The 1962 publication of Michael Harrington’sThe Other Americahelped focus the gaze of the nation on a problem it had overlooked as many Americans experienced unprecedented affluence amidst a post–World War II economic boom—the impoverished condition of many of its citizens. In the 1950s and early 1960s, between forty and fifty million people lived in an other America that maimed body and spirit. They lived with hunger and without adequate housing, education, and medical care. Harrington sought to open the eyes of his readers. He worried that “American society is creating a new kind of blindness about...

The welfare reform debates of the retrenchment era did not represent the emergence of a unique late-twentieth–century social crisis. The debates reengaged and enacted historical discourses on poverty, which became manifest in deliberations over a federal public assistance program and an associated set of policies directed at poor single parents and their children. For example, Charles Murray’s influential 1984 thesis that federal social welfare programs actually injured the people they were designed to help recalled a sentiment expressed by Alexis de Tocqueville 150 years earlier. In a lecture delivered to the Royal Academic Society of Cherbourg, he stated: “I...

One week before the election, in his closing remarks of the only debate held between himself and President Carter, Ronald Reagan asked television viewers a series of questions that highlighted for many the most important issues of the 1980 presidential campaign: “Are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago?”¹ These questions encapsulated the everyday impact of harsh economic conditions confronting many Americans in the...

In 1981 Reagan and his supporters paid little attention to the “truly needy,” attributing only an unspecified condition of faultlessness to this group. In his frame-setting 5 February speech, the president asserted that taxpayers would “continue to meet our responsibility to those who, through no fault of their own, need our help.”¹ The budget-cutters did not concern themselves with the behaviors, attitudes, or motivations of the “truly needy.” In the mid-1980s, however, Reagan heeded the condition of AFDC recipients whose neediness he did not challenge. His portentous description of their deterioration in his 1986 State of the Union address helped...

The 1988 Family Support Act passed through a compromise reached under the aegis of consensus—a compromise that intimated two very different directions for future reform. A comparison of legislation and program titles from that mid-1980s episode and the mid-1990s policy episode examined in this chapter signals the direction of reform taken. The Family Support Act announced the sense of mutual obligation that permeated the debates in its name. Families would not be maintained by government agencies, but those who displayed initiative would be supported in their attempts at self-sufficiency. The identified beneficiary—a family—emphasized as well the widely...

Policymakers in the retrenchment era ostensibly ended welfare as we knew it. Until its repeal in the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, welfare had come to be known as the dispersal of cash grants to poor families through the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program. This was not the only form by which welfare could have been known, of course, for Americans of varied economic standing receive monetary benefits from the federal government ranging from social security retirement benefits to income tax deductions on home mortgage interest payments. “Welfare” pejoratively understood had meant AFDC and to...