The Legacy of Frances Fox Piven

Acad. Quest. (2015) 28: 281–288 DOI 10.1007/s12129-015-9513-0 VERDICTS Unordering Liberty: The Legacy of Frances Fox Piven David Stoesz Published online: 24 July 2015 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015 Ardent activist and provocateur, Frances Fox Piven earned her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1962. From 1962 to 1972 she taught at Columbia University’s School of Social Work, where she collaborated with her husband, Richard Cloward, on a forerunner of the War on Poverty, Mobilization for Youth. From 1972 to 1982 she taught political science at Boston University, where she became an icon of the Left. Currently, Piven is professor of political science and sociology at the City University of New York. She has held leadership positions in the American Political Science Association, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the American Sociological Association. In addition to cofounding the National Welfare Rights Organization, she cofounded an organization promoting voter registration, a precursor of the National Voter Registration (“Motor Voter”) Act. Piven has received five honorary doctorates and more than a dozen lifetime achievement awards. The arc of Piven’s career spans the War on Poverty, the Reagan revolution, and the rise of neoliberalism, events defining the decline of the Left and the rise of the Right in the 1970s and 1980s. The 1970s also marked a divergence in liberalism. On the one side there were the “Romantic” activists such as Piven and Cloward, who attempted to replicate for the minority poor victories that suffragettes, labor leaders, and civil rights activists had achieved for women, David Stoesz is program director and professor of social work at the University of Illinois Springfield, Springfield, IL 62703-5407; [email protected]. Poverty has been a long-standing interest, informed by having been a welfare caseworker, living on the West Side of Baltimore, serving as a welfare department director, and writing a critique of welfare reform, A Poverty of Imagination (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000). He is the author of The Dynamic Welfare State (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) and Quixote’s Ghost: The Right, the Liberati, and the Future of Social Policy (Oxford University Press, 2005), among other books. 282 Stoesz workers, and blacks decades earlier through organized marches and protests. On the other side, in stark contrast, stood the “Empirical” analysts, including Daniel Patrick Moynihan and James Coleman, who were vilified for their research at variance with the received truth of the liberal Left. While leftist Romantics insisted that corporate interest exploited the poor, Moynihan and Coleman demonstrated that poverty was more nuanced, associated with increasing family disorganization and that the short-term benefits of anti-poverty programs eroded over time, respectively. While the mass demonstrations advocated by Piven contributed to a short-lived welfare rights movement, ultimately data would triumph, conspicuously evident in the field experiments that provided the justification for the 1996 welfare reform. A decade later, Occupy Wall Street spluttered out at the very moment radicalized conservatives founded the Tea Party, elected Republican majorities to both houses of Congress, and bedeviled a progressive President Obama. Undaunted, Piven continues to advance a leftist agenda that emphasizes the role of organized labor and liberal academics in social affairs, even as the credibility of both has cratered. Despite an industrial era theory of social change that failed to incorporate the dynamics of the information age, Piven remains the doyenne of the literary Left, a liberati nostalgic for simplistic explanations of progress.1 The genesis of Piven’s oeuvre can be traced to “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty,” published in 1966 in The Nation,inwhichsheand Cloward proposed mobilizing the poor in order to create “a political crisis” that would produce a guaranteed annual income, thus eliminating poverty: “Widespread campaigns to register the eligible poor for welfare aid, and to help existing recipients obtain their full benefits, would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state government.” 2 Initially, Piven and Cloward viewed public welfare as contrary to the interests of the poor, but rather than call for eliminating it or instituting incremental policy reforms, they paradoxically suggest dramatically expanding the number of welfare beneficiaries. In 1972 Piven and Cloward published their iconic text, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare, which documented a dynamic relationship 1David Stoesz, Quixote’s Ghost: The Right, the Liberati, and the Future of Social Policy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 2Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty,” Nation, May 2, 1966, http://www.thenation.com/article/weight-poor-strategy-end-poverty. Unordering Liberty: The Legacy of Frances Fox Piven 283 between public assistance and wages. 3 As the demand for low-skilled labor increased, they maintained, welfare benefits dropped in order to force the disproportionately minority poor to work. This idea was not new; indeed, the “less eligibility principle,” holding that the status of welfare recipients must be below the lowest laborer, had been introduced in the British Poor Law of 1834.4 Piven and Cloward contended, however, that agricultural mechanization in the South created a chain of events that replicated the mass unemployment of the Great Depression. As blacks migrated to cities, they encountered discrimination, which caused unemployment; electoral retribution blocked, blacks resorted to civil disorder, which was defused by expanding the relief rolls. Having provided this historical justification for their 1966 screed that called for actions to collapse the welfare system and install guaranteed income instead, Piven and Cloward opposed palliative or incremental measures to improve the functioning of the dislocated, minority poor: “We are opposed to work-enforcing reforms.” 5 Once the restive poor were pacified, “relief-giving can be virtually abolished, as it has been so often in the past” (emphasis in original).6 Piven and Cloward hoped to shatter the historic dynamic through which low-wage work oscillated with welfare benefits, creating a substandard income for low-income families, by mobilizing the poor in order to replace inadequate public assistance with a guaranteed annual income. Having rejected judicious measures to accommodate the minority poor as faux relief by the state, Piven and Cloward opted for continual mass protest. Accordingly, the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) was organized in 1966 to attain equity for welfare recipients. Led by charismatic George Wiley, an American chemist and civil rights leader, NWRO grew to represent twenty-five thousand members at its apogee, and organized demonstrations in cities around the country. The momentum behind NWRO would dissipate with Wiley’s death, however, and the organization shuttered in 1975. Published two years after NWRO’s demise, Piven and Cloward’s Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail continued to endorse mass demonstration as a means to achieve social justice for the welfare poor.7 With the election of Ronald Reagan as president, Piven and Cloward reversed course: confronted with an administration stridently anti-welfare, they embraced 3Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York: Vintage, 1971). 4Walter I. Trattner, From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America (New York: The Free Press, 1974), 49. 5Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, 347. 6Ibid. 7Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage, 1977). 284 Stoesz the welfare state. Perceiving conservative assaults on public assistance as inimical to the poor, in The New Class War: Reagan’s Attack on the Welfare State and Its Consequences, they defended public assistance; even if benefits were inadequate, they should be salvaged. “The emergence of the welfare state was a momentous development in American history,” they wrote. “It meant that people could turn to government to shield them from the insecurities and hardships of an unrestrained market economy.”8 The Reagan presidency provided a venue for conservative critics of public welfare, including George Gilder, Charles Murray, and Lawrence Mead. 9 In response, in The Mean Season: The Attack on the Welfare State, Piven, Cloward, and co-authors Fred Block and Barbara Ehrenreich reverted to trope: The current ideological attack on the welfare state is a continuation of the repeated effort of the American business elite to limit the gains not only of the most vulnerable but of the majority of working people. In fact, the contemporary arguments against the welfare state are remarkably similar to those that have been employed decade after decade by business interests and their intellectual representatives.10 Buttonoavail—1988 witnessed the first conservative reform of public assistance, The Family Support Act. The battle over welfare, begun in the 1980s and continuing through the early 1990s, found the Left on eroding terrain, primarily because it had, as Lawrence Mead prophetically observed, failed to conduct serious research on poverty.11 The welfare state’s assignment

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