Schram, Sanford F.

English

Scholarship;  Research;  and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College

Bryn Mawr College
Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr
College
Graduate School of Social Work and Social
Research Faculty Research and Scholarship
Graduate School of Social Work and Social
Research
2008
Review of The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and
Poverty in Modern America, by Felicia Kornbluh
Sanford F. Schram
Bryn Mawr College, sschram@brynmawr.edu
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Schram, Sanford F. Review of The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern America, by Felicia Kornbluh. Social Service
Review 82 (2008): 345-348.
Book Reviews 345
ing and placement services, as well as among consumers of services provided by
government-sponsored, community-based, and nonprofit organizations. Some
LMIs have succeeded; others have not. This variation is lost in the presentation
of survey data.
Qualitative interview data (with LMI leaders and staff) highlight some ex-
amples of strong and weak programs, but these examples reflect the choice of
programs selected for inclusion in the study and do not represent the full scope
of program models available. These data are also insufficient for understanding
how LMI services relate to employment outcomes, as LMIs do not provide de-
tailed job placement data.
Another shortcoming is that the book fails to capture the employer’s per-
spective. The authors recognize that LMIs broker deals between employers and
job seekers. A discussion of the employer’s perspective could have provided
important additional context for understanding LMIs’ roles in brokering labor
market transactions (between employers and job seekers) and ways in which the
positioning of the negotiants shapes labor market outcomes for disadvantaged
job seekers.
Still, Staircases and Treadmills provides an important overview of the expanded
roles of LMIs within the new economy. As the authors state, more detailed
research is needed to uncover additional variations in LMI services, especially
those services for disadvantaged populations, and to explain relationships be-
tween services and employment outcomes.
Timothy P. Hilton
Northern Michigan University
The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern America. By Felicia
Kornbluh. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Pp. 312. $24.95
(paper).
More than 10 years have passed since the landmark welfare reform legislation
of 1996 (110 Stat. 2105) dramatically revised public assistance in the United
States for single mothers with children. The Aid to Families with Dependent
Children (AFDC) program that grew out of the Social Security Act of 1935 (49
Stat. 620) was replaced by the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families block
grant program, which mandates that states must impose time limits and work
requirements on recipients who receive assistance from this program. As a result,
the welfare rolls plummeted approximately 50 percent from 1996 to 2000, fall-
ing another 38 percent by 2007.1
Although recipients, advocates, and activists organized to oppose the reforms,
the retrenchment of welfare rights did not lead to an upsurge reminiscent of
the one led by the single mothers on welfare who helped form the National
Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) in the 1960s. Felicia Kornbluh’s won-
derfully written, elegantly structured, and meticulously researched history
of that 1960s activism is a moving reminder that women on welfare were once
important political actors who actively pushed to make social policy more sen-
sitive to their needs. By the end of her book, one may find it hard not to ask
whether can this happen again, and, if so, why not now?
Kornbluh convincingly presents the welfare rights movement of the 1960s
from the perspective of women like Beulah Sanders, Jennette Washington, John-
nie Tillmon, and others who led it. She thereby effectively demolishes the idea
346 Social Service Review
that women on welfare are somehow passive dependents. Nonetheless, the book
inevitably reads as if its historical analysis is at odds with its political intentions.
The narrative unavoidably leads to the conclusion that structural forces are
overwhelming and women’s agency is limited in what it can do to attune welfare
policy to the real-life conditions of low-income single mothers and their children.
The historical analysis is compelling, but the political lesson may be different
than what Kornbluh suggests.
Kornbluh begins her book by stating that
while the events in this book occurred within the living memory of many of the people
with whom I have discussed them, accounts of them have sometimes seemed to arrive on
my desk not merely from a distinct moment in the past but from a distant planet. In
sharing the history of welfare rights, I . . . wish to recall that astonishing things are possible.
The past does not exist to teach later generations a lesson. In the case of welfare rights,
however, it offers an opportunity to see that astonishing things are possible even in modern
U.S. politics. It also offers an opportunity to see that what has been done, no matter how
astonishing, can be undone in the blink of an eye. (13)
She returns to this sobering thought only at the end, where she writes of the
women who led the 1960s welfare rights effort: “They enjoyed a string of suc-
cesses, demonstrating that ‘enduring and deeply entrenched social beliefs’ are
more flexible in response to popular pressure than they may at first appear.
Ultimately they were defeated, leaving behind so few traces that it became the
job of historians to remember them” (187).
The historian’s job to which Kornbluh alludes is one she executes with great
care and skill. These efforts bring a number of distinctive qualities to the nar-
rative. Each chapter is organized around an analysis of what was happening in
New York City, the epicenter of the 1960s welfare rights movement, and how
that resounded in developments across the country. Kornbluh describes, for
instance, how in New York, the City-Wide Coordinating Committee of Welfare
Groups (or Citywide) served as the foundation for what became the NWRO and
its eventual leadership in the nationwide welfare rights struggle. She observes
that activists with experience in civil rights campaigns adjusted their organizing
techniques to push the issue of welfare rights both in the city and around the
country. Kornbluh, for instance, demonstrates that the campaign to get supple-
mental benefits for low-income mothers in New York was an excellent organizing
tool that became popular elsewhere. She chronicles Beulah Sanders’s New York
experiences, as well as Sanders’s leadership of NWRO’s efforts when they shifted
from pressuring the local welfare offices to lobbying Congress for a guaranteed
income.
The book’s narrative is focused primarily on the role of the single welfare
mothers in leading the activism associated with welfare rights. Each chapter is
keen to demonstrate how these women thought and behaved in contrast to
others, including George Wiley, the civil rights activist and executive director of
NWRO at its pinnacle. Kornbluh also details the pivotal role played by Richard
Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, who served as key advisors, especially in de-
veloping campaigns to increase access to assistance among eligible families. Most
prominently, what they called their “crisis” strategy became central to the efforts
of NWRO (“A Strategy to End Poverty,” The Nation May 2 [1966]: 512). Most
eligible families were not receiving aid at the time. If the movement were able
to help them get assistance, Cloward and Piven recognized, pressure would build
to replace overburdened state and local welfare programs with a nationally
funded guaranteed income of some sort. While Kornbluh mentions the critical
roles played by Cloward and Piven, Wiley, and staffers like Faith Evans, Hulbert
Book Reviews 347
James, and Tim Sampson, the focus remains on the women leaders, who most
often were nonwhite single mothers on welfare. This focus underscores not only
the fact that these women were active leaders in the movement but also that
they often had their own distinct perspectives that could stand in contrast with
those held by others in the movement.
Kornbluh provides copious documentation of the history of these women’s
efforts. She complements archival materials with extensive interviews of the
leaders and their collaborators in the welfare rights organizations. As a result,
Kornbluh tells a very convincing tale, and her thesis cannot be easily dismissed.
Part of this thesis is that women on welfare are real people, just like everyone
else, and deserve to be treated just as they demanded: as full citizens. Kornbluh
shows that they were active agents in their own history-making efforts. Yet, an-
other part of her thesis is that the success of the movement was bound to be
short-lived because “historical forces far from Citywide and NWRO were re-
sponsible for the movement’s demise” (185). She therefore takes issue with the
idea that mistakes in strategy killed the movement, rejecting most especially the
charge that NWRO’s opposition to President Richard Nixon’s limited guaran-
teed income proposal, the Family Assistance Plan (FAP), led to its defeat and
eventually meant that none of the subsequent guaranteed income plans would
get through Congress.
Kornbluh brilliantly dissects this issue, showing with striking clarity that NWRO
was not powerful enough to stop FAP and, more importantly, that Nixon himself
ensured its defeat. His political interests shifted away from domestic policy to
the war in Vietnam. At the same time, his Southern strategy for building Re-
publican support below the Mason-Dixon line no longer called for the national
government to take over the costs of welfare in the South. Further, Kornbluh
correctly notes that Wiley was willing to negotiate with the White House on FAP.
Her larger point is that local and national welfare rights organizations could
have done things differently at various critical junctures, but there were limits
to the possibility for a different outcome in a society that expected the individual
to work if he or she were to be seen as a full citizen, regardless of whether the
job could get him or her out of poverty. That structural impediment overrode
the agency of the women activists.
Kornbluh also acknowledges that potential for success was limited by (and
that the current fight for welfare rights must struggle within) the constraining
parameters set by profound class, race, and gender biases. It is as if black women
on welfare are operating with three strikes against them. This raises the issue
of why is it important to remember the welfare activists of the 1960s if the activism
and agency of such women are most often not likely to override the structural
limits of American society.
One answer that Kornbluh’s narrative provides is that structural limits are
themselves susceptible to change in the face of concerted political action by
oppressed people. Yet, Kornbluh could have emphasized that all policy victories,
not just the welfare rights gains of the 1960s, are always provisional in a de-
mocracy, and that this is especially the case regarding the gains made for low-
income and other marginalized groups. As Piven and Cloward themselves ar-
gued, structure matters, but it never completely precludes effective action by
the disempowered (Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail [New
York: Vintage Books, 1979], 1–37). Disruptive action from below sometimes pro-
duces lasting change, but more often it produces temporary (although none-
theless crucial) victories that are eventually eroded by the powerful and must
be fought for again.
In this sense, I think that Kornbluh actually understates the importance of
the welfare rights movement by focusing on it only as a historical exemplar. The
348 Social Service Review
welfare rights campaign in the 1960s was an entirely human endeavor, fraught
with uncertainties and riddled with conflicts. The women leaders did make
missteps, and some of the most dramatic ones are not detailed in the book.
Nonetheless, the welfare rights movement did win major resources for the poor
for quite a few years. It had a real impact on the extent of suffering and hardship
in the United States, as well as on the distribution of public resources. Moreover,
the welfare rights movement produced real change even with all sorts of struc-
tural forces arrayed against it (as well as some that propelled it). That these
victories turned out to be impermanent should not be surprising. In fact, one
of the effects of the welfare rights victories was to mobilize the very forms of
agency by other actors that eventually rolled back the victories. All of this is to
say that politics, the realm in which people exercise agency and influence the
use of power, is a critical, if contingent, element in the policy-making process.
As Kornbluh notes, the welfare rights struggle of the 1960s shows that “‘en-
during and deeply entrenched social beliefs’ are more flexible in response to
popular pressure than they may at first appear” (187). Although the changes
activists helped create were not to be everlasting, they serve as a reminder that
as long as political action is possible, change can come yet again.
Sanford F. Schram
Bryn Mawr College
Note
1. Author’s calculations; see U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Ad-
ministration for Children and Families, Office of Family Assistance, “1996: AFDC Total
Caseload,” http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/ofa/caseload/afdc/1996/fycytotal96.htm
(accessed April 8, 2008), “TANF: Total Number of Recipients; Fiscal and Calendar Year
2000,” http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/ofa/caseload/2000/2000_recipient_tan.htm
(accessed April 8, 2008), and “TANF Recipients through June 2007” (2007), http://
www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/ofa/caseload/2007/tanf_recipients.htm.
Speaking Out for America’s Poor: A Millionaire Socialist in the Progressive Era;
The Life and Work of Robert Hunter. By Edward Allan Brawley. Amherst, NY:
Humanity Books, 2007. Pp. 372. $39.00 (paper).
In 1904, Robert Hunter, who had recently stepped down as head resident of
University Settlement in New York City, published his enduring social study,
Poverty (New York: Macmillan, 1904). In the tradition of Seebohm Rowntree’s
Poverty: A Study of Town Life, Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, and Hull-House
Maps and Papers, Hunter culled together personal observations from his settle-
ment house days in New York and Chicago, as well as wide-ranging statistics, to
provide a descriptive and analytical account of poverty in the United States.1
Hunter estimated that over 10 million individuals lived in poverty in the United
States. The bulk of this poverty, he concluded, was attributable to social problems
that could be addressed only by widespread social reform.
Hunter followed social convention in drawing subjective distinctions between
the worthy poor and paupers. He also drew on popular xenophobic impulses
of the day in calling for limits on immigration to protect both the wages of
laborers and American culture. His broad emphasis on the scope and social


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