Essay on War on Poverty

This essay examines a 1969 speech by President Nixon that introduced Family Assistance Plan (FAP), a welfare reform proposal that would have provided a national minimum welfare benefit coupled with a work requirement for poor families. I argue that Nixon’s engaging historical distinction between “deservingness versus undeservingness” and “dependency versus independency frustrated his attempt to indicate a new progressive approach to federal welfare policy. This is a distinction that historically has divided poor persons. This legacy influenced the Clinton administration’s welfare reform in 1996 which was a “triumph of policy and ideology over knowledge” (O'Connor, 2001).

To begin with, low-income individuals who were most likely to be impacted by this proposal were families where a father was present – even though he was unable to support his family. Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) restricted the benefits to families without a breadwinner which further narrowed its perceived beneficiaries to black women. However, according to the proposal, benefits would go to both single parents and married couples, bolstering family stability amid the changing social norms of the 1960s. Therefore, the next aspect of this proposal expands to families where fathers are present which is inconsistent with the historical fact that the targeted recipient group of welfare benefits has been single mothers and their children.

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1900-1960s policy regimes emphasized using government to address social problems not as moral issues, but as problems of everyday life which aligns with the progressive era’s regime where poverty was primarily a material condition, ‘not a moral one.” However, Nixon’s FAP failed to eliminate moral issues by engaging categories of “deservingness versus undeservingness” and “dependency versus independence” to judge the potential recipients worthy of compassion. Throughout history, low-income individuals were frequently characterized as a “dependent” population in the U.S government policies. Initially, the American ideology of republicanism was built upon independence. Those who were dependent and living under care could thus not be complete citizens. Therefore, the dependent status of individuals put them in the same categories as children, slaves, and the poor (Stansell, 1986).

Following the U.S. history, FAC can be understood within the context of cultural distinctions between the deserving/independency and undeserving/dependent poor. Nixon states that “the welfare system stagnates enterprise and perpetuates dependency.” Before Johnson’s War on Poverty, little attention was focused on welfare dependency as the total caseload was quite small. However, in the aftermath of the War on Poverty, caseloads substantially increased which led to proposals for welfare reform. Nixon wanted to dismantle the costly failures of President Johnson’s Great Society program. This may seem to be an economic decision based on cost and benefit analyses and not on ideology. However, the public and policymakers regarded the increased welfare recipiency as evidence that programs were subsidizing dependency and encouraging idleness. The FAP would require prospective recipients to participate in the paid labor force and oppose rights without responsibilities. The diagnosis that work would alleviate poverty implied that poor individuals receiving public assistance did not work. This call for work thus attributed a lack of effort to recipients and raised concerns about their deservingness and dependency.

Nixon mentioned that the proposal aims to “equip Americans to play a productive role.” This approach further minimizes the public safety net and strengthens the “capitalist economic system” which is also embedded in the current neoliberal society. According to Esping-Anderson, decommodification means the 'extent to which workers can leave the labor market through choice.' One’s well-being should not be harmed by whether you are working or in the market. By requiring “work” to receive welfare benefits in the proposal, poor individuals are discouraged from leaving the labor market by choice. Nixon criticized the current welfare system by stating that “it breaks up homes. It often penalizes work. It robs recipients of dignity.” However, his approach does not support recipients of dignity either by commodifying the individuals.

By using the term “working poor,” Nixon unintentionally failed to explain a clear distinction between worker/independence to non-worker/dependence. The phrase 'working poor' itself suggested that one could labor and still be 'dependent' on income supplements. Therefore, working status cannot determine whether an individual is dependent or not. Moreover, referring to the “Working Poor” not the “Working Class” restricts the reform conversation to the problem of “welfare” rather than the problems of “political economy and work” (O'Connor, 2001). Therefore, although the proposal attempted to indicate a new progressive approach to federal welfare policy and address structural reforms, its approach was restricted to a “narrow” conceptual framework.

In this manner, the conservative president who dreamed of going down in history as a progressive leader lost a unique opportunity to overturn a stereotype rooted back in 19th-century England- the myth of the lazy undeserving poor. Nixon could not present a 'new and drastically different approach' to one of its most presenting social problems. This legacy influenced the Clinton administration’s welfare reform in 1996 which “dependency” was their principal target. U.S. history is self-replicating by approaching the poverty problem within the “narrow” conceptual framework. Individual failure rather than structural inequality and cultural and skill deficits than the unequal distribution of power and wealth are more addressed in the U.S. social welfare policies.

A scientific concept can be used and/or abused by ideological motives. This can be demonstrated by reviewing the history of Oscar Lewis’s “subculture of poverty” concept. Every society has some individuals and groups who are successful and some who are less successful. In the U.S., “anyone could climb the economic ladder, provided they had the attitude, psychological makeup, and determination to get ahead” (O'Connor, 2001). For American liberals and conservatives, the differences in individual and group levels of outcomes are explained primarily in cultural terms. The conservative argues that superior and inferior cultural values exist and that good values produce successful individuals and groups. Therefore, conservatives believe that individuals are responsible for their conditions and focus on the behavioral problems of the poor rather than problems of political-economic structures. As conservatives insisted that the only way to help the poor is to get them to change their values, they started the construction of poverty knowledge on the cultural understanding of the poor. This combination of politics and social science which guided the construction of poverty knowledge will be discussed in this section.

Historical analysis of poverty knowledge was assessed as a part of historical trends in ideology, politics, institutions, culture, and political economy than learning about poverty’s causes and cures. During the Depression era, behavior and culture were emphasized rather than economic analyses that could explain poverty. “Cultural lag” that Lynd implicated explained the problems of class polarization and unemployment during this era. The main point of addressing lower-class cultural disadvantage was to recognize that lower-class culture would not change without prior changes in economic opportunity. This lower-class culture is independent of economics. This cultural lag was then developed into a culture of poverty by Oscar Lewis. He created an inventory of behavioral and psychological “traits” that are universal to poor people around the globe. He explained the paradox of poverty in the affluent U.S. by emphasizing the behavioral and psychological aspects that would persist even without the deprivations caused by structural factors such as modernization, race, and class (O'Connor, 2001).

The culture of poverty was identified as the main obstacle to black progress. The economic situation of the blacks could also be described as pathological in much the same way. Black culture resulted in the product of low skills and lack of education always compounded by the fact of racial discrimination. Because of the racism in the “general American culture,” the vast majority of blacks had not been allowed to assimilate as other immigrants, and the opportunity cost for this was to be found in the family instability, religious “emotionalism,” high crime rates, “superstition,” “provincialism,” “personality difficulties,” and other “characteristic traits” of Negro culture (O'Connor, 2001). The culture of poverty even narrowly fixated on the psychological dimensions of family life. For example, the absence of a father at home, which was prevalent in black households, would leave the children without the basic personality traits, such as anxiety and frustration, that motivated achievement. This discussion opened the way for the racialization of poverty knowledge as in all senses a problem of cultural pathology.

Moreover, according to a prevalent argument in sociology, every complex society needs a system of stratification to help individuals “adjust” to their community. The culture of poverty is part of an adaption to a set of objective conditions of the larger society. However, there were instances where these adaptions or assimilations were assessed based on cultural stereotypes. For example, social workers thought European immigrants were capable of assimilation (Fox, 2012). In contrast, social workers considered that Mexicans could never become true Americans and were not capable of assimilation. Based on their preference, they collected data to support their argument. Social workers tried to prove that European immigrants were not welfare dependents and explained their vulnerability based on structural or environmental causes. In contrast, white social workers collected data to prove the Mexicans’ use of relief and spread the stereotype of Mexican dependency. In much the same way, cultural stereotypes about “black migrants’ predilection for dependency also existed. This history implies that assessing individuals or groups based on the “psychological and social-psychological orientation,” focusing heavily on prejudice, intergroup relations, and often, for policy and political purposes.

The culture of poverty is a simple and powerful concept that has policy implications. If the politics focus on why the poor were culturally different, whether policy could do anything to make them more like everyone else should be discussed. Lewis emphasized the autonomy of culture and its imperviousness to change which leads to a question of whether lower-class culture should be subject to reform efforts. This especially brought more attention in response to Oscar Lewis and the politicized context of the War on Poverty (O'Connor, 2001). The War on Poverty cultivated and tried out theories about how to help the “culturally deprived” children of poverty that were emerging within the field of child development. The culture of poverty concept proved attractive to US public policymakers and politicians and strongly informed the War on Poverty in general. Decades after the War on Poverty, the holistic approach has become prevalent and more deeply entrenched than the behavioral patterns attributed to any particular class of poor people. However, regardless of this new poverty knowledge, liberals and conservatives frequently use the concept of culture to support their policy strategies. Whenever the economic conditions are poor, immigrants are targeted and blamed for their dependency, family instability, high crime rates, personality difficulties, and other characteristic traits of their immigrant culture. In conclusion, historically, the conservatives used the culture of poverty as their political strategy to explain and social problems. When structural analysis did enter the poverty debate in the 1980s, it was under the cover of a concept that was a very limited and highly stigmatized segment of the poor. People continued to think in strictly behavioral and cultural terms. However, it is important to raise the notion that poverty is not the result of a “culture of poverty” drenched in racial stereotypes but rather the necessary result of America’s distinctive political economy system.

References

1. Fox, C. (2012) Three worlds of relief: Race, immigration and the American welfare state from the Progressive era to the New Deal. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
2. Hacker, J. S. (2002) The divided welfare state: the battle over public and private social benefits in the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
3. Katz, Michael B. and Stern, Mark J. (2006) One Nation Divisible: What America was and What it is Becoming. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
4. O'Connor, A. (2001). Poverty knowledge: Social science, social policy, and the poor in twentieth-century U.S. history. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
5. Orleck, A. (2005) Storming Caesar’s Palace: How black mothers fought their war on poverty. Beacon Press,
6. Stansell, C. (1986) City of Women: sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860. New York: Alfred A Knopf.