How Welfare Lost Its Good Name

"The Invention of ‘Welfare’ in America" by Michael B. Katz and Lorrin R. Thomas, in Journal of Policy History (1998: No. 4), Saint Louis Univ., P.O. Box 56907, St. Louis, Mo. 63156–0907. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the early 20th century, welfare was a During the New Deal era, when America’s proud term, signifying the best in modern welfare state emerged, the term welfare selsocial policy. How it came to connote the dom appeared in public without being worst, write Katz, a historian at the University accompanied by an adjective enhancing its of Pennsylvania, and Thomas, a doctoral stu-meaning of "well-being." Social welfare or dent there, is an instructive tale. public welfare referred to a broad array of government programs intended to ensure economic security. Welfare "retained its Progressive Era association with modernity, progress, science, and efficiency, and with services rather than relief" for the poor, the authors observe.

The Committee on Economic Security, appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934, called for a comprehensive program of "social welfare activities," including insurance for unemployment, old age, and sickness; expanded public health programs; pensions for the uninsured elderly; and aid for "fatherless children." This, say the authors, is what "welfare," at its inception, was: an expanded system of social insurance coupled with public assistance for those ineligible for coverage. By replacing "the old poor laws and their invidious distinctions" with Aid to Dependent Children as part of a broad concept of "welfare" to which Americans were entitled as citizens, Katz and Thomas write, the committee thought that the stigma of family assistance could be erased.

Eventually, it was hoped, public assistance would become "almost unnecessary," the authors note. Even in 1950, this expectation "did not appear unreasonable." Amendments to the Social Security Act in 1939 and 1950 extended social insurance to widows and their children, as well as to many domestic and farm workers originally excluded. Meanwhile, labor unions were winning medical insurance, pensions, and other fringe benefits for more and more Americans.

But Cold War controversy over whether the "welfare state" was "socialistic" or even "un-American" rubbed off on the word welfare, and as more of the "deserving poor" became eligible for social insurance, those left on public assistance—chiefly unmarried mothers with children—"inherited the degraded mantle" of past "relief" efforts. Welfare cheating scandals didn’t help matters. And the rolls of those receiving aid, later renamed Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), rose 41 percent during the 1950s, with recipients disproportionately black, and 169 percent during the 1960s.

By the mid-1960s, the definition of welfare had narrowed, becoming synonymous with AFDC, and identified with the "undeserving poor." After 1973, the value of "welfare" benefits, in constant dollars, plummeted. By 1996, a Democratic president was proud to claim that by abolishing AFDC, America was "ending welfare as we know it." But America did not end welfare as we used to know it, the authors note. Welfare in the form of social insurance, especially Social Security, for those who weren’t so down-and-out, "remained unassailable."