The emergence of race in national welfare politics: the 1962 and 1967 amendments to AFDC

Abstract

This article traces the influence of post-war shifts in gender and race relations on the politics of federal welfare in the 1960s. It describes a conservative turn in the politics of welfare during this decade, driven in large part by the rising importance of race within the context of federal welfare policymaking. Contrasting President Kennedy’s Public Welfare amendments in 1962 with amendments to welfare added to President Johnson’s 1967 Social Security increases, the article identifies the declining influence of gender-based concerns and an increase in the importance of race in national welfare policymaking by the latter half of the decade. This shift occurred simultaneously with a move away from a rehabilitation framework designed to encourage work and self-sufficiency through expanded social services for welfare families, toward an employment-focused framework that required work from adult welfare recipients, enforced through punitive sanctions. In explaining the changes in national welfare politics during these years, I analyze the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) demographics and growth, public opinion survey data, and the partisan and ideological composition of congress. A content analysis of New York Times welfare coverage during each of these policymaking efforts, along with a close reading of congressional hearings and floor debates, provides empirical evidence for the shift from gender to race in national welfare politics. The article demonstrates that increasingly liberal gender norms and advances in civil rights for African Americans provided the impetus for reactive efforts by conservatives to re-impose post-war gender and racial norms where possible, with one manifestation being the restrictive and racially pejorative welfare politics that emerged in Congress by the late 1960s.