When Jill Quadagno began researching the social programs of the 1960s "War on Poverty," she had no idea she would end up studying the American civil rights movement.
Quadagno, the Mildred and Claude Pepper Eminent Scholar in Social Gerontology and professor of sociology at Florida State University, presented "Lessons on Welfare Reform from the War on Poverty" Feb. 27 as part of Emory's annual Southeastern Undergraduate Sociology Symposium. Her talk focused on the "puzzle of exceptionalism" of the American welfare state.
In spite of recent Republican calls to reduce drastically the level of federal spending on welfare, Quadagno stated, "The U.S. welfare system does virtually nothing to help single-parent families out of poverty. All they have is AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children), which is clearly under attack now in Washing-ton. Compare that to Canada, where 29 percent of families have been lifted out of poverty, along with 23 percent of families in the United Kingdom and 18 percent in Germany."
She also said that aside from an earned income tax credit, the U.S. welfare system does little for two-parent, working households in poverty, while many other nations have tax and transfer programs to help such families.
Quadagno said that virtually all theories for why the United States does so little to help impoverished families in comparison to other industrialized countries ignore the key ingredient: race. "The driving force [behind the development of the U.S. welfare state] has been a policy of racial inequality," she said. "But the 1960s were a turning point. The United States embarked on a war on poverty, which ended up being an agent to extend civil rights to African Americans. The welfare state of the [Lyndon] Johnson administration became a vehicle for extending civil rights and equal opportunity, but there was a white backlash against that government intervention. Racial inequality became imbedded in the core of American political and economic institutions."
The origins of the war on poverty, Quadagno said, go back to 1935 when the Social Security system was created. "The New Deal created Social Security, but three-fifths of African Americans were excluded from Social Security and unemployment insurance because agricultural and domestic workers were not included," she said. "They were relegated to the welfare system, where they had to prove their poverty to receive benefits. This happened because southern congressmen insisted that no federal money go directly to black workers in the South. Under that structure, funds for social programs such as welfare had to be in the hands of local authorities."
Federal housing policy in 20th-century America also has contributed to racial inequality, Quadagno said. "The New Deal helped increase home ownership, but it reinforced segregation," she said. The Federal Housing Authority (FHA) encouraged the practice of redlining, denying mortgage loan guarantees for minority areas, Quadagno said. The FHA also encouraged restrictive neighborhood covenants, which kept blacks from buying in white areas, and refused to insure mortgages in racially integrated areas. Public housing was and continues to be racially segregated.
Because race had been a key factor in American poverty for so long, the framers of the war on poverty program knew they would have to bypass existing local governmental structure in the South to make a dent in addressing poverty in the region. Poverty-fighting programs were designed to bypass local governments and give federal money directly to private organizations that were trying to improve conditions and opportunities for southern blacks, Quadagno explained. These programs dealt with issues such as literacy, job training, health care, housing and many others.
Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, both of whom initially supported a variety of programs to address poverty and discrimination against blacks, ultimately softened their positions in the face of white backlash, Quadagno said. Nearly all those programs gradually diminished during the 1970s until they were virtually non-existent by the Reagan era.
"There is no doubt that liberalism was redefined in the 1960s," Quadagno said. "Government intervention was seen as a force for good in the 1930s. But such intervention was seen as a force for extending civil rights to blacks in the 1960s. The failure of democratic politics in the war on poverty is the result of America's failure to live up to its democratic creed," which promises fundamental equality of opportunity for all citizens. "This remains one of America's most important unfinished tasks."
--Dan Treadaway