Culture » September 9, 2004

The Statistical Christs

By Jefferson Decker

After great fortunes were made in Victorian-era industrialization in America, wage earners, such as these Massachusetts railway workers, suffered when work became scarce.

In the decades following the Civil War, the northern half of the United States experienced massive social transformation. Large-scale manufacturing took off, European immigrants poured into cities and the ranks of industrial wage laborers exploded. When the economy boomed, a handful of men made great fortunes in railroads, steel and finance. When the economy stumbled, workers had few options. Previous generations of white Americans tended to be artisans or small farmers who could subsist off the land or family during hard times. Wage laborers, on the other hand, suffered immediate deprivation when work became scarce. They took to the road in search of jobs and sought out charity when none could be found.

In The New Victorians, Stephen Pimpare describes how this transformation set off a debate about economics, inequality and poverty. On one side, struggling workers pressed for a generous system of public relief to ameliorate the extremes of the new economy. Often, they found allies among elected officials who were anxious to please their working-class constituents and build urban political machines. In Philadelphia, public relief spending doubled between 1850 and 1870. In New York City, expenditures doubled during the 1860s alone. But this expansion also faced a concerted counter-attack in the 1870s and 1880s, from a group of intellectuals, political reformers and charities. Through a network of Charity Organization Societies, the reformers sought to make poor relief rational, scientific—and stingy. Robert Treat Paine of Boston gave the group its motto: “Not Alms, but a Friend.”

The debate turned on a simple question: What causes poverty? Advocates of public assistance blamed economic factors: Deprivation happened when the economy failed to provide jobs. Accordingly, those who profited most from the economic system had a responsibility to help those who could not find enough work. The Charity Organization Societies told a different story. Poverty, their members insisted, was a moral failure on the part of the poor. As Mrs. Glendower Evans argued at a charity conference in 1889, “Too often it will be found that the root of the evil lies in the character of the poor themselves—in habits of laziness, shiftlessness, intemperance or vice, which have reduced them to an irregular and meagre subsistence.”

The Charity Organization Societies pressed private charities to focus on moral reform rather than simply provide aid and argued that government-run public assistance was counter-productive. “Indiscriminate almsgiving is a crime against society,” complained reformer William Slocum in 1882. Reformers promoted this message through conferences, journals and the popular press—most of them underwritten by wealthy employers. The effort paid off. By the late 1890s, 39 of the 50 largest U.S. cities had reconfigured cash assistance programs to reduce amounts of public aid and subsidize moral reform. As the poet John Boyle O’Reilly wrote, in verse, “organized charity scrimped and iced / in the name of a cautious, statistical Christ.”

Alongside this history, Pimpare draws parallels with its 20th Century counterpart: the campaign against welfare that culminated in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. Like the charity reform movement, the anti-welfare forces were organized and bankrolled by a group of wealthy individuals and institutions, such as the Coors and Olin foundations. They too built a network of organizations to share information and make a case to the public. And they made the morality of the poor—a question that had receded from view during the New Deal through the Great Society—central to the debate. Anti-welfare authors such as Charles Murray in Losing Ground demonized “welfare mothers” for laziness and bearing children out of wedlock. And they blamed federal public assistance programs, especially Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), for creating a “welfare trap” that kept recipients in poverty and promoted anti-social values. These “new Victorians” got many of their wishes in 1996, when Congress voted to abolish AFDC, drive down caseloads through punitive sanctions and replace federal guarantees with block grants to state governments.

Pimpare offers a defense of generous public assistance programs on the grounds that they benefit all working-class people. Aid gives a worker with a marginal income an option—the opportunity to avoid the labor market when it pays too little or proves demeaning and the so-called “marriage market” when potential spouses are abusive or inadequate. This, Pimpare argues, boosts incomes across the low-wage workforce because employers must offer higher wages to find employees. “American businesses, especially those that needed low-wage, low-skilled workers, clearly understood the economic benefits of welfare reform just as their counterparts had over a century ago.” Too often, welfare reform simply means replacing union workers with “workfare” recipients making sub-minimum wages.

There is considerable truth to this argument, but I think it should come with significant qualification. Opposition to U.S. welfare policy as it existed before 1996 did not come exclusively from the corporate-funded conservative propagandists profiled by Pimpare. Some liberals worried that providing long-term public assistance to healthy adults violated norms of fair play and mutual responsibility that they used to defend other redistributive public policies. Others thought that the specific design of AFDC created economic incentives—for example, to take under-the-table work that could be hidden from welfare agencies instead of jobs in the formal economy—with unfortunate social consequences. Still others believed (incorrectly) that welfare mostly served African-Americans and resented it on racist grounds. By turning the entire debate into a contest between neo-Victorians and their ideological opposites, Pimpare fails to address the public opinion in between. As a result, he never explains why AFDC proved so vulnerable to attack in the first place.

After all, AFDC was not the only government program to face a concerted propaganda assault in the past few decades. But conservatives have been much less successful at undermining public support for, say, minimum wage laws—even though they impact low-wage labor markets directly. Nor have numerous think-tank campaigns succeeded in demolishing Social Security or doing away entirely with environmental protection or workplace safety legislation. (Indeed, the substantial regulatory and welfare state that grew up in the mid-20th century made the wage effects of the 1996 welfare reform far less significant than the cutbacks of public aid in the 19th century were.) It is worth wondering why attacks on AFDC led to its abolition while many other government programs have withstood, thus far, the concerted attack on so-called big government. Doing so might produce a more complicated and ambiguous history of policy-making in the late 20th century. But it could also help advocates of generous public aid design the kind of programs that can withstand the inevitable counterattacks from the right.

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• Reader Comments

  I thought I might respond to Jefferson Decker’s thoughtful review of The New Victorians—actually, it’s only the final two paragraphs I want to take issue with, paragraphs in which he suggests how my argument, as he lays it out, might be qualified and complicated.  I am in full agreement, so much so that I addressed these issues in the book itself, though perhaps not as clearly as I might have.  Let me try to clarify, since Decker raises good, and I think important, questions.

  Decker is right to suggest that contemporary opposition to welfare was more broadly rooted than merely among anti-welfare business conservatives.  That’s in part the puzzle I set out to answer in The New Victorians.  Opposition to welfare was widespread in the late twentieth century, just as it had been in the late nineteenth century, just as it has been throughout most all of American (and world) history.  The puzzle is why only at these two moments in American political history was anti-relief sentiment able to mobilize a widespread roll-back of benefits.  The argument I make in The New Victorians is that only when that opposition was institutionalized (in nineteenth century Charity Organization Societies and twentieth century think tanks) and it thereby found entrée into the policy making apparatus was it able to dominate policy debate and change policy itself.  That’s also part of why I pay so much attention to the manner in which a few nineteenth century cities were able to resist these powerful reform efforts, thanks to the institutionalized resilience and inertia of certain relief agencies, the mobilized resistance of poor and working people, and pro-relief propaganda from competing elites.

  Decker is also right that welfare alone was not the target; but again, this forms a key thread in my narrative—because of the vulnerabilities in its political support and the structural failings of AFDC that he reminds us of (which New Victorians does, too) I argue that AFDC was merely a first target in a bigger and bolder class war, an effort that is raging now to return us to pre-Progressive Era notions of the appropriate role of the state, to do no less than undo the Great Society and the New Deal.  Social Security has not been repealed, it is true, but surely we can see the ways in which Democrats and Republicans alike contemplate various schemes of privatization, unthinkable (at least for Democrats) twenty years ago; unlike AFDC, because of Social Security’s strong political support and its structural, institutionalized resilience, it is a much more difficult target for rollback.  But it is a target, and the campaign against welfare helped soften the ground for this much larger battle, something Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan saw clearly upon welfare reform’s passage.  And I hardly need point out the state of environmental, and workplace health and safety regulations.  Or new overtime regs.  Or progressive tax policy.  And so on. 

  As for the suggestion that The New Victorians pay more attention to the middle-ground of public opinion, I must confess to being at something at a loss, that being at the very heart of the book – to show the ways in which conservative think tanks successfully shaped public understandings about and discourse over welfare, pushed credible social science data out of the debate, and the ways in which misconceptions came to appear in polled public opinion, then from the mouths of both Democratic and Republic policy makers, and then in policy itself.  Sure, there were legitimate liberal complaints about welfare – it was a deeply flawed program, especially from the perspective of those who depended upon it (as David Ellwood put it, “Everyone hates welfare”).  But those voices are not the ones that dominated debate and shaped policy reform, and thus play a very small role in my story (as I think they should, though we could disagree about that).

  Finally, we do need to think in a more sophisticated fashion about how to structure social welfare programs that are more resilient to attack, as Decker urges.  But that is not enough, for as the first Gilded Age’s battles over relief show, institutional resilience is not likely to be sufficient – only when grassroots mobilization in defense of relief was joined with elite rhetorical defense of strong welfare programs were anti-welfare campaigns beaten back.  That offers a lesson for us today, as I tried to show in The New Victorians.

  Posted by Stephen Pimpare on Sep 13, 2004 at 3:33 PM

  Is the idea we should support everyone who does not work? That work itself should be optional?

  From what i can tell, most people (all?) are basically lazy. They do what they need to do to survive. The ability to survive has gotten much easier in the last hundred years. Now people in the US in the “povery” zone basically all have color tvs, cars, vcrs, enough food to eat etc (ok, there are some exceoptions but this applies to the large majority, according to all the studies i have read). This is not poverty, at least not by historical standards (remember the potato famine - now that was poverty!).

  The problem here is that too many people have a desire to have a standard of living that is just too high. We should all reduce our personal standards of living. I will start now - from now on, i will live on 75% of my means. And as time goes on, i will decrease my expenses.

  If everyone in the US does this (or everyone with a per capita income of over $10K anyway), it will benefit the environment, the energy problems and many other problems. We are all living too high on the hog - it is time to readjust to a more modest life style.

  Posted by man on Sep 14, 2004 at 7:31 PM

  If everyone reduced by 25% their consumption of appliances, automobiles and gas, clothes, food, and assorted sundries, what does ‘man’ think the effect would be on the economy?  On US manufacturers, on foreign exporters to the US, on the balance of trade, etc.?

  Posted by Johnny on Sep 15, 2004 at 12:23 PM

  Johnny - all changes can cause bad side effects. But if we (the US and other developed countries) continue to increase consumption over the next 100 years at the current rate, what do you think will happen?

  The point is that we are heading off a cliff, being driven by greed. We can either fix the problem now or continue on our merry way. If we continue as we are, imagine the environmental effects and the social consequences (distribution of wealth issues come to mind).

  We as a nation are all a bit too fat and too happy. Even the poor (have you noticed how obese they are, especially in the US?). Used to be that the rich were fat - now it is the other way around. . .

  Posted by man on Sep 15, 2004 at 12:33 PM

  Why is it that people resent giving to the poor and no one complains about what the Senators and Congressmen take?  They have fixed it so that they get everything. Lots of perks that the poor never dream of. We were actually better off when people went into factories to work. Everyone worked. Not many were on welfare. Now people either work for the government, a contractor or go into the military. Places like Walmart and the military encourage people to apply for food stamps. What’s wrong with this?

  Posted by Jean Scott on Sep 16, 2004 at 11:25 AM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

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