American Dream

by Jason DeParle

  Framed in docudrama clarity, this was just what Wisconsin feared: welfare families—black welfare families—racing in for higher benefits. The aid givers’ fear of attracting aid seekers is a timeless one, or at least as old as the Elizabethan Poor Laws, which greeted migrating paupers with residency requirements nearly four centuries earlier. But the tensions in Wisconsin in the early 1990s were especially pronounced. A run-up in the state’s benefits had left a stark imbalance along the Illinois line and roiled Wisconsin politics for decades. Angie and Jewell had no way to know that the very thing that had drawn them to town, larger welfare checks, was about to turn Milwaukee into the world’s most famous welfare-eradication zone.

  In Milwaukee, as in most American cities, the story of welfare was tangled in the story of race. One reason the city had almost no public housing was the belief, as one opponent put it in 1952, that the lack of affordable shelter was “the only thing that has kept ten thousand—aye, twenty thousand—Negroes from coming up here.” A main champion of black interests, the white socialist mayor Frank Zeidler, survived a particularly ugly challenge in 1956 when his critics spread rumors that Zeidler was posting billboards across the South to lure more blacks to town. Time dubbed the campaign “the Shame of Milwaukee,” and it bore a second distinction: forty years before Congress put time limits on welfare, Zeidler’s opponent called for time-limiting stays in public housing, to keep black migrants away.

  They came, anyway. As late as 1950, blacks composed as little as 3 percent of the city’s population. Their numbers rose fivefold over the next two decades, though welfare was hardly involved. While Wisconsin’s benefits were higher than those in the South, they were not much different from neighboring states, and the migrants mostly came for other reasons—for better jobs and schools, to join family, or to flee Jim Crow. Ironically, the racial conflict that ensued brought a liberal ascension—and with it, the rising benefits—that made Wisconsin a welfare magnet, after all. Some of the worst racial confrontations occurred on the city’s south side, in blue-collar neighborhoods fiercely opposed to housing integration. After those precincts gave George Wallace his first strong northern showing in his 1964 presidential race, he said if he ever left Alabama he would settle on the south side of Milwaukee. Wallace stayed out, but a few years later the city’s home-grown radical priest marched in. Organizing a band of black “youth commandos,” Father James Groppi led a series of marches for six months, drawing rock-throwing crowds thousands strong and helping to win the city’s first fair-housing laws. Next he turned to welfare.

  The battle began in 1969, after conservative Republicans in the legislature pushed through a benefit cut of 15 percent. Groppi led what started as a small protest march and ended as a melee, as thousands of university students joined an impromptu occupation of the Capitol. The day played out like a carnival set piece. Groppi proclaimed a “war on the rich,” while protesters flew a red flag and picnicked on the lawmakers’ floor. Bloody clashes continued for a week. In the short run, the protest backfired. The moderate Republican governor, Warren Knowles, was trying to restore the cuts, but the trashing of the Capitol only hardened the conservatives’ resolve. Yet the welfare cutters also suffered self-inflicted blows. Sneering about “virgin births,” Assembly Speaker Harold Froehlich urged that recipients be prosecuted under antifornication laws. His ally, Ken Merkel, a John Bircher from the Milwaukee suburbs, suggested they trim their food budgets to twenty-two cents a meal, and his supporters called recipients “gorillas.” The ugly racial subtext, coupled with the bloodied protesters, fed a broader rejection of the political right. In a landslide the following year, the Democrats captured the governorship and two-thirds of the assembly. Throughout the 1970s, the Democrats ruled Wisconsin.

  The changes that followed made the state a lodestar of welfare liberalism: benefit increases, eligibility expansions, and streamlined applications. Benefits more than doubled in the 1970s. Caseloads tripled. In 1970, Wisconsin’s grants per family ranked twenty-sixth nationwide. Five years later, among the lower forty-eight, only Connecticut paid more. The legislators who championed the benefit expansion saw it as an overdue bit of economic justice (and a hedge against further violence). But among the problems they created was a disparity along the southern border. Before the run-up, benefits in Wisconsin were 21 percent lower than those in Illinois. By 1980, Wisconsin’s payments were 54 percent higher. The Chicago ghettos had horrific problems. Milwaukee offered safer streets, cheaper housing, and larger welfare checks—all just ninety miles up the road. Who - wouldn’t be tempted to move?

  The notion that women like Angie and Jewell move for higher benefits has long been discounted by academics, and nationally the evidence was slight. But the Milwaukee-Chicago situation was unique, both in the proximity of the cities and the difference in what their benefits could buy. In 1986, a state-sponsored study concluded that migration played a “relatively small” part in the Wisconsin’s caseload growth. Yet it also showed that nearly half the applicants in Milwaukee were newcomers from another state. In 1991, another study found that 21 percent of Milwaukee applicants had arrived in the previous three months. Surveyed by strangers, most migrants cited less stigmatized reasons for a move—family ties, better schools—but with people they knew, Angie and Jewell were blunt. “We came up here because the aid in Chicago wasn’t nowhere as much as it was up here,” Jewell said. Angie said the same: “We were figuring out how we were gonna pay our bills.”

  When they arrived in 1991, Milwaukee had the nation’s fastest-growing ghetto. The number of high-poverty census tracts (those where two-fifths of the residents were poor) had tripled in just a decade. In 1970, only 1 percent of metro area residents lived in such areas of dense poverty, and nearly half were white; by 1990, 10 percent lived in the expanding poverty zone, and more than two-thirds were black. Half the black population of Milwaukee County was drawing a welfare check. Welfare was by no means the sole cause of the urban transformation; Milwaukee had lost nearly half of its manufacturing jobs in just twenty years (from 1967 to 1987). But welfare, compared to deindustrialization, was an issue politicians could more readily address, and voters were screaming for change. “Go back to Illinois,” advised a letter published in the Kenosha News. “[A]ll you bring with you are more drugs, gangs, vandalism, murder, muggings, robberies and more rug rats for us to feed.”

  In 1986, advisers to the Democratic governor, Anthony Earl, approached him with a plan to trim benefits and impose work rules. Earl demurred; for many Democrats, the criticism of welfare still carried a racist taint. Earl’s opponent in the fall election, Republican Tommy G. Thompson, made a similar welfare-cutting plan a cornerstone of his campaign. No one took Thompson seriously. Preternaturally ambitious, he had captured his assembly seat straight out of law school but was still stuck there twenty years later—the leader of a powerless minority, so reflexively negative he was known as “Dr. No.” His opponent in the Republican primary had dismissed him as a “two-bit hack,” and the head of the state Democratic Party declared her bra size larger than Thompson’s IQ.

  “Tommy Thompson wants to reform welfare and make Wisconsin like Mississippi,” Earl complained.

  “With you in charge,” Thompson answered, “we’re attracting all the people from Mississippi up here anyway.”

  Thompson rode the issue to an upset victory, cut benefits 5 percent, and put the savings in an early work program. Still, benefits remained comparatively high, and the work program weak. When Angie and Jewell arrived four years later, nothing much had changed.

  Finding a house came easy for Angie. Living without Greg did not. She had been on her own for four months, so the shock of his arrest hovered in a strange middle distance, as raw as yesterday and as distant as a lifetime ago. She took so many of his collect calls she needed fake names to keep the phone turned on. They spent half their time telling each other he’d be home soon and half secretly wondering what to do if he wasn’t. A month after Angie got to Milwaukee, her fa
ther died, bringing her something new to grieve. With everyone on First Street drinking, Angie drank, too: coolers, daiquiris, Tanqueray, beer. Drinking took her mind off Greg.

  By the time Angie arrived, Thompson’s early work initiative had been folded into a federal program called Job Opportunities and Basic Skills (JOBS), which for the first time required a part of the caseload to seek work, education, or training. When the appointment notice arrived, Angie met it with an open mind. She wanted to do something to let the kids know—to let herself know—that things would be all right. JOBS sent her to the nursing aides’ course where graduation had conferred such pride, but once she quit the nursing home it lost track of her. After a few months, she pressed ahead on her own, finding work at the post office; taking up with the deejay, Vernon; and enrolling in a GED class. Her efforts to scramble onto her feet stood out, not least since she scrambled alone; no one else in the First Street compound was thinking about work or school. After a year in Milwaukee, Angie couldn’t say just when her life there had come together. But she knew when it fell apart, the moment the nurse said the pregnancy test had come back positive. She went home and cried for a month.

  She was much more upset to be pregnant at twenty-seven than she had been at seventeen. Then she had Greg. Now she had Vernon. Or actually, she didn’t—she had already ditched him. Just getting her kids out the door some days was more than Angie could manage. Kesha had arrived in Milwaukee as a cheerful second-grader, surprisingly well-adjusted after what she had been through, but she was absent a third of the school year. Her asthma attacks were part of the problem, but so was everything else: the late-night parties, the winter cold, Angie’s sadness over losing Greg. Kesha “tries very hard to do her work, even though all of the work that involves reading is difficult,” her teachers wrote. At the end of the year, they called her a “pleasure” but held her back. Redd missed half his kindergarten year and struck his teachers as less of a pleasure. “Dwayne has to put forth more effort,” one warned the next year, as he failed first grade. Having finally gained some forward momentum, Angie just couldn’t see returning to bottles and diapers. Something about abortion made her hesitate, but survival was its own imperative: you do what you have to do. Angie bought a $350 money order and asked her cousin Adolph for a ride.

  Adolph started up on the way—abortion’s a sin, God don’t play that—but Angie wasn’t in the mood, particularly from a man. Adolph wouldn’t be there to raise this child and neither would Vernon. “Just drive and shut up,” she said. One of the protesters outside the clinic called her a “baby killer.” A counselor asked if she’d considered other plans. She had considered them night and day. Finally she was in the examining room, with her feet up in stirrups, when a nurse explained what would follow. She would give Angie a pain pill, wait thirty minutes, and return to dilate her cervix. The aspiration would produce uterine cramps. To some women, it feels like labor.

  Labor? As the words sank in, Angie couldn’t believe what she had heard. “Labor” brought to her mind another word. Baby.

  “Un-uhh,” she thought. “Un-uhh!”

  “Are you telling me I have to have my baby in order to kill my baby?” she said. “That’s murder for real!”

  Her legs flew out of the stirrups. Her feet hit the floor. “Gimme my money back,” she said. “I’m fittin’ to be gone.”

  To explain how much she wanted that abortion, Angie would later resort to quadruple adverbs; she “really, really, really, really” wanted it. She wanted it, literally, more than she could say. “My conscience just wouldn’t let me,” she said. In surrendering to biological chance, Angie surrendered more broadly. She quit school. She quit the post office. Too depressed to face the world, she stayed home drinking for months. If she couldn’t control what was happening to her body, how - could she pretend to control her larger fate? In June 1993, a miserable pregnancy peaked in an excruciating birth—a boy she named Darrell. She had been in Milwaukee for nearly two years, and she was in a deeper hole than when she had arrived.

  Angie had summoned enough sentiment to put Darrell’s sonogram in her photo album. But the flesh-and-blood presence of an infant did nothing to boost her spirits. Jewell didn’t think she was coping very well and took over for a few days. Vernon dropped off some Pampers and clothes, but Angie didn’t want to see him, and for years she more or less didn’t. Angie sent the older kids to see her mom in Mississippi, and while they were gone, she heard the post office was hiring again. “It was time to get up off my ass,” she said. She still had her welfare check, and the baby brought a two-year exemption from JOBS. But “I don’t like sitting around no house,” she said. “Some people’s mind just ain’t right for kids.”

  Angie’s second tour at the post office is a story she tells with pride. It lasted a year and a half, long enough to earn her label as the First Street “workaholic.” Sent downtown, rather than to the airport, Angie had a shorter commute. And as a handler, rather than a sorter, she - could move around and talk with friends. Since no one else in the compound had a regular job, child care wasn’t a problem. A romance with Lucky’s uncle, Johnny, didn’t work out, and Angie was more hurt than she liked to show. But she launched another, with a postal worker named Sherman. She bought her first car. Then she learned to drive. The kids had some good news, too. By the end of his kindergarten year, Von had learned to count to one hundred, and his report card swelled with superlatives: “A very good student and friend!” Kesha scored an even bigger triumph. After struggling through two years of second grade, she gained ground in third, and had a breakthrough year in fourth. Her attendance rate reached 90 percent, and, except for reading, she earned straight As; by the end of the year, even her reading had reached grade level. “Lakesha is a lovely young lady,” her teacher wrote. “She has great potential for success.”

  But maintaining the momentum was hard, for Angie and the kids. Six months into her postal job, Angie found two Chicago police officers at her door, asking for Angela Jobe. “She ain’t here,” Angie said. The next thing she knew, she was in the back of their car, heading to Greg’s trial. It had been nearly three years since Greg’s arrest, and they each had reason to feel abandoned. Angie didn’t write much anymore or bring the kids to see him; Greg couldn’t do anything to help her raise them. Angie knew little about the shooting, and from the stand she shared as little as possible about what she did know. But she got a private visit with Greg before the trial began. The prosecutors were still offering a deal, and Angie urged him to take it. He wound up instead with sixty-five years.

  Redd, still in first grade, turned eight the day after his father’s sentencing. He still didn’t know what his father had done, but among the kids he missed him the most. While Kesha missed Greg in a misty, little girl’s way, sending him valentines, Redd missed him with raw fury. He put on weight as he repeated first grade, and classmates started to taunt him. Redd wasn’t afraid to fight back, with his lip or with his fists. Academically he didn’t meet the promotional requirements to get out of second grade, but at nine he was too old to stay back again, so his teacher passed him on to third. A lackluster student who had missed her own father, Angie identified with Redd. She also felt powerless to help him.

  What she did was continue to work. Either from knowledge or canny sixth sense, Angie finally reported the job just before the state computer network probably would have caught her. “I have never had no friends tell them when they was working,” she said. “Nobody but my dumb ass!” The fall-off in her benefits explains her reluctance: for every $100 she earned, her package of welfare and food stamps fell by $61, and she paid $7 in payroll taxes. She faced a higher marginal tax rate than Bill Gates did. With her take-home pay running about half the minimum wage, why bother? “ ’Cause I like working—that’s why!” Angie said. “It makes me feel good, like I accomplish something. As long as I’m working, I can say ‘I work,’ doing what I can for my kids.”

  Angie’s pride was real but hard to sustain, especially wh
en the job left her with so little to show. Angie usually says her postal career ended with a layoff, a version she half believes. In truth, she quit. She quit because her “cool” supervisor was replaced by an autocrat. (“Everything went to hell! We was doing shit somebody else shoulda done.”) She quit because the Christmas rush left her so tired, she was ready to go postal herself. (“Not one day off! You wonder why they crazy up in there?”) She quit because she resented her temp-worker caste, while veterans could walk into union jobs at twice the pay. (“We ain’t got no war—what makes you so special?”) That is, she quit because the job market for low-skilled workers is stressful and exploitative. Yet quitting left her stuck at its lowest rungs. “If I was still working at the post office now, I’d be making about $12, $13 an hour,” she said years later.

  She also quit because she could: she had a welfare check. “I knew if I left the post office, I could still have money,” she said. She told her caseworker she had stopped working months before she did, and with her full benefits restored, she bought a new living room set. For all her efforts, Angie was still stuck, and the welfare system let her stay that way.

  Unlike Angie, Jewell wasn’t thinking about jobs, and the JOBS program wasn’t thinking about her. She was seven months pregnant when she got to Milwaukee, and the birth of her second son, Tremmell, left her exempt until he turned two. While Angie found refuge in the First Street parties, Jewell wearied of the commotion and made one of the modest bids for independence that subtly defined her. She moved away. The appearance of the letters PZ in her welfare file might have given her pause. In moving to Twentieth and Brown, she and her new boyfriend, Lucky, had moved to a “pickup zone,” an area where checks got stolen so often the office made recipients come get them. With gunfire outside the window most nights, Jewell and the kids slept on the floor. Lucky had grown up a Gangster Disciple; Brown Street was Vice Lord ground. He got shot in the hand walking to the corner store, and Jewell raced back to First Street the next day. “I ain’t no kicking-it type—I’m a home-bound type,” she said. “But I ended up in the same place.”