s role during this period was chiefly to weaken liberal proponents of the bill by dividing and confusing them. If blacks were seemingly opposed to the bill, it became more difficult for some white liberals to support it. Nevertheless a liberal coalition formed under the leadership of Abraham Ribicoff, whom NWRO denounced. At several junctures this coalition managed to negotiate compromises with conservatives and with administration representatives. By this time, however, the president was backing away from his own bill and would not sanction the compromises.
Moreover these particular events were of no great significance, taken by themselves. Chairman Long and others had made it abundantly clear that they would organize a filibuster should the bill ever reach the floor of the Senate. In the judgment of various persons close to the congressional struggle, such as Mitchell I. Ginsberg, it would have been impossible to find the votes to invoke cloture. And even if one grants the extremely remote assumption that cloture might have been invoked, the opponents of the bill would have had many other chances to destroy it through repeal, or to emasculate it by crippling amendments. The point is that the test of a lobbying strategy is not merely momentary success, if even that can be achieved; the test is the capacity to sustain influence year after year in the face of a continuing and determined opposition.
NWRO’s ineffectiveness in the Congress is further illustrated by another incident. During the course of the welfare debate Congress enacted an extremely restrictive amendment to the Social Security Act. It will be recalled that congressional concern over the welfare rises had begun to be expressed some years earlier, as marked by the enactment of training and employment programs in 1967. Under the original “Work Incentives Now” program, welfare files were presumably to be combed for people eligible for training and work, who were then to be registered as “ready for employment.” In the late 1960s welfare administrators implemented this program laxly for fear of the possible repercussions in the ghettos. But in late 1971 Congress acted to put teeth into the program with an amendment specifying that any state which failed to refer to employment at least 15 percent of the average number of individuals registered during the year as “ready for employment” would be penalized by the subtraction of one percentage point from its matching funds for each percent by which referrals fell below 15 percent. The amendment was passed in the Senate without a single dissenting vote despite the fact that NWRO’s lobbying presence was at its peak during this period (Burke and Burke, 164).
But NWRO did not lobby simply to be effective in the legislative process. NWRO and its leadership obtained enormous visibility and substantial resources in the course of the struggle over welfare reorganization, thus reinforcing the illusion of its influence. Consistent with this illusion NWRO’s leadership determined to make its presence felt as the Democratic and Republican parties formulated their campaign platforms in the spring and summer of 1972. These events indicate just how invested NWRO had become in electoral politics and in an image of itself as being influential in electoral politics. This turn had been signaled by George at the convention in 1970 when he announced: “We’ve got to get into lobbying, political organization, and ward and precinct politics” (Martin, 131). With that rallying cry a welfare recipients’ organization which no longer had a constituency capable of storming a welfare center anywhere in the country issued a call through its newsletter in November 1971 to storm the American electoral system. This statement by Beulah Sanders, who was elected chairman of the National Coordinating Committee in 1971, deserves to be quoted completely if only to convey the full measure of the unreality which had come to dominate the organization:
At the last NWRO Convention, there was a clear mandate from the membership that NWRO take a major role in the various political arenas all across this country. In keeping with that mandate your chairman consented to testify both in Boston and New York before the New Democratic Coalition’s regional platform hearings.
NWRO also has played a significant role in the building of the National Women’s Political Caucus and we are helping to build similar caucuses in several states. The upcoming year is going to be most active politically for the entire country and a very significant one (politically) for WRO’s across the country. So with the slogan of Bread, Justice and Dignity, let’s unite all our brothers and sisters in the struggle and hard fight ahead.
For it is our intent to develop a large welfare rights caucus at the Democratic convention. We must begin on local levels to make sure that our members are registered to vote, and that we begin as early as possible to vote for the various delegate seats by demanding that there be equal representation for our members. We must begin to link up with other organizations and run candidates for the various local, state, and national offices. Politics has in the past been a very dirty and closed business in this country.
We must be about changing that. For we have seen in the past what has happened to candidates who have gotten the support of the people but decide that the old line party powers are who they need to be beholden to. So the burden is going to be on us to pick and support candidates for office whom we can trust.
It is going to be very important for us to know what is happening in your local areas so that we can work from a national level to develop our plans for the coming year. So begin now: get together with other groups, especially women’s groups, to discuss your strategies. As welfare recipients who represent a major portion of the poor in this country, the burden is ours to keep the goal of “adequate income” in the forefront as the most vital issue in any and all of our campaigns. “Welfare Reform” will be a vital issue in ’72, but we must not get caught up in that trap, as so many of the liberal candidates and organizations have, for we are about more than just “Welfare Reform.” We are about a “Guaranteed Adequate Income” for all Americans; and that means a true redistribution of this country’s resources in such a way as to guarantee the right to a decent life to all Americans, be they man, woman, child, black, white or red, working or non-working.
In June 1972 the NWRO leadership announced to its membership: “We will go to the Democratic National Convention in the same manner we have always dealt with an unjust system—with representation on the inside, but our real strength on the outside, in the streets.” A major demonstration was planned, and at a huge financial cost to the organization and its affiliates about 500 leaders, members, and organizers actually attended. Given the extraordinary delegate composition of that particular Democratic convention, NWRO obtained 1,000 votes (about 1,600 were needed) supporting a plank calling for a guaranteed income of $6,500 for a family of four. It was heady stuff. “We lost,” NWRO announced in a post-convention newsletter, “but in a spiritual sense, we had won.” (Just how great a spiritual victory had been won was to be revealed in November when in part because of McGovern’s advocacy, at least in the early months of the campaign, of a guaranteed income of $4,000 for a family of four, he was obliterated by the voters.) As for the Republican convention, there was no spiritual victory; it was, NWRO proclaimed, “No place for the poor.”