Welfare And Public Relief
The principle of public responsibility for those in need was observed by the earliest colonists in British North America. Although funds made available for public assistance, as well as the unit of government administering them, varied greatly over time, Americans never wavered from this fundamental acceptance of public responsibility.
The English Parliament laid down the legal framework for public assistance in a series of enactments from 1597 to 1601 that became known as the Elizabethan Poor Law. Settlers carried this set of arrangements with them to the New World, and it continued to define obligations well into the twentieth century in the United States. Central to the system was the declaration that primary responsibility for care rested within the family: parents were expected to care for their children, and adult children, for their aged parents; eventually in many regions the obligation covered grandparents and grandchildren and in some cases extended even to brothers and sisters. Only when the family was unable to care for its own did public responsibility become operative. In the colonies, and later in the states, the effective unit of government came to be the town or township, the parish, the city, or the county. With the passage of time the unit most often was the county, as evidenced in the tens of thousands of county departments of public welfare that still carry chief responsibility for the administration of general relief funds.
The initial legislation permitted local governments to provide assistance through "outdoor" relief--that is, to persons in their own homes--or through the establishment of "indoor" institutions--almshouses for infirm dependent persons and workhouses for the presumably able-bodied poor. To assist orphaned, neglected, or abandoned children, local government had the power to assign them to other families by apprenticeship or indenture contracts (a process that survives today as foster placement). A later addition, stated in the English Act of Settlement (1662) and implemented with various degrees of severity in the colonies, required that legal residency in town or county be a precondition of eligibility to receive assistance. Although this system did not establish a legal right to assistance on the part of needy citizens, it did create a powerful presumption of the obligation of local government to assist them.
Local officials in village and countryside knew firsthand the conditions and resources of families who might fall into need. When sickness, disability, old age, or death of a spouse rendered persons dependent, they could petition for assistance knowing that if they could still manage a household their basic needs would be supplied in kind (with grants of food, fuel, clothing) or with modest cash grants. If no longer competent to care for themselves, they could be placed in the households of others who, for their services, received a somewhat larger stipend than the sums accorded for regular outdoor assistance. Only rarely, until urbanization accelerated in the nineteenth century, did localities resort to the institution of poorhouses to shelter dependent people. The able-bodied were left to fend for themselves; but very old widows and widowers, the mentally ill or retarded, the physically handicapped, orphans, and dependent children were cared for at levels that local propertied taxpayers would tolerate--not generous amounts but enough to provide a bare subsistence. Persons without legal residence were "warned out" of the community or "passed along" on a journey back to their original legal residence.
Colonial governments at the provincial level supplemented local relief funds only in times of natural catastrophe or following the dislocations of war. With independence and ratification of the U.S. Constitution, the traditional assignment of responsibility for public assistance to local units of government was secured in the Tenth Amendment, which reserved for the states and their subdivisions broad powers to provide for the general well-being of the citizenry. Here lay the source of political resistance to the assumption by the nation of any responsibility for public assistance until widespread and deep human need during the Great Depression of the 1930s prompted a number of New Deal measures involving direct federal grants and subsidies to sustain families devastated by hard times. An earlier precedent for direct federal action--the Freedmen's Bureau, 1865-1870--provided food, clothing, and medicine to recently freed slaves, but it was only a temporary measure.
Throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, modifications in the administration of relief programs had to be made as industrialization, urbanization, and economic centralization transformed American society. In large urban centers, overseers of the poor could no longer know the circumstances of persons who petitioned for relief, and government in those years did not yet have the bureaucratic capacity to control the expenditure of relief funds. The values and norms of a bourgeois, capitalistic society, moreover, did not easily tolerate those who would "feed at the public trough." The Anglo-American Protestant tradition had always honored hard work, thrift, and self-reliance, but in the Victorian era those values took on a harshness provoked by a striving, competitive social economy. Social norms distinguished sharply between those needy persons who were perceived as being "worthy"--widows, orphans, respectable aged persons, the severely handicapped--and the "unworthy"--those whose need was perceived to be rooted in laziness, intemperance, profligacy, or vice.
In an economy hungry for investment capital, every dollar "squandered" on the poor subtracted from the national substance. As dictates of efficiency and rationalization of economic resources took command, moreover, substantial citizens increasingly objected to the inefficiency and corruption they thought characterized the expenditure of tax moneys on the poor. Respectable community leaders began to speak and write of the "dangerous classes" (not unlike today's "underclass") and the threat they posed to social order and established norms of morality. In such an environment, local governments throughout the nation rushed to establish almshouses or poor farms where the disorderly lives of the poor could, it was hoped, be ordered. Proponents believed that the discipline of the poorhouse could be made so punitive that potential clients would pursue every strategy to avoid incarceration, and that such deterrence would lead to financial savings. In fact, persons forced by circumstance to seek shelter in these institutions were rarely employable or able to do profitable work within their walls, and the poorhouses were quickly crowded with a pathetic lot of unfortunates. People voicing the rhetorical hope that almshouses would serve as "bettering" institutions were doomed to disillusionment in the United States as well as other countries.
Contrary to expectations, the elaboration of the poorhouse system did not lead to a reduction in overall expenditures for public relief. Assistance to families in their own homes continued in most regions of the country, but it was rendered haphazardly and at levels lower than the lowest standards prevailing among the working poor.
The nineteenth century also saw the proliferation of tens of thousands of private benevolent or charitable agencies, many rooted in religious conviction, some church-sponsored, others moved by humane or philanthropic sentiments. Intended primarily to provide services, not financial assistance, to those deemed to be "worthy" of moral support, these agencies initiated a variety of programs to protect and uplift their clients. Although they promised "not alms but a friend," many of them were driven in fact by the needs of those whom they served to offer relief in kind and even in cash. Serving quasi-public functions, they frequently received substantial capital grants from local and state governments, which found it more convenient to lay out funds through direct subsidies than to erect elaborate public agency bureaucracies. Here was a precedent picked up again in the 1960s through the 1980s, whereby social work agencies provided human services to diverse clienteles, using large grants from federal, state, and local governments mixed together with funds from individuals, corporations, United Ways, and foundations.
Although traditionally the burden of public assistance had fallen primarily upon local government, states began to assume a share of the obligation beginning in the late 1820s with the founding of asylums for the insane. Subsequent generations created other specialized institutions--houses of refuge for dependent or delinquent youngsters, homes for the blind, the "deaf and dumb," and the mentally retarded, and state orphanages. To oversee these institutions, states gradually created supervisory boards and agencies that in time evolved into state welfare commissions with vastly increased resources and powers.
From state initiative, beginning in the 1910s, came programs to provide "mothers' assistance," which later was designated as aid to dependent children. The declared objective was to enable mothers of young children suffering economic need owing to the death of husband and father to stay at home and provide maternal care. But whatever the motives and intended goals, programs were weighed down with eligibility criteria difficult to meet: there was a means test, of course, for only the "truly needy" were deserving; there was also a test of marital status, and mothers deserted, separated, or divorced rarely qualified; and finally there were morals tests in that recipients were to be of sound character, able and willing to provide a "suitable home" for their offspring. It is estimated that less than 10 percent of mothers eligible solely on economic grounds were ever able to qualify. Throughout the nation, but especially in the South, mothers of a minority race were all but automatically excluded. Hard times in the early 1930s led to the discontinuance of many of these programs. But as a part of the Social Security Act (1935), federal funds were offered on a matching basis to the states for reinstituting programs of assistance. It was not until the 1960s that relatively objective economic criteria crowded out morals testing of eligibility, and from that time, an expanded program of Aid to Families of Dependent Children (afdc, 1961) came to constitute the largest single expenditure of funds for direct public assistance.
The 1930s had marked a watershed in public assistance. Beginning in 1933, as emergency measures, federal funds were provided for direct relief grants to individuals, through the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, for example. Through the Civil Works Administration, the Works Progress Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the National Youth Administration, unemployed persons were hired on works projects fully funded and directly administered by agencies of the federal government.
Passage of the Social Security Act (1935) initiated a two-track system of welfare: one path insured participating employees against unemployment and old age (dependents and disabled persons were later brought under the umbrella of secured income); the other track provided federal funds through dollar-matching arrangements with state governments for specific categories of the needy. Striking differences persisted between the two tracks. Categorical aid was means-tested; its benefits, awarded at levels below the lowest prevailing income standards in a given community, were perceived by the public as unearned benefits provided as charity, not as entitlements. They invariably carried a stigma. Programs blanketed under social insurance, on the other hand, provided benefits earned by contributions into the system over a lifetime of employment. They provided benefits at levels roughly corresponding to a recipient's employment and income experience, and neither the payments nor the recipients were in any way stigmatized.
To these basic programs of assistance and insurance a number of additions were made: food stamps (1964), Medicare insurance for persons retired under Social Security (1965), Medicaid payments to providers of health care to persons otherwise unable to afford them (1965), and a Supplementary Security Income (ssi) benefit for income-needy aged, blind, and disabled persons (1972). By the end of the 1970s these programs together with vastly increased expenditures for families of dependent children had substantially enlarged the costs of welfare assistance at every level of government and thus provoked a fiscal reaction and a clamor for "reform" of the "welfare mess" in the 1980s.
The poverty programs initiated during the 1960s dealt far more with provision of services than with public assistance. Federal funds invested in local community action programs were used for preschool education (Head Start), for legal aid, for local medical clinics, and for family planning, but none involved the transfer of money directly to persons in need.
In conclusion it can be observed that many features that had characterized public assistance from earliest colonial days lost force after the 1930s. Although family responsibility still operated as a moral norm, it no longer enjoyed legal force; the eligibility requirement of residency fell, at long last, to court rulings in 1969; the federal government came to be a major source of funding for public assistance and social insurance. But some traditions survived into the present era: assistance programs for families of dependent children and for general assistance remained stigmatized; general assistance to persons not covered by afdc or ssi remained the exclusive obligation of local government; such programs were means-tested and awarded grudgingly at relatively low benefit levels; federal funding assumed major importance, but the administration of categorical programs resided primarily at the level of county government; human service agencies in the private sector received funding not only from private subscriptions and foundation grants but from federal, state, and local subsidies, grants, and contracts as well. Public assistance today, then, is a patchwork system, in which past traditions and present circumstances each plays a part.
Bibliography:
Blanche D. Coll, Perspectives in Public Welfare: A History (1969); Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (1986).
Author:
Clarke A. Chambers
See also Civilian Conservation Corps; Dix, Dorothea; Freedmen's Bureau; Great Society; Medicaid; Medicare; New Deal; Philanthropy; Poverty; Public Works Administration; Settlement Houses; Social Security; Unemployment; Works Progress Administration.
