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The Politics of Welfare Retrenchment, 1873-1898 and 1973-2002

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The Politics of Welfare Retrenchment, 1873-1898 and 1973-2002 City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 2002 No Relief: The Politics of Welfare Retrenchment, 1873-1898 and 1973-2002 Stephen Pimpare Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1690 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9’ black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. ProQuest Information and Learning 300 North Zeeb Road. Ann Arbor. Ml 48106-1346 USA 800-521-0600 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. / f No Relief: The Politics of Welfare Retrenchment, 1873-1898 and 1973-2002 by Stephen Pimpare A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Political Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2002 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 3047253 Copyright 2002 by Pimpare, Stephen All rights reserved. ____ ________ (f t UMI UMI Microform 3047253 Copyright 2002 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor. Ml 48106-1346 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ©2002 STEPHEN PIMPARE All Rights Reserved Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. This manuscript has been read and accepted by the Graduate Faculty in Political Science in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy [signature] ranees Fox Piven Chair of Examining Committee [signature] Da e W. Ofuatey Ki Executive Officer Herbert J. Gans John H. Mollenkopf Frances Fox Piven Andrew J. Polsky Sanford F. Schram Examining Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. A b s t r a c t No Relief: The Pblidcs of Welfare Retrenchment, 1873-1898 and 1973-2002 by Stephen Pimpare Advisor Frances Fox Piven No Relief compares the national repeal of AFDC in 1996 with the widespread campaigns against municipal poor relief that occurred throughout the United States some one hundred years earlier. In both eras businesses and the governments that depended upon them, threatened by growing labor power, civil unrest and the rising costs of poor relief, launched an attack against poor people and the limited benefits available to them. They did not do so directly but under cover of the Charity Organization Societies of the Gilded Age and conservative think tanks of the late twentieth century - “neutral” reform organizations that obscured the class-based nature of their activism. In addition to examining these institutions through which anti-relief campaigns were waged. No Relief explores the arguments used to justify relief reforms (which in both periods drew upon Malthusian and Spencerian ideas about the dangers of a profligate pauper class and the “natural” role of the state); the policies ultimately enacted (which restricted access to relief and made what was still available conditioned upon work or new standards of moral behavior); and the outcomes of such policy changes (which led to rising costs and less effective service provision, in which greater sums of money were distributed to private contractors and not-for-profit service providers, and less money reached those most in need). What reformers achieved was to remove the minimal supports available to poor men and women, forcing them into the low-wage labor market, into marriage, or into prison. No Relief concludes with an analysis of what these cases reveal about the circumstances under which welfare benefits previously extended to citizens can be rescinded with relative impunity and offers some thoughts as to what the ultimate outcomes of relief reform in the late nineteenth century might portend for the beginning of the twenty-first century. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. V P r e f a c e Here’s to You, Gertrude Hmmelfarb! The following pages seek to respond to a few challenges. An early inspiration was Andrew Polsky, who pointed me toward events in nineteenth century poor relief he thought I might find puzzling. He was right. Why did so many cities abolish poor relief at the end of the century? Why did other cities not do so? I began my investigation in hopes of simultaneously addressing social welfare historian Michael Katz’s complaint that “all discussions about the reasons for variation in [late nineteenth century poor] relief must remain speculative until historians do research on the topic. Virtually none exists at the moment” (Katz 1986, 341 fill3). But to fully answer that challenge was, I soon realized, a fool's errand, not least because of the scarcity of reliable data. I am not the first to note the problem. F.B. Sanborn quipped at the 1877 National Conference of Charities and Corrections (NCCC) that “Mr. Canning once said in parliament, 'I can prove anything by figures, except the truth.’ This is eminently the case with the figures which relate to pauperism.” The 1891 President’s address to the NCCC noted that “no state keeps complete statistical records.” “It is impossible to obtain statistics of value from the majority of the States,” complained another in 1892. Amos Warner wrote in 1894 that 'There are absolutely no reliable statistics of outdoor relief in the United States as a whole.” From the NCCC of 1898 we learn that “there is yet no uniformity [on reporting on relief] between the States, and the statistics secured are very imperfect.” As late as 1922, Katherine Howland of Smith College wrote that “Not only is there no central body of our federal government which collects statistics on poor relief, but in a large number of states not even figures are available for all the counties.” Suffice to say I cannot here offer the kind of rich comparison and analysis of poor relief patterns, city-by-city, that Katz (and I) would like to see. Instead, I gather what data are available to offer a few more pieces of the weird puzzle that is nineteenth century “welfare” (outdoor relief, or out-relief it was called then) and show how many of the same forces have more recently been at work once again. I do better addressing Lawrence Mead's complaint (2000) that scholars have too little attended to the politics of recent policymaking, especially to the conservative welfare changes Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. of the 1980s and 1990s. I take the challenge, ceitain he will find little to like in my explanation, and up the ante a decade by beginning that part of my story in the 1970s. But more on Mead below. I also pick up a gauntlet tossed down by Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. (Howard (1987, fh6), who lamented that “much of the history of popular political struggles over poor relief in the United States before the Great Depression remains to be written." True enough. Most people I daresay don’t even know that there were heated battles over outdoor relief in the late 1800s or that many cities abruptly cut off assistance, imposed work requirements, tightened eligibility standards and enacted other “reforms” that eerily echo the “reforms" made in the late twentieth century. This is a faint response to their fair challenge (and one that owes much to them and their work) but it helps, I hope, solve another intriguing puzzle: given that Americans have always been ambivalent about welfare (whatever we have called it), why at the end of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did we so give up on offering aid to poor people, and in so much the same way? Why then and why now? But it turns out that these pages are as much as anything a reaction to those Gilded Age charity reformers and some contemporary would-be Victorian revivalists who argue that it is a decline in values ( virtues, Gertrude Himmelfarb would insist we say) that is the real problem and that public efforts to reduce poverty by offering material aid, however well- intentioned, will only make matters worse, encouraging dependency, breeding illegitimacy and leading generally to the demise of all things decent and good.
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