From the Monday, May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation
Published on Wednesday, March 24, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
How
can the poor be organized to press for relief from poverty? How can a
broad-based movement be developed and the current disarray of activist
forces be halted? These questions confront, and confound, activists
today. It is our purpose to advance a strategy which affords the basis
for a convergence of civil rights organizations, militant anti-poverty
groups and the poor. If this strategy were implemented, a political
crisis would result that could lead to legislation for a guaranteed
annual income and thus an end to poverty.
The strategy is based on the fact that a vast discrepancy exists
between the benefits to which people are entitled under public welfare
programs and the sums which they actually receive. This gulf is not
recognized in a society that is wholly and self-righteously oriented
toward getting people off the welfare rolls. It is widely known, for
example, that nearly 8 million persons (half of them white) now subsist
on welfare, but it is not generally known that for every person on the
rolls at least one more probably meets existing criteria of eligibility
but is not obtaining assistance.
The discrepancy is not an accident stemming from bureaucratic
inefficiency; rather, it is an integral feature of the welfare system
which, if challenged, would precipitate a profound financial and
political crisis. The force for that challenge, and the strategy we
propose, is a massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls.
The distribution of public assistance has been a local and state
responsibility, and that accounts in large part for the abysmal
character of welfare practices. Despite the growing involvement of
federal agencies in supervisory and reimbursement arrangements, state
and local community forces are still decisive. The poor are most visible
and proximate in the local community; antagonism toward them (and
toward the agencies which are implicated with them) has always,
therefore, been more intense locally than at the federal level. In
recent years, local communities have increasingly felt class and ethnic
friction generated by competition for neighborhoods, schools, jobs and
political power. Public welfare systems are under the constant stress of
conflict and opposition, made only sharper by the rising costs to
localities of public aid. And, to accommodate this pressure, welfare
practice everywhere has become more restrictive than welfare statute;
much of the time it verges on lawlessness. Thus, public welfare systems
try to keep their budgets down and their rolls low by failing to inform
people of the rights available to them; by intimidating and shaming them
to the degree that they are reluctant either to apply or to press
claims, and by arbitrarily denying benefits to those who are eligible.
A series of welfare drives in large cities would, we believe, impel
action on a new federal program to distribute income, eliminating the
present public welfare system and alleviating the abject poverty which
it perpetrates. 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 governments. These disruptions would
generate severe political strains, and deepen existing divisions among
elements in the big-city Democratic coalition: the remaining white
middle class, the white working-class ethnic groups and the growing
minority poor. To avoid a further weakening of that historic coalition, a
national Democratic administration would be con-strained to advance a
federal solution to poverty that would override local welfare failures,
local class and racial conflicts and local revenue dilemmas. By the
internal disruption of local bureaucratic practices, by the furor over
public welfare poverty, and by the collapse of current financing
arrangements, powerful forces can be generated for major economic
reforms at the national level.
The ultimate objective of this strategy--to wipe out poverty by
establishing a guaranteed annual income--will be questioned by some.
Because the ideal of individual social and economic mobility has deep
roots, even activists seem reluctant to call for national programs to
eliminate poverty by the outright redistribution of income. Instead,
programs are demanded to enable people to become economically
competitive. But such programs are of no use to millions of today's
poor. For example, one-third of the 35 million poor Americans are in
families headed by females; these heads of family cannot be aided
appreciably by job retraining, higher minimum wages, accelerated rates
of economic growth, or employment in public works projects. Nor can the 5
million aged who are poor, nor those whose poverty results from the ill
health of the wage earner. Programs to enhance individual mobility will
chiefly benefit the very young, if not the as yet unborn. Individual
mobility is no answer to the question of how to abolish the massive
problem of poverty now.
It has never been the full answer. If many people in the past have
found their way up from poverty by the path of individual mobility, many
others have taken a different route. Organized labor stands out as a
major example. Although many American workers never yielded their dreams
of individual achievement, they accepted and practiced the principle
that each can benefit only as the status of workers as a whole is
elevated. They bargained for collective mobility, not for individual
mobility; to promote their fortunes in the aggregate, not to promote the
prospects of one worker over another. And if each finally found himself
in the same relative economic relationship to his fellows as when he
began, it was nevertheless clear that all were infinitely better off.
That fact has sustained the labor movement in the face of a counter pull
from the ideal of individual achievement.
But many of the contemporary poor will not rise from poverty by
organizing to bargain collectively. They either are not in the labor
force or are In such marginal and dispersed occupations (e.g., domestic
servants) that it is extremely difficult to organize them. Compared with
other groups, then, many of today's poor cannot secure a redistribution
of income by organizing within the institution of private enterprise. A
federal program of income redistribution has become necessary to
elevate the poor en masse from poverty.
Several ways have been proposed for redistributing income through the
federal government. It is not our purpose here to assess the relative
merits of these plans, which are still undergoing debate and
clarification. Whatever mechanism is eventually adopted, however, it
must include certain features if it is not merely to perpetuate in a new
guise the present evils of the public welfare system.
First, adequate levels of income must be assured. (Public welfare
levels are astonishingly low; indeed, states typically define a
"minimum" standard of living and then grant only a percentage of it, so
that families are held well below what the government itself officially
defines as the poverty level.) Furthermore, income should be distributed
without requiring that recipients first divest themselves of their
assets, as public welfare now does, thereby pauperizing families as a
condition of sustenance.
Second, the right to income must be guaranteed, or the oppression of
the welfare poor will not be eliminated. Because benefits are
conditional under the present public welfare system, submission to
arbitrary governmental power is regularly made the price of sustenance.
People have been coerced into attending literacy classes or
participating in medical or vocational rehabilitation regimes, on pain
of having their benefits terminated. Men are forced into labor on
virtually any terms lest they forfeit their welfare aid. One can prize
literacy, health and work, while still vigorously opposing the right of
government to compel compliance with these values.
Conditional benefits thus result in violations of civil liberties
throughout the nation, and in a pervasive oppression of the poor. And
these violations are not less real because the impulse leading to them
is altruistic and the agency is professional. If new systems of income
distribution continue to permit the professional bureaucracies to choose
when to give and when to withhold financial relief, the poor will once
again be surrendered to an arrangement in which their rights are
diminished in the name of overcoming their vices. Those who lead an
attack on the welfare system must therefore be alert to the pitfalls of
inadequate but placating reforms which give the appearance of victory to
what is in truth defeat.
How much economic force can be mobilized by this strategy? This
question is not easy to answer because few studies have been conducted
of people who are not receiving public assistance even though they may
be eligible. For the purposes of this presentation, a few facts about
New York City may be suggestive. Since practices elsewhere are generally
acknowledged to be even more restrictive, the estimates of unused
benefits which follow probably yield a conservative estimate of the
potential force of the strategy set forth in this article.
Basic assistance for food and rent: The most striking characteristic
of public welfare practice is that a great many people who appear to be
eligible for assistance are not on the welfare rolls. The average
monthly total of New York City residents receiving assistance in 1959
was 325,771, but according to the 1960 census. 716,000 persons
(unrelated or in families) appeared to be subsisting on incomes at or
below the prevailing welfare eligibility levels (e.g $2,070 for a family
of four). In that same year, 539,000 people subsisted on incomes less
than 80 per cent of the welfare minimums, and 200,000 lived alone or in
families on incomes reported to be less than half of eligibility levels.
Thus it appears that for every person on welfare in 1959, at least one
more was eligible.
The results of two surveys of selected areas in Manhattan support the
contention that many people subsist on incomes below welfare
eligibility levels. One of these, conducted by Greenleigh Associates in
1964 in an urban-renewal area on New York's upper West Side, found 9 per
cent of those not on the rolls were in such acute need that they
appeared to qualify for emergency assistance. The study showed, further,
that a substantial number of families that were not in a "critical"
condition would probably have qualified for supplemental assistance.
The other survey, conducted in 1961 by Mobilization for Youth, had
similar findings. The area from which its sample was drawn, 67 square
blocks on the lower East Side, is a poor one, but by no means the
poorest in New York City. Yet 13 per cent of the total sample who were
not on the welfare rolls reported incomes falling below the prevailing
welfare schedules for food and rent.
There is no reason to suppose that the discrepancy between those
eligible for and those receiving assistance has narrowed much in the
past few years. The welfare rolls have gone up, to be sure, but so have
eligibility levels. Since the economic circumstances of impoverished
groups in New York have not improved appreciably in the past few years,
each such rise increases the number of people who are potentially
eligible for some degree of assistance.
Even if one allows for the possibility that family-income figures are
grossly underestimated by the census, the financial implications of the
proposed strategy are still very great. In 1965, the monthly average of
persons receiving cash assistance in New York was 490,000, at a total
cost of $440 million; the rolls have now risen above 500,000, so that
costs will exceed $500 million in 1966. An increase in the rolls of a
mere 20 per cent would cost an already overburdened municipality some
$100 million.
Special grants: Public assistance recipients in New York are also
entitled to receive "nonrecurring" grants for clothing, household
equipment and furniture-including washing machines, refrigerators, beds
and bedding, tables and chairs. It hardly needs to be noted that most
impoverished families have grossly inadequate clothing and household
furnishings. The Greenleigh study, for example, found that 52 per cent
of the families on public assistance lacked anything approaching
adequate furniture. This condition results because almost nothing is
spent on special grants in New York. In October, 1965, a typical month,
the Department of Welfare spent only $2.50 per recipient for heavy
clothing and $1.30 for household furnishings. Taken together, grants of
this kind amounted in 1965 to a mere $40 per person, or a total of $20
million for the entire year. Considering the real needs of families, the
successful demand for full entitlements could multiply these
expenditures tenfold or more and that would involve the disbursement of
many millions of dollars indeed.
One must be cautious in making generalizations about the prospects
for this strategy in any jurisdiction unless the structure of welfare
practices has been examined in some detail. We can, however, cite other
studies conducted in other places to show that New York practices are
not atypical. In Detroit, for example, Greenleigh Associates studied a
large sample of households in a low-income district in 1965. Twenty per
cent were already receiving assistance, but 35 per cent more were judged
to need it. Although the authors made no strict determination of the
eligibility of these families under the laws of Michigan, they believed
that "larger numbers of persons were eligible than receiving." A good
many of these families did not know that public assistance was
available; others thought they would be deemed ineligible; not a few
were ashamed or afraid to ask.
Similar deprivations have been shown in nation-wide studies. In 1963,
the federal government carried out a survey based on a national sample
of 5,500 families whose benefits under Aid to Dependent Children had
been terminated. Thirty-four per cent of these cases were officially in
need of income at the point of closing: this was true of 30 per cent of
the white and 44 per cent of the Negro cases. The chief basis for
termination given in local department records was "other reasons" (i.e.,
other than improvement in financial condition, which would make
dependence on welfare unnecessary). Upon closer examination, these
"other reasons" turned out to be "unsuitable home" (i.e., the presence
of illegitimate children), "failure to comply with departmental
regulations'' or "refusal to take legal action against a putative
father." (Negroes were especially singled out for punitive action on the
ground that children were not being maintained in "suitable homes.")
The amounts of money that people are deprived of by these injustices are
very great.
In order to generate a crisis, the poor must obtain benefits which
they have forfeited. Until now, they have been inhibited from asserting
claims by self-protective devices within the welfare system: its
capacity to limit information, to intimidate applicants, to demoralize
recipients, and arbitrarily to deny lawful claims.
Ignorance of welfare rights can be attacked through a massive
educational campaign Brochures describing benefits in simple, clear
language, and urging people to seek their full entitlements, should be
distributed door to door in tenements and public housing projects, and
deposited in stores, schools, churches and civic centers. Advertisements
should be placed in newspapers; spot announcements should be made on
radio. Leaders of social, religious, fraternal and political groups in
the slums should also be enlisted to recruit the eligible to the rolls.
The fact that the campaign is intended to inform people of their legal
rights under a government program, that it is a civic education drive,
will lend it legitimacy.
But information alone will not suffice. Organizers will have to
become advocates in order to deal effectively with improper rejections
and terminations. The advocate's task is to appraise the circumstances
of each case, to argue its merits before welfare, to threaten legal
action if satisfaction is not given. In some cases, it will be necessary
to contest decisions by requesting a "fair hearing" before the
appropriate state supervisory agency; it may occasionally be necessary
to sue for redress in the courts. Hearings and court actions will
require lawyers, many of whom, in cities like New York, can be recruited
on a voluntary basis, especially under the banner of a movement to end
poverty by a strategy of asserting legal rights. However, most cases
will not require an expert knowledge of law, but only of welfare
regulations; the rules can be learned by laymen, including welfare
recipients themselves (who can help to man "information and advocacy"
centers). To aid workers in these centers, handbooks should be prepared
describing welfare rights and the tactics to employ in claiming them.
Advocacy must be supplemented by organized demonstrations to create a
climate of militancy that will overcome the invidious and immobilizing
attitudes which many potential recipients hold toward being "on
welfare." In such a climate, many more poor people are likely to become
their own advocates and will not need to rely on aid from organizers.
As the crisis develops, it will be important to use the mass media to
inform the broader liberal community about the inefficiencies and
injustices of welfare. For example, the system will not be able to
process many new applicants because of cumbersome and often
unconstitutional investigatory procedures (which cost 20c for every
dollar disbursed). As delays mount, so should the public demand that a
simplified affidavit supplant these procedures, so that the poor may
certify to their condition. If the system reacts by making the proof of
eligibility more difficult, the demand should be made that the
Department of Health, Education and Welfare dispatch "eligibility
registrars" to enforce federal statutes governing local programs. And
throughout the crisis, the mass media should be used to advance
arguments for a new federal income distribution program.
Although new resources in organizers and funds would have to be
developed to mount this campaign, a variety of conventional agencies in
the large cities could also be drawn upon for help. The idea of "welfare
rights" has begun to attract attention in many liberal circles. A
number of organizations, partly under the aegis of the "war against
poverty," are developing information and advocacy services for
low-income people [see "
Poverty, Injustice and the Welfare State"
by Richard A. Cloward and Richard M. Elman, The Nation, issues of
February 28, 1966 and March 7, 1966]. It is not likely that these
organizations will directly participate in the present strategy, for
obvious political reasons. But whether they participate or not, they
constitute a growing network of resources to which people can be
referred for help in establishing and maintaining entitlements. In the
final analysis, it does not matter who helps people to get on the rolls
or to get additional entitlements, so long as the job is done.
Since this plan deals with problems of great immediacy In the lives
of the poor, it should motivate some of them to involve themselves in
regular organizational activities. Welfare recipients, chiefly ADC
mothers, are already forming federations, committees and councils in
cities across the nation; in Boston, New York, Newark, Cleveland,
Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles, to mention a few. Such groups
typically focus on obtaining full entitlements for existing recipients
rather than on recruiting new recipients, and they do not yet comprise a
national movement. But their very existence attests to a growing
readiness among ghetto residents to act against public welfare.
To generate an expressly political movement, cadres of aggressive
organizers would have to come from the civil rights movement and the
churches, from militant low-income organizations like those formed by
the Industrial Areas Foundation (that is, by Saul Alinsky), and from
other groups on the Left. These activists should be quick to see the
difference between programs to redress individual grievances and a
large-scale social-action campaign for national policy reform.
Movements that depend on involving masses of poor people have
generally failed in America. Why would the proposed strategy to engage
the poor succeed?
First, this plan promises immediate economic benefits. This is a
point of some importance because, whereas America's poor have not been
moved in any number by radical political ideologies, they have sometimes
been moved by their economic interests. Since radical movements in
America have rarely been able to provide visible economic incentives,
they have usually failed to secure mass participation of any kind. The
conservative "business unionism" of organized labor is explained by this
fact, for membership enlarged only as unionism paid off in material
benefits. Union leaders have understood that their strength derives
almost entirely from their capacity to provide economic rewards to
members. Although leaders have increasingly acted in political spheres,
their influence has been directed chiefly to matters of governmental
policy affecting the well-being of organized workers. The same point is
made by the experience of rent strikes in Northern cities. Their
organizers were often motivated by radical ideologies, but tenants have
been attracted by the promise that housing improvements would quickly be
made if they withheld their rent.
Second, for this strategy to succeed, one need not ask more of most
of the poor than that they claim lawful benefits. Thus the plan has the
extraordinary capability of yielding mass influence without mass
participation, at least as the term "participation" is ordinarily
understood. Mass influence in this case stems from the consumption of
benefits and does not require that large groups of people be involved in
regular organizational roles.
Moreover, this kind of mass influence is cumulative because benefits
are continuous. Once eligibility for basic food and rent grants is
established, the dram on local resources persists indefinitely. Other
movements have failed precisely because they could not produce
continuous and cumulative influence. In the Northern rent strikes, for
example, tenant participation depended largely on immediate grievances;
as soon as landlords made the most minimal repairs, participation fell
away and with it the impact of the movement. Efforts to revive tenant
participation by organizing demonstrations around broader housing issues
(e.g., the expansion of public housing) did not succeed because the
incentives were not immediate.
Third, the prospects for mass influence are enhanced because this
plan provides a practical basis for coalition between poor whites and
poor Negroes. Advocates of low-income movements have not been able to
suggest how poor whites and poor Negroes can be united in an expressly
lower-class movement. Despite pleas of some Negro leaders for joint
action on programs requiring integration, poor whites have steadfastly
resisted making common cause with poor Negroes. By contrast, the
benefits of the present plan are as great for whites as for Negroes. In
the big cities, at least, it does not seem likely that poor whites,
whatever their prejudices against either Negroes or public welfare, will
refuse to participate when Negroes aggressively claim benefits that are
unlawfully denied to them as well. One salutary consequence of public
information campaigns to acquaint Negroes with their rights is that many
whites will be made aware of theirs. Even if whites prefer to work
through their own organizations and leaders, the consequences will be
equivalent to joining with Negroes. For if the object is to focus
attention on the need for new economic measures by producing a crisis
over the dole, anyone who insists upon extracting maximum benefits from
public welfare is in effect part of a coalition and is contributing to
the cause.
The ultimate aim of this strategy is a new program for direct income
distribution. What reason is there to expect that the federal government
will enact such legislation in response to a crisis in the welfare
system?
We ordinarily think of major legislation as taking form only through
established electoral processes. We tend to overlook the force of crisis
in precipitating legislative reform, partly because we lack a
theoretical framework by which to understand the impact of major
disruptions.
By crisis, we mean a publicly visible disruption in some
institutional sphere. Crisis can occur spontaneously (e.g., riots) or as
the intended result of tactics of demonstration and protest which
either generate institutional disruption or bring unrecognized
disruption to public attention. Public trouble is a political liability,
it calls for action by political leaders to stabilize the situation.
Because crisis usually creates or exposes conflict, it threatens to
produce cleavages in a political consensus which politicians will
ordinarily act to avert.
Although crisis impels political action, it does not itself determine
the selection of specific solutions. Political leaders will try to
respond with proposals which work to their advantage in the electoral
process. Unless group cleavages form around issues and demands, the
politician has great latitude and tends to proffer only the minimum
action required to quell disturbances without risking existing electoral
support. Spontaneous disruptions, such as riots, rarely produce leaders
who articulate demands; thus no terms are imposed, and political
leaders are permitted to respond in ways that merely restore a semblance
of stability without offending other groups in a coalition.
When, however, a crisis is defined by its participants--or by other
activated groups--as a matter of clear issues and preferred solutions,
terms are imposed on the politicians' bid for their support. Whether
political leaders then design solutions to reflect these terms depends
on a twofold calculation: first, the impact of the crisis and the issues
it raises on existing alignments and, second, the gains or losses in
support to be expected as a result of a proposed resolution.
As to the impact on existing alignments, issues exposed by a crisis
may activate new groups, thus altering the balance of support and
opposition on the issues; or it may polarize group sentiments, altering
the terms which must be offered to insure the support of given
constituent groups. In framing resolutions, politicians are more
responsive to group shifts and are more likely to accommodate to the
terms imposed when electoral coalitions threatened by crisis are already
uncertain or weakening. In other words, the politician responds to
group demands, not only by calculating the magnitude of electoral gains
and losses, but by assessing the impact of the resolution on the
stability of existing or potential coalitions. Political leaders are
especially responsive to group shifts when the terms of settlement can
be framed so as to shore up an existing coalition, or as a basis for the
development of new and more stable alignments, without jeopardizing
existing support. Then, indeed, the calculation of net gain is most
secure.
The legislative reforms of the depression years, for example, were
impelled not so much by organized interests exercised through regular
electoral processes as by widespread economic crisis. That crisis
precipitated the disruption of the regionally based coalitions
underlying the old national parties. During the realignments of 1932, a
new Democratic coalition was formed, based heavily on urban
working-class groups. Once in power, the national Democratic leadership
proposed and implemented the economic reforms of the New Deal. Although
these measures were a response to the imperative of economic crisis, the
types of measures enacted were designed to secure and stabilize the new
Democratic coalition.
The civil rights movement, to take a recent case, also reveals the
relationship of crisis and electoral conditions in producing legislative
reform. The crisis in the South took place in the context of a
weakening North-South Democratic coalition. The strains in that
coalition were first evident in the Dixiecrat desertion of 1948, and
continued through the Eisenhower years as the Republicans gained ground
in the Southern states. Democratic party leaders at first tried to hold
the dissident South by warding off the demands of enlarging Negro
constituencies in Northern cities. Thus for two decades the national
Democratic Party campaigned on strongly worded civil rights planks but
enacted only token measures. The civil rights movement forced the
Democrats' hand: a crumbling Southern partnership was forfeited, and
major civil rights legislation was put forward, designed to insure the
support of Northern Negroes and liberal elements in the Democratic
coalition. That coalition emerged strong from the 1964 election, easily
able to overcome the loss of Southern states to Goldwater. At the same
time, the enacted legislation, particularly the Voting Rights Act, laid
the ground for a new Southern Democratic coalition of moderate whites
and the hitherto untapped reservoir of Southern Negro voters.
The electoral context which made crisis effective in the South is
also to be found in the big cities of the nation today. Deep tensions
have developed among groups comprising the political coalitions of the
large cities--the historic stronghold of the Democratic Party. As a
consequence, urban politicians no longer turn in the vote to national
Democratic candidates with unfailing regularity. The marked defections
revealed in the elections of the 1950s and which continued until the
Johnson landslide of 1964 are a matter of great concern to the national
party. Precisely because of this concern, a strategy to exacerbate still
further the strains in the urban coalition can be expected to evoke a
response from national leaders.
The weakening of the urban coalition is a result of many basic
changes in the relationship of local party leadership to its
constituents. First, the political machine, the distinctive and
traditional mechanism for forging alliances among competing groups in
the city, is now virtually defunct in most cities Successive waves of
municipal reform have deprived political leaders of control over the
public resources--jobs, contracts, services and favors--which machine
politicians formerly dispensed to voters in return for electoral
support. Conflicts among elements in the urban Democratic coalition,
once held together politically because each secured a share of these
benefits, cannot now be so readily contained. And as the means of
placating competing groups have diminished, tensions along ethnic and
class lines have multiplied. These tensions are being intensified by the
encroachments of an enlarging ghetto population on jobs, schools and
residential areas Big-city mayors are thus caught between antagonistic
working-class ethnic groups, the remaining middle class, and the rapidly
enlarging minority poor.
Second, there are discontinuities in the relationship between the
urban party apparatus and its ghetto constituents which have so far
remained unexposed but which a welfare crisis would force into view. The
ghetto vote has been growing rapidly and has so far returned
overwhelming Democratic majorities. Nevertheless, this voting bloc is
not fully integrated in the party apparatus, either through the
representation of its leaders or the accommodation of its interests.
While the urban political apparatus includes members of new minority
groups, these groups are by no means represented according to their
increasing proportions in the population. More important, elected
representation alone is not an adequate mechanism for the expression of
group interests. Influence in urban politics is won not only at the
polls but through the sustained activity of organized interests--such as
labor unions, home-owner associations and business groups. These groups
keep watch over the complex operations of municipal agencies,
recognizing issues and regularly asserting their point of view through
meetings with public officials, appearances at public hearings and the
like, and by exploiting a whole array of channels of influence on
government. Minority constituencies--at least the large proportion of
them that are poor--are not regular participants in the various
institutional spheres where organized interest groups typically develop.
Thus the interests of the mass of minority poor are not protected by
associations which make their own or other political leaders responsive
by continuously calling them to account. Urban party organizations have
become, in consequence, more an avenue for the personal advancement of
minority political leaders than a channel for the expression of
minority-group interests. And the big-city mayors, struggling to
preserve an uneasy urban consensus, have thus been granted the slack to
evade the conflict-generating interests of the ghetto. A crisis in
public welfare would expose the tensions latent in this attenuated
relationship between the ghetto vote and the urban party leadership, for
it would thrust forward ghetto demands and back them with the threat of
defections by voters who have so far remained both loyal and quiescent.
In the face of such a crisis, urban political leaders may well be
paralyzed by a party apparatus which ties them to older constituent
groups, even while the ranks of these groups are diminishing. The
national Democratic leadership, however, is alert to the importance of
the urban Negro vote, especially in national contests where the loyalty
of other urban groups is weakening. Indeed, many of the legislative
reforms of the Great Society can be understood as efforts, however
feeble, to reinforce the allegiance of growing ghetto constituencies to
the national Democratic Administration. In the thirties, Democrats began
to put forward measures to circumvent the states in order to reach the
big-city elements in the New Deal coalition; now it is becoming
expedient to put forward measures to circumvent the weakened big-city
mayors in order to reach the new minority poor.
Recent federal reforms have been impelled in part by widespread
unrest in the ghetto, and instances of more aggressive Negro demands.
But despite these signs that the ghetto vote may become less reliable in
the future, there has been as yet no serious threat of massive
defection. The national party has therefore not put much pressure on its
urban branches to accommodate the minority poor. The resulting reforms
have consequently been quite modest (e.g., the war against poverty, with
its emphasis on the "involvement of the poor," is an effort to make the
urban party apparatus somewhat more accommodating).
A welfare crisis would, of course, produce dramatic local political
crisis, disrupting and exposing rifts among urban groups. Conservative
Republicans are always ready to declaim the evils of public welfare, and
they would probably be the first to raise a hue and cry. But deeper and
politically more telling conflicts would take place within the
Democratic coalition. Whites--both working-class ethnic groups and many
in the middle class--would be aroused against the ghetto poor, while
liberal groups, which until recently have been comforted by the notion
that the poor are few and, in any event, receiving the beneficent
assistance of public welfare, would probably support the movement. Group
conflict, spelling political crisis for the local party apparatus,
would thus become acute as welfare rolls mounted and the strains on
local budgets became more severe. In New York City, where the Mayor is
now facing desperate revenue shortages, welfare expenditures are already
second only to those for public education.
It should also be noted that welfare costs are generally shared by
local, state and federal governments, so that the crisis in the cities
would intensify the struggle over revenues that is chronic in relations
between cities and states. If the past is any predictor of the future,
cities will fail to procure relief from this crisis by persuading states
to increase their proportionate share of urban welfare costs, for state
legislatures have been notoriously unsympathetic to the revenue needs
of the city (especially where public welfare and minority groups are
concerned).
If this strategy for crisis would intensify group cleavages, a
federal income solution would not further exacerbate them. The demands
put forward during recent civil rights drives in the Northern cities
aroused the opposition of huge majorities. Indeed, such fierce
resistance was evoked (e.g., school boycotts followed by
counter-boycotts), that accessions by political leaders would have
provoked greater political turmoil than the protests themselves, for
profound class and ethnic interests are at stake in the employment,
educational and residential institutions of our society. By contrast,
legislative measures to provide direct income to the poor would permit
national Democratic leaden to cultivate ghetto constituencies without
unduly antagonizing other urban groups, as is the case when the battle
lines are drawn over schools, housing or jobs. Furthermore, a federal
income program would not only redeem local governments from the
immediate crisis but would permanently relieve them of the financially
and politically onerous burdens of public welfare--a function which
generates support from none and hostility from many, not least of all
welfare recipients. We suggest, in short, that if pervasive
institutional reforms are not yet possible, requiring as they do
expanded Negro political power and the development of new political
alliances, crisis tactics can nevertheless be employed to secure
particular reforms in the short run by exploiting weaknesses in current
political alignments. Because the urban coalition stands weakened by
group conflict today, disruption and threats of disaffection will count
powerfully, provided that national leaders can respond with solutions
which retain the support of ghetto constituencies while avoiding new
group antagonisms and bolstering the urban party apparatus. These are
the conditions, then, for an effective crisis strategy in the cities to
secure an end to poverty.
No strategy, however confident its advocates may be, is foolproof.
But if unforeseen contingencies thwart this plan to bring about new
federal legislation in the field of poverty, it should also be noted
that there would be gains even in defeat. For one thing, the plight of
many poor people would be somewhat eased in the course of an assault
upon public welfare. Existing recipients would come to know their rights
and how to defend them, thus acquiring dignity where none now exists;
and millions of dollars in withheld welfare benefits would become
available to potential recipients now--not several generations from now.
Such an attack should also be welcome to those currently concerned with
programs designed to equip the young to rise out of poverty (e.g., Head
Start), for surely children learn more readily when the oppressive
burden of financial insecurity is lifted from the shoulders of their
parents. And those seeking new ways to engage the Negro politically
should remember that public resources have always been the fuel for
low-income urban political organization. If organizers can deliver
millions of dollars in cash benefits to the ghetto masses, it seems
reasonable to expect that the masses will deliver their loyalties to
their benefactors. At least, they have always done so in the past.
© 1966 The Nation
