California Crucible by Bell Jonathan;

Author:Bell, Jonathan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

CHAPTER 8

Welfare Reform and the Idea of the Family

“This is indeed a crucial time in public assistance,” reported assistant secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare and long-time federal Social Security administrator Wilbur Cohen in a speech in Boston in November 1961. “I can venture to say that the welfare programs have never been so thoroughly studied as they are being studied under this administration. And they have never been the object of so many independent evaluations by such highly qualified people.”1 In California a number of factors coalesced in the early 1960s to put the welfare state at the center of the political agenda. First, the passage of several federal bills, ranging from Social Security for the disabled in 1956 to the Kerr-Mills Medical Assistance to the Aged bill in 1960, offered federal funds on a matching basis to states that implemented new state programs of categorical assistance. The election of President Kennedy ushered in a period of high political expectation that new entitlement programs would be on the agenda, and the president's temporary allowance of AFDC benefits to unemployed parents as an economic stimulus measure raised the possibility that a major expansion of entitlements at the state level would not necessarily cause ructions in Washington. Third, the early years of the Brown administration had witnessed a dramatic enlargement of the state government, and an increasingly ambitious and influential state Department of Social Welfare sought to capitalize on the favorable political climate and enlarge its control over a multilayered and bureaucratically complex welfare apparatus. Fourth, the state legislature was by the early 1960s solidly under Democratic control, and the chair of the Social Welfare Committee was the extraordinarily talented and driven champion of the poor and dispossessed Phil Burton, who possessed such powers of legislative legerdemain and singularity of purpose that he would almost single-handedly revolutionize California's welfare state without arousing the suspicions of many of his opponents until it was too late. Finally, the reelection of Pat Brown in 1962 gave the political green light to the most enthusiastic supporters of a more generous welfare system, and gave Brown the electoral capital he needed to throw his weight behind one of the biggest spending sprees in the history of any single state.2 While the story of the major amendments to California's welfare system in 1963, usually referred to under the umbrella Assembly Bill 59 that brought them about, is important in itself, the underlying story of the ideological impact of welfare state building on the Democratic Party in California is a less-understood narrative that had a major influence on politicians' understanding of how society did and should function in later years. Efforts to define welfare as a right to all needy people and not just those who met a particular moral standard opened up new opportunities for marginalized interest groups to integrate themselves into the political mainstream through involvement in the campaign to eliminate the morality-based foundations of public policy. At the same time, debates over welfare suggested growing

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