Gripped by a severe recession in late 2007, the United States suffered the most sustained and extensive wave of job destruction the country had seen since the Great Depression. Over the next year and a half, unemployment topped 10 percent, and the number of Americans facing long-term joblessness set new records. Poverty rates climbed above 15 percent, and the Census Bureau reported that more Americans were poor than at any other time in the nation’s history.

The recession ended in 2009, but the hardships did not. By the end of the decade, the median American family had lost twenty years’...

Two eras command attention in the historical development of both the U.S. welfare state and the modern Democratic Party: the New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society of the 1960s. Both were launched by liberal Democratic presidents backed by sizable congressional majorities, and the social welfare programs and policies they created came to be seen by supporters and detractors alike as among the defining legacies of the party. Yet the Democratic Party of the 1930s and 1960s was not only the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and their liberal supporters. It was...

As the 1968 presidential race took shape, welfare reform emerged as an unavoidable campaign issue for both parties. In addition to congressional complaints about AFDC’s rising price tag, a growing chorus of opposition arose from state and local officials facing grave fiscal crises.¹ These included prominent Republican governors from states such as California, New York, Illinois, and Pennsylvania; more than one-fourth of the AFDC caseload burden was carried by these four states alone.² “If you were going to run for President of the United States, you had to have a welfare reform program,” said Martin Anderson, who became research director...

Senator Russell Long had headed home to Louisiana victorious when Congress adjourned in December 1967. He had regaled a crowd in Shreveport with the story of how his eleventh-hour maneuver on the Senate floor had foiled a filibuster planned by liberal Democrats, securing passage of the WIN amendments authored by his fellow Southerner Wilbur Mills and sealing the fate of the welfare measure proposed by President Johnson and Senate liberals. “That group of young turks,” he concluded, “has a lot to learn” about how to run a filibuster.¹ Four years later, he was back before crowds in his home state...

By the mid-1970s, successive policy changes had conditioned a growing proportion of federal public assistance on private employment. Only the elderly and disabled poor were categorically exempt from work. Others eligible for aid, through new programs such as the EITC or old ones such as AFDC, were either already working or increasingly expected to do so. Although the decisive battles over AFDC were still to come, these changes had begun to redirect public assistance. They had also eroded one of the defining distinctions between the social insurance and public assistance programs of the New Deal welfare state, by bringing core...

In the years spanning the election of Ronald Reagan and the passage of welfare reform legislation under Bill Clinton, policy battles over work and welfare exploded onto the national political agenda. But welfare reform was only one act in a much larger struggle over social policy toward the poor. Two far-reaching policy questions were at stake in this fifteen-year debate. The first concerned federal income assistance for poor families, working and nonworking, with one parent or two: when and how should needy families be granted assistance, at what levels, and under what conditions? This issue had been at the center...

The welfare reforms of the 1990s have posed a puzzle for policy analysts: how and why did Bill Clinton, a moderate Democrat, rewrite the social contract for poor families on terms that would be the envy of Ronald Reagan? Accounts of the Clinton welfare reform focus on a number of proximate factors: the role of an activist Republican Congress, Clinton’s 1996 reelection bid, political positioning by leaders of both parties, and deepening political opposition to the AFDC program.¹ All of these factors may have contributed. But none explains why the most conservative and far-reaching policy shift in sixty years would...

Democratic Party liberals were cautiously optimistic as Bill Clinton prepared to enter the White House in 1993. Despite the New Democratic rhetoric, there were enough liberal proposals sprinkled through his stump speeches for liberals to hold out hope that Clinton shared their core commitments in social and economic policy. He had hit hard on issues of economic insecurity throughout the long campaign.¹ He pledged a change in course, and an economic program that would “put people first.” Many liberals were encouraged by his promised public investment strategy and buoyed by key cabinet appointments, including Robert Reich at the Department of...

Major questions remained in the wake of the Clinton reforms. Would the policy settlement on workfare hold? What impact would the new policy framework have, given conditions in the job market? Would workfare create new opportunities or new sources of insecurity for poor families?

The next decade and a half provided an unprecedented opportunity to answer these questions under varied political and economic conditions. Changes in party control of the White House and Congress tested the political durability of the workfare settlement under every imaginable arrangement. From 1996 to 2014, the White House was controlled by Democrats (Clinton and Obama)...

There was much bold talk at the turn of the twenty-first century about leaving behind the old for the new. In social and economic policy, references to the changes wrought by the “New Democrats,” the “New South,” and the “New Economy” were ubiquitous. These were overlapping and mutually reinforcing categories in the battles over work and welfare in the 1990s. Many prominent New Democrats came from the New South; both New Democrats and proponents of Southern economic development lauded the arrival of the New Economy.

In each case, the implication was that there had been a break with the previous...