From the creation of the New Deal to status quo court rulings, social security frameworks historically are symbolic of the extension of the ante-bellum plantation by systematically excluding black workers.

The Aftermath The millions of workers excluded from Social Security would haunt future social policy. Having struggled through the Depression, many laborers found themselves redundant due to the mechanization of agriculture. Whether in the form of the cotton picker of the Delta or the tractor powered by an internal combustion engine that became a fixture in American agriculture, millions of laborers were no longer necessary on farms that predominated in the South and Southwest. While sharecroppers were quickly dispossessed, tenant farmers, unable to access credit to purchase the equipment essential to plant and harvest crops, were similarly unnecessary. Denied Social Security benefits and finding welfare assistance minimal, if available at all, millions of rural workers sought work elsewhere, the urgency of their search in large measure by government design. Harassed by Jim Crow, Negroes fled to cities of the North—Chicago, New York City, Detroit—the Black Diaspora populating black ghettoes, while whites often moved West, chronicled by John Steinbeck’s (1939) novel The Grapes of Wrath, which won the National Book Award as well as a Pulitzer Prize. The circumstances of black families migrating North would have been intimately familiar to a lad from an Irish family in New York City during the 1940s. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s father had abandoned the family, leaving his mother to scrape together earnings from teaching at a women’s correctional institution, working as a nurse, and occasionally relying on public assistance. The family’s frequent moves included slums, even Hell’s Kitchen, until the young Moynihan took advantage of the GI Bill and became a student of public policy. Receiving a master’s degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a doctorate from the London School of Economics, Moynihan’s focus was on labor policy. Inserting himself in New York City politics, Moynihan sought a position in the new Johnson administration, where he hoped to expand job opportunities through the War on Poverty. As an assistant in the Labor Department, Moynihan sought to leverage social policy in order to preempt a burgeoning Civil Rights Movement that had become associated with urban riots. At the same time Moynihan wanted to position himself for a run for President of the City Council of New York (Patterson 2010). In March 1965, one hundred copies of The Negro Family: A Case for National Action were printed, without authorship, and distributed surreptitiously within the Johnson administration. By the summer of 1965, the “Moynihan report” was provoking debate within the administration as well as academic circles due to its focus on the disorganization of African American family life as a cause of persistent poverty. Illegitimacy, crime, and alcoholism subverted normal family life; conspicuously absent was a father figure to discipline children, particularly boys. Absent discipline necessary to navigate a way out of poverty, Moynihan contended, poor black families produced irresponsible young men who had little education and limited job prospects and young women who became pregnant to sustain their families through welfare. Replicating family disorganization attributed to slavery, Moynihan worried about generational poverty distinguishing black families from the American mainstream (Moynihan 1965). The Moynihan Report generated a firestorm, inflaming liberals, while animating conservatives who had long been skeptical about welfare. Liberal critics accused Moynihan of blaming African American mothers for their impoverished families. Moreover, even though he cited contemporary data to substantiate his argument, liberals noted that Moynihan neglected to propose solutions. Conservatives found validation in Moynihan’s analysis, later configuring “behavioral poverty” subsidized by government welfare programs in perverse synergy. During the 1980s, conservative intellectuals would inveigh against government welfare, George Gilder (1981, 118) stating the poor needed “the spur of their own poverty,” and Charles Murray (1984) advocating the termination of all government supports for welfare recipients of working age. Ultimately, Lawrence Mead (1986) would propose a “new paternalism” through which government would deny benefits to poor women who refused to work and had children out of wedlock in order to integrate them into the mainstream. Together, these would be harbingers of the welfare reform debate of the mid-1990s. Conspicuously absent in Moynihan’s monograph is any recognition of the role played by excluding almost one-third of low-wage workers, particularly Black domestic and agricultural workers, from provisions of the Social Security Act during its early years.11 The third part of the Moynihan Report, “The Roots of the Problem,” focused on the matriarchal family that evolved from slavery, the emasculation of Black males with Jim Crow, then skipped forward to the disorganized black family in urban ghettoes, which was attributed to high levels of black unemployment, especially among young men. A striking omission for a labor scholar, Moynihan failed to acknowledge how government’s refusal to provide pensions to low-wage workers contributed to economic desperation, evident in family disorganization. Ultimately, ignorance of the exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers from Social Security would place liberals on the defensive, struggling to refute conservative critics of welfare, who contended that imprudent behavior was the cause of minority poverty. Had he been better informed, Moynihan could have charted a more compassionate course for public policy, recognizing that low-income, minority households, having been excluded from social program supports, included workers who were left to fend for themselves in a Darwinian labor market. Eventually, the default in welfare reform would be a disciplinary regime that not only targeted single mothers but also excluded the fathers of their children. The irony of the Moynihan Report would be that its author, elected to the U.S. Senate, would find himself disagreeing with a Democratic President about welfare reform during the 1990s. Himself a product of a low-income, disorganized home, Bill Clinton would become a Rhodes Scholar and, after losing the governorship of Arkansas in 1978, regained it in 1982 and served for a decade until his election as President in 1992. During Clinton’s governorship, Ronald Reagan had pioneered welfare reform, convincing Congress to pass the Family Support Act in 1988. While the outcomes of Reagan welfare reform would be disappointing for conservatives, the waivers granted to states induced them to experiment with alternatives to the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the family welfare entitlement. An ambitious politician, Clinton sought a welfare reform waiver from the Reagan administration, and subsequently established Arkansas WORKS, a mandatory welfare-towork program. An evaluation of Arkansas WORKS revealed that it cost $118 per recipient, which was recovered by reduced expenditures for AFDC of $167.67 annually for each participant during the first three years of the program. Notably, AFDC recipients benefited only $242.33 in increased earnings annually about $0.12 per hour, hardly enough to become self-sufficient (Gueron and Pauly 1991). But the savings to government, multiplied by the number of Arkansas AFDC families, 20,000 in 1988 (US Department of Health and Human Services 2004), yielded $3.5 million in savings, half of which would be credited to the State of Arkansas, a tidy sum for a small state. Compared to other state welfare-to-work programs, Arkansas WORKS performed better with respect to government benefit reductions as well as increased earnings, minimal as those would be, leading Governor Clinton to conclude that welfare reform was a winner politically. Presidential candidate Clinton would include in his platform, “ending welfare as we know it.” In the debate leading to passage of the 1996 welfare reform law, President Clinton encountered an indignant Senator Moynihan who objected to altering AFDC in line with a Republican plan, which included converting the entitlement to a discretionary program, devolving it to the states, conditioning benefits on specific behaviors, and establishing a life-time cap on receipt of benefits. Clinton, however, realized the benefits of Arkansas WORKS, and was on the cusp of a reelection campaign, so he signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, effectively ending the family cash entitlement and securing reelection. By social policy standards, the consequences were profound: caseloads crashed. Between 1994 and 2002, caseloads plummeted, especially in the South: Alabama 64.2 percent, Florida 76.1 percent, Georgia 62.0 percent, Louisiana 72.7 percent, Mississippi 69.0 percent, North Carolina 62.5 percent, South Carolina 60.1 percent, Virginia 59.8 percent (US House of Representatives, Committee on Ways and Means 2004, table 7-7). In many states, cash assistance dwindled, dropping from $117.00 per month in 1996 for a family of three in Mississippi to $101.00 in 1998, in Alabama from $144.00 to $140.00, respectively (US House of Representatives, Committee on Ways and Means 2004, 7-36). If the War on Poverty marked a new front to assist the poor for many low-income families in the South, welfare reform represented a retreat, and a protracted retreat at that. Two decades after welfare reform 1.5 million American households, including 3 million children, were scrambling to get by on less than $2.00 per day (Edin and Shaefer 2015). Significantly, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), AFDC’s successor, declined dramatically, at inception providing benefits to 68 out of every 100 eligible families in 1996 to 27 eligible poor families in 2010 (Trisi and Pavetti 2012). Much of the caseload collapse would be attributed to increasingly punitive eligibility requirements, sanctions that ejected entire families from assistance, and the belief among low-income families that welfare was not available for them, despite their technical eligibility. Any summary of poverty in the U.S. must acknowledge the interplay between social insurance, such as Social Security, and public assistance, such as TANF. For policy analysts, this distinction accounts for an awkwardness imposed by federalism; but for the poor, the distinction has been poignant. The Social Security Act denied millions of poor households a public pension that was available to other workers, forcing them to rely on public assistance, or welfare, which was initially non-existent or minimal. When welfare uptake became too objectionable, politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, resorted to a work regime, paradoxically the very norm that government had violated by excluding agricultural and domestic workers from Social Security. Denied a public pension, the minority poor would be effectively denied welfare, as well, ironically through the imposition of the TANF work mandate. Denied TANF, an increasing number of families cobbled together incomes by means that were illegal as regards federal welfare programs, including selling Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, doubling-up in Section 8 apartment units, and generating unreported income through scavenging for scrap metal, selling blood plasma, engaging in prostitution, and selling drugs, their 21st century living conditions mirroring those of 20th century farm workers, debased lives then and now. As before, their numbers are disproportionately minorities.12 The sad tale of excluding agricultural and domestic workers from Social Security, which has been replicated in the denial of welfare benefits to the poor, would continue with the most recent addition to the American welfare state: the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Designed to universalize healthcare, the 2010 ACA included a mandatory expansion of Medicaid for the poor. In National Federation of Independent Business v. Sibelius, however, the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that the Medicaid expansion would be optional; states could not be required to expand health care to the poor despite billions of dollars in federal subsidies to underwrite program expansion.13 By 2023, eleven states had rejected the expansion of Medicaid—most in the former Confederacy—effectively denying access to healthcare to their disproportionately minority poor.14