American Dream

by Jason DeParle

  Just as no one expected Tommy Thompson to capture the governor’s mansion, no one expected to him to keep it. He was a quirk, a fluke, a “two-bit hack”—and he went on to become the longest-serving governor in state history. One reason was his mastery of welfare politics. “It’s a fantastic campaign issue,” he told me in 1994, when the issue had reached such a boil that even Ted Kennedy ran workfare ads. One observer that year argued that “all the Republican candidates, and a good portion of the Democratic candidates, are copying Tommy Thompson.” The observer was Tommy Thompson.

  Thompson’s early claims of success rested on a single statistic: caseload declines. From 1987 to 1993, the Wisconsin rolls fell 20 percent. Over the same years, caseloads rose in all but two states—nationally, they rose by a third. Thompson liked to say that he had moved more people off welfare than the rest of the country combined. Res ipsa loquitor. There was reason to be skeptical and not just because falling caseloads are value-neutral. (The question, of course, is what becomes of those not on the rolls.) Some of the declines simply came from his benefit cut, which also reduced eligibility; some came from the state’s strong economy; and caseloads barely budged in Milwaukee, the only place where Thompson’s efforts could be measured against the challenge of ghetto poverty.

  As programs, Thompson’s first efforts had flopped. Learnfare tried to keep kids in school by reducing the checks of families with teenage truants. Thompson said he got the idea while talking to his campaign - driver, and it had that kind of commonsense appeal. But it assumed more control over their kids than many parents had, and bureaucratically it proved a nightmare, especially in Milwaukee where the schools were too disorganized to track attendance. In 1992, when researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee found that it failed to boost school attendance, Thompson attacked them as liberal ideologues and canceled their contract. Then the new analysts found the same thing: “Learnfare had no detectable effect on school participation.” The debate over Thompson’s first work program ran a similar course. Work Experience and Job Training sent modest numbers of recipients into work or training programs. But when the evaluators (UW-M, again) found that it did little to move people into jobs, Thompson ended that contract, too, and ordered them to hand over their data to the state. They published their report, anyway, showing the earnings of recipients had risen in just two of twenty-nine counties.

  Thompson was done with big messy programs and prominent evaluations. In his second term, he ramped down to pilot projects and focused on the press release. In the early nineties, Gerald Whitburn, Thompson’s savvy welfare chief, ran the department like a unit of Procter & Gamble, rolling out a glossy new product each year, with maximum marketing oomph. “Bridefare,” a four-county marriage project, won Thompson a Bush White House event. “Two-Tier,” an effort to dissuade welfare migrants, staged a competition among prospective sites, a drawn-out process that kept the words Thompson and welfare reform in local headlines. It says something about Thompson’s lens on welfare that Whitburn held a second cabinet portfolio. He was the governor’s point man on polling.

  Thompson’s supporters make two plausible claims for his early record. By highlighting welfare’s failures, they say, his programs helped build support for deeper change. “It’s what I call the drip theory,” Whitburn said. “Over and over, and pound and pound, and out of that comes more and more understanding and fewer and fewer opponents.” To his credit, Thompson was also the rare governor who put up enough state matching funds to receive all his federal JOBS money. As a result, the modest percentage of the Wisconsin caseload enrolled in a welfare-to-work activity was two to three times the national average. That gave the bureaucracy some practice and probably helped trim the rolls. At the same time, Thompson had an advantage no other governor enjoyed, a special pipeline to federal aid. In one of his first acts in office, he cut a unique deal with the Reagan administration that eventually brought him a federal windfall of $148 million. Of that, $78 million ostensibly represented money the state had saved the feds by reducing its benefits, though no other state that cut benefits was allowed to make the same claim. The remaining $70 million was an even purer political gift. The embattled administration of George H. W. Bush, needing Thompson’s active support, signed off on the figure a few months before the 1992 election, saying that it represented unspecified cost savings. As one White House negotiator explained: “Wisconsin was in play. It was an election year. You don’t have to connect too many dots.”

  The “drip, drip, drip,” the special deals, the outsized claims of success—it all made Wisconsin Democrats chafe. In early 1993, as Clinton took office with a pledge to “end welfare” through time limits, Thompson tried to upstage him by announcing his own time-limit plan. It would affect only one thousand people in two rural counties, but it captured national headlines and left the state Democrats an unappealing choice. They could go along and feed the Thompson publicity machine or be tagged as welfare apologists. (When I saw him afterward, Thompson bragged he made liberals feel like “their hearts had been cut out.”) One thing that set Milwaukee apart from most big cities is that its leading Democrats were antiwelfare, too. Father Groppi notwithstanding, the idea of paying people not to work had never fit comfortably in its blue-collar culture; the focus of its famed socialist mayors had been clean government and rights for workers. As early as 1990, John Norquist, the Democratic mayor, had called for repealing AFDC and replacing it with public jobs. The mayor’s chief of staff, David Riemer, a public jobs zealot, had written a book on the subject. Their ally, Representative Shirley Krug, had been pushing a bill to replace welfare with jobs.

  In the fall of 1993, Norquist held a backyard picnic. A state legislator named Antonio Riley was there, complaining about Thompson’s latest headline grab. Riemer, the mayor’s aide, responded with a plea: end it. Answer Thompson’s two-county tinkering with a plan to abolish AFDC statewide. Riley had grown up on welfare himself and considered it “a jailer of people.” With the mayor’s blessing, he and Riemer drafted a one-page bill to scrap AFDC and replace it with a system of public employment. As for the obvious questions—how would it work? what would it cost?—the sketchy bill left five years for future debate. It passed without a Republican vote. Now, in a bizarre inversion of politics, it was the GOP’s turn to squirm: the Democrats had become the welfare repealers. The Republicans called it a publicity stunt, and they were largely right. Half the Democrats voted for the bill just to put Thompson in a bind. Whitburn, the welfare secretary, threatened a veto, and the effort seemed dead.

  At breakfast the following morning, Thompson chewed him out. Veto a death sentence for AFDC? “It was like serving me up a filet mignon when I was only supposed to get a cheese sandwich,” he later said. Wisconsin’s unique partial veto let him excise the public-job guarantees, and as for the rest of the new system, he had until nearly the end of the decade to figure it out. The feds would have to sign off first. It probably wouldn’t come to pass. If it did, no one had more than the vaguest idea of what would take the program’s place.

  As the backyard plot to end welfare hatched, Jewell recruited another recipient onto the Wisconsin rolls—her cousin Opal. They had been playmates in the projects two decades earlier, but until Jewell made a visit to Chicago and gave her a call, she hadn’t heard Opal’s voice in years. On the outs with her drug dealer husband and doubled up at her mother’s with three young kids, Opal was dying for a place of her own. When Jewell told her she could get a place on First Street, she hung up and started to pack. Coming home from work a few days later, Angie found a kindred spirit in the compound and embraced her as “family.” Opal had a knack for winning people over, and after five years of marriage she put it to quick use. She raced though a line of instant boyfriends with street names like “Smoke” and “Man.” She fell for a preachy black Muslim named “Dre,” whom Angie dubbed “Me Don’t Eat Pork,” after she caught him sneaking bites of bacon. Opal seemed crushed when Dre moved on, but recovered to cele
brate her twenty-eighth birthday with two suitors in her apartment, each unaware of the other. “Opal was crazy,” Angie said. “Opal shoulda been caged!” The duo became a trio—not just real and fictive cousins, but closer than sisters. “We did just about everything together besides taking a bath,” Angie said.

  At about the time the three women were born in the mid-1960s, the anthropologist Carol Stack went to live among a group of poor black single mothers who, just like the trio’s mothers, had migrated from the South to a midwestern city. A generation later, her famous study, All Our Kin, still reads as though it could have been written about Opal, Angie, and Jewell. Stack’s women survived by creating a domestic network, across multiple households, of real and honorary kin, with few of the boundaries that characterize middle-class life. “They trade food stamps, rent money, a TV, hats, dice, a car, a nickel here, a cigarette there, food, milk, grits, and children.” Life is a giant favor bank; letting someone move in with you today insures you can do the same tomorrow. While others had labeled the poor black family “broken” and “disorganized,” Stack celebrated this cooperative living as “a profoundly creative adaptation to poverty.”

  And in part it was. But if the bond among the trio served its functions, it brought dysfunctions, too. Angie said she started to drink when her friend Lisa did; Jewell said she hung out and partied because Angie and Opal did. Even Stack found the networks discouraged work and marriage by casting them as “precarious” alternatives to the coop life. You don’t travel very far in the ghetto without hearing a crab-pot story, of someone who tried to get ahead but was dragged down by family and friends—a resentful boyfriend, an addicted sister, a brother headed for jail. Stories of ghetto success often involve a moment of physically breaking away, to school, the army, or merely the asylum of an outside mentor. Stack argued that “survival demands the sacrifice of upward mobility.” Maybe in 1968, but a generation later that was a high price to pay. While Angie denied feeling any downward pull, one noteworthy thing about her efforts to work is how little overt encouragement she received. “We ain’t like, ‘You go, girl! Good!’ ” Angie said. “Who do shit like that? I don’t need nobody to pat me on the back. I’m a grown woman.” Looking back, Jewell would conclude that “everybody was too, too close.”

  And with Opal they grew closer still. She landed on First Street with charm, guile, a seductive smile, and a secret crack addiction. When Jewell’s food stamps disappeared, Jewell suspected her brother Robert. When Opal disappeared, Jewell figured she had met a guy. Angie was clueless, too. But six months after Opal arrived, the child welfare bureau received an anonymous complaint: “Ms. Caples had minimal food, no beds or stove, and the children were sleeping on the floor. The caller indicated that Ms. Caples uses all of her AFDC on drugs.” Sierra was four, Kierra was two, and Tierra was about to turn one. An investigator, unable to find Opal, let the matter drop. It - wouldn’t be the last time a bureaucracy would lose her trail.

  Not long after, Opal brought Angie and Jewell along on a shopping trip to Kmart. Opal got into an argument with a security guard, and the three went to jail on shoplifting charges, only to emerge the following morning with another yarn. The case was dropped, but the episode lived on. One of their cellmates spent the night spinning tales about the crack house she ran. All three found Andrea’s stories diverting, but Opal seemed especially engaged. She ran into Andrea shortly after her release, and when Andrea showed her where the drug house was, Opal knew all she needed to know. Jewell, by now aware of Opal’s problem, began to chide her. “You need to leave that shit alone,” she said. “I know what I’m doing,” Opal would answer. “You ain’t my mama. Shut up!” One thing Opal liked about Andrea is Andrea didn’t lecture.

  The First Street life sputtered to a close in the spring of 1995, after three and a half years. By then, Mrs. Allen was eighty years old, and she ceded control to her younger brother, who proclaimed himself the new sheriff in town. The metaphor was apt. Felmers O. Chaney had started his career in law enforcement by walking a ghetto beat, then gone on to become the city’s first black police sergeant and the head of the local NAACP; soon he would have a Milwaukee prison named after him. Pay up or get out, he said. Jewell’s tempestuous brother Robert knocked him to the ground, which sealed the end. Everyone decided to go.

  As Angie and Jewell were making plans, Opal disappeared. In the past, she had straggled back after a day or two, fending off the lectures with a weary, “I know.” This time, she never returned. Four days later, when the high wore off, Opal was sitting in Andrea’s kitchen, too tired and ashamed to go home. She guessed, rightly, that Jewell had called her mother to come and get the kids; that was one lecture she didn’t want to hear. Opal picked up a phone.

  “Where are you now?” the drug counselor asked.

  “In a smoke house,” Opal said.

  “Get in the car—don’t stop, come straight here.”

  Frightened, crying, filled with dread, Opal did what she was told. Angie and Jewell found new apartments, and life on First Street ended as it began, with everyone still on public aid. At that point, something called the “Personal Responsibility Act” was making its way through Congress, though none of them paid it any mind. For decades, Hattie Mae had warned her kids that the white folks were going to stop giving out welfare checks. “When you’re young,” Jewell said, “you don’t believe stuff like that.”

  PART II

  Ending Welfare

  FIVE

  The Accidental Program: Washington, 1935-1991

  The people who created Aid to Families with Dependent Children1 - weren’t thinking about Angie, Opal, and Jewell. They had no idea their program would become the federal government’s answer to ghetto poverty. They had no idea that ghetto poverty would demand a federal response. They thought they were excluding the two groups that came to dominate the rolls: unmarried women and racial minorities. Everything about welfare’s trajectory—its size, its longevity, and the hostility it engendered—would have left them astonished.

  The program began during the Depression as part of the Social Security Act. When the law passed in 1935, the main action revolved around programs of “social insurance” for working men, like unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, and survivors’ benefits. With the whole capitalist system reeling, Edwin Witte, the economist Franklin Roosevelt tapped to draft the bill, took such little interest in the welfare provisions he farmed them out to the Children’s Bureau of the Labor Department. Even there, they remained a secondary concern, behind a program to improve maternal and child health. AFDC was thrown in as a temporary measure, to tide over widowed mothers until Social Security matured. Over time, as workers paid into the system, their widows would qualify for death benefits, and welfare would wither away.

  Impossible as it is to imagine now, a welfare check once conferred an element of prestige. AFDC essentially brought federal support to a system of underfinanced, state-run “Mothers’ Pensions.” Before the state programs arose in the 1910s, the care of destitute children was often left to charities, which dispatched them to orphanages or even leased them out as indentured servants. As concerns about abuse grew, Mothers’ Pensions sought to keep poor children in their homes—but not just any homes. The payments were reserved for a small elite of “fit” mothers with so-called suitable homes. That typically excluded divorced mothers and those with children born outside marriage, and it almost always excluded racial minorities. The screening was so rigorous, those on the rolls were sometimes called “gilt-edged widows.” Decades later, welfare would be condemned for encouraging poor women not to work. But that was precisely what it was created to do—in Edwin Witte’s words, “to release from the wage-earning role the parent whose task is to raise children.” Here’s the dewy vision of one Arkansas congressman:

  I can see the careworn and dejected widow shout with joy . . . after having received assurance of financial aid for her children. I see her with the youngest child upon her knee and the others cluster
ed by her, kissing the tears of joy from her pale cheek as she explains they can now obtain clothes and books, go to Sunday school, and attend the public school.

  The “pale cheek” is telling: the last thing Congress intended in the thirties was to move black women out of the fields and onto the welfare rolls. The beneficiaries of the Mothers’ Pensions were 96 percent white, and AFDC was meant to support the same population. Southern members of Congress controlled the presiding committees and made sure the law did nothing to interfere with the South’s supply of cheap field labor. They let states set payments low, kept local discretion high, and rejected language seen as outlawing racial discrimination. The federal government shared in the costs, but states set benefits and many of the rules. As Witte later wrote, “No other federal aid legislation has ever gone to such lengths to deny the federal government supervisory power.”

  At the outset it worked as intended: black women like Hattie Mae were mostly barred from the rolls, especially in the South. Georgia went as far as establishing Negro quotas. After his tour of the South in the early 1940s, Gunnar Myrdal wondered how welfare discrimination had gone “to such extremes” and blamed state laws requiring “suitable homes.” Since “practically all Negroes are believed to be ‘immoral,’ almost any discrimination against Negroes can be motivated on such grounds,” he wrote. Another inspector, Mary S. Larabee, found southern officials approaching poor blacks with the “attitude that ‘they have always gotten along’ and ‘all they’ll do is have more children.’ ” The officials, Larabee wrote, “see no reason why the employable Negro mother should not continue her usually sketchy seasonal labor or indefinite domestic service rather than receive a public assistance grant.” Covering about 2 percent of American children, welfare in 1940 was more or less what Congress intended: a small, predominantly white program.