American Visions of Welfare Reform

March-April, 1996

By Drew D. Hansen

WASHINGTON, D.C.—[What lessons about how to reform welfare can we learn from our nation's three centuries of fighting poverty? Drew Hansen, a social studies graduate of Harvard University who is currently a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University; surveyed that history in a paper for the Center for Public Justice Welfare Responsibility Inquiry. Hansen focuses on three periods: the colonial era with its emphasis on direct and personal help; the effort to deal with family abandonment during the Progressive era at the turn of the century; and President Lyndon Johnson's wide-ranging and much criticized War on Poverty. Hansen argues that each of these antipoverty approaches has something to teach us, despite its flaws. The following excerpts are adapted from his concluding section.—Eds.]

Over and over again, Americans have come back to focus on personal relationships in the community. In colonial times, poor relief was little more than neighborly kindness written into law. During the Progressive era, charity workers who dealt with wife desertion sought to bring back an absent parent and reestablish family ties, instead of just giving money to the single parent. The planners of the War on Poverty believed that the best way to help the poor was by revitalizing local communities so they could decide for themselves what would best meet their needs and so they could demand changes from government.

The best ideas for fighting poverty in American cities will often come from the poor themselves. In cities across the country, sustained grass-roots activism by poor people, often based in local churches, is generating some of the most innovative approaches to fighting poverty. These poor people's organizations might also be one of the only political forces willing to lobby for welfare reform that is actually responsive to the needs of the poor. During the 1960s, activism by and on behalf of poor people became tied to attempts to loosen eligibility rules and raise benefits for AFDC. The successful legal challenges to AFDC regulations by government-funded Legal Services lawyers were partly responsible for the huge increase in welfare cases in the late 1960s, a development which made many people understandably angry. The poor, it was felt, were protesting for their "right" to sit at home while the rest of the country was at work. If poor people are to become a powerful political force, they need to decouple their activism from AFDC and tie it instead to job training, education, child care, and health care. That would help make possible the formation of broad-based coalitions necessary to pass major welfare reforms.

Another striking element in the history of American welfare policy is how blurred the lines are between the public and private sectors. Poor relief has never been a wholly public or a wholly private affair. Sometimes public agencies have made policies that private individuals or organizations implement. At other times, private organizations have laid the conceptual groundwork for government policies. The involvement of the church in colonial times at all levels of relief provision demonstrates that church/state partnerships in delivering poor relief are nothing new.

The public and the private have never been separate in American welfare policy. The private sector often has structures which can better promote the sort of personalized poor relief relied upon in many different eras. Many of these structures, especially the urban churches, have been built by poor people themselves. Often, however, only government is able to provide the fiscal resources needed to lift people out of poverty. And only the government can implement large-scale programs crucial to bringing people out of poverty, for instance by changing the tax code to make it easier for people to work their way out of poverty or by passing tougher child support laws to make it more costly for men who leave their families without any support. A working partnership between the public and private sectors and between the state and the churches might be the best way to ensure that poor people receive both the resources and the personal attention they need to escape poverty.