Our Homestead Plan for the Poor

...It is time we all put our heads together to try to find a solution...

...It was assumed this meant by death...

...As the federal government has extended its reach, the impact of this law has spread...

...by 1969, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers had a 1.9 percent black membership, the International Plumbers and Pipefitters 0.6 percent...

...About 2.5 million disabled receive $8 billion a year, and another 82,000 blind people receive $264 million a year...

...University of Chicago Press, $19.95...

...After 1862, the government made land grants available out of the public lands...

...Both Wilson and Lemann say that structural unemployment is natural to a free-market system...

...He suggests that conservatives promise to support any program, no matter what it costs, as long as it takes the negative incentives out of welfare and promises to set low-income blacks and others on a permanent path to family stability and independent functioning...

...Half of all black children are now being raised in single-parent homes—up from 20 percent in 1960...

...Inflation has since devoured these benefits...

...The argument that slavery is at the root of black family problems has since been discredited...

...T s there any alternative to this 1 Rube-Goldberg system that virtually begs women to become pregnant and then uses this failure as an opportunity to teach them ersatz independence...

...The loss of income has made black men less attractive marriage partners for black women, leading to a decline in family formation...

...When the system reaches its natural limits, they shout, "Full employment...

...This effort, however, was soon overrun by a campaign initiated within Community Action—a Great Society agency—encouraging unmarried mothers to "demand their rights" to be put on the welfare rolls...

...This will make them eligible for job-training and other educational benefits...

...In 1984, Leon Dash, a veteran Washington Post investigator, spent a year living in a welfare-dependent housing project that has the highest rate of illegitimacy in Washington, fully one out of four children being born to unwed teenagers...

...After all, the entire present system has been improvised out of fifty years of backing and filling—patching up a system that was wrongly conceived in the first place...

...Only this year the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the latest proposal to raise the minimum wage would destroy 500,000 jobs, most of them held by low-wage black teenagers...

...The "safety valve" of the Homestead program is often credited with preventing the development of a permanently impoverished underclass in the nineteenth century...

...Conservatives told him girls had babies just to collect welfare grants...

...Welfare rolls burgeoned from 4.4 million in 1965 to 9.7 million in 1970 and the percentage of female-headed households among blacks rose from 24 percent to 31 percent...

...As Walter Williams argues, it has been the restriction of the labor market through government intervention, rather than any failures of capitalism, that has led to "structural" black unemployment...

...Drug dealers run neighborhood empires, using the shield of the juvenile-justice laws to arm teenage couriers with automatic weapons...

...After more than a year of intensive training and sheltered employment, only one group showed any real long-term improvement—welfare mothers...

...The central problem with Wilson's argument is that it attributes a virtually unprecedented social disaster to an almost routine historical event...

...As economist Eugene Steuerle pointed out in Taxing the Family, as late as 1948 a family with four children making the median income of $3187 was completely exempted from taxes by the $600 deduction for dependents...

...The whole concept of adolescence as a preparation for life, rather than life itself, has been lost...

...The percentage of single mothers was always a little higher than among whites—about 20 percent as opposed to 10 percent in the general population—but this seems to have been due to higher rates of widowhood...

...A large item on the congressional agenda during the 1930s was thus to restrict the employment of "cheap" black labor...

...In all my years of walking the streets of New York City, I have never seen a black or Puerto Rican garbage man...

...How did this disintegration of family life—truly unprecedented in history—ever occur...

...But licensing procedures and unionization gradually pushed them out...

...As Walter Williams points out, there is a tacit understanding between the leadership of blacks and labor that blacks will not challenge union regulations if unions continue to support welfare spending...

...Several states, including Michael Dukakis's Massachusetts, claim to have gotten thousands of people off the dole by requiring that recipients go through job-training programs, with some mild threats of losing their benefits if they don't eventually find work...

...In a remarkable piece of scholarship, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (1976), historian Herbert Gutman proved that the black family remained intact throughout slavery and long thereafter...

...The main problem with single mothers, after all, is not that they don't work, but that they don't get married...

...Instead he tries to settle the issue with one third-hand account from the 1930s that marriages were often "arranged by plantation owners" during slavery...

...In another much-discussed analysis, William Julius Wilson, a University of Chicago sociologist, argues in The Truly Disadvantaged' that "structural unemployment" has been the deciding factor in the disintegration of poor black families...

...Black "strikebreakers" were one of the major impediments to unionization—and in fact many early union contracts specifically excluded hiring black labor...

...Do either men or women feel they would be better off by not getting married...

...Historically, blacks were known as people who would underbid professional carpenters and plumbers, who were non-unionized labor, and who would take factory jobs at wages most whites would disdain...

...By the late forties, however, the Truman Administration discovered that some states were allow-ing divorced women to collect AFDC where alimony payments were not being made...

...But the "widows and orphans" program—now called Aid to Financially Dependent Children (AFDC)—has exploded in a manner no one ever imagined...

...The system has given up on them and is concentrating on those who may still make it: black women...

...Even amid the worst economic distresses, there has never been an instance where the majority of an underemployed population abandoned marriage and reverted to single-parent, female-headed households...

...Men become increasingly more attuned to violence, women increasingly more comfortable with welfare...

...Beginning in some specific year-1990, for instance—every young person who has lived below the poverty line for three years should be given a $5000 cash grant when they reach age 21...

...Across the country, many urban schools have given up all pretense of maintaining moral behavior and are turning themselves into day-care centers...

...Such vast expanses of public land, of course, are no longer available...

...Almost by accident, the small widows-and-orphans pension of the New Deal had become America's family policy...

...But how can such assistance encourage positive goals rather than reward failure...

...There are 35 million people currently living below the poverty line...

...For the underclass, things are actually worse now than they were twenty-five years ago, when the most concentrated attempts in our history to remove institutional racism began...

...Affirmative action" has essentially been a belated effort to force more black hirings through a union-dominated system...

...nder these changing circumstances, it was more than likely that pressures building up in the black community would find some outlet...

...Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that the old verities do work...

...Only as they absorb the urban welfare culture do their lives begin to deteriorate...

...A 1905 survey of 15,000 recently immigrated black families in New York found only one woman heading a single-parent family with more than two children...

...The experience of recent immigrant groups, most notably Asians, proves that the system still works...

...When the National Mediation Board was formed in 1934, one of its first actions was to outlaw a union of black railroad workers formed to oppose white-dominated unions that were forcing blacks out of railroad jobs...

...Sponsored largely by the Ford Foundation, MDRC gave intense job and personality training to 11,000 underclass recruits drawn from three principally male groups—drug addicts, ex-convicts, and recent high school drop-outs—plus welfare mothers...

...The initiative is certainly not going to come from the middle class...

...In areas where federal rules could not reach, states and municipalities were encouraged to set up licensing boards and regulatory bodies to "protect the public interest"—and of course limit competition...

...and watch the inflationary fires burn...

...For many years, the standard explanation was that the black family was destroyed during slavery and never recovered...

...Thus, if workfare is successful, the single-parent, female-headed household will become institutionalized even beyond the incentives of AFDC...

...Of those, about one in twenty-two-1.5 million—turn 21 each year...

...Wilson also cites the later migration...

...The congressional debates over Davis-Bacon made it explicit that black labor was the target...

...The contemporary phenomenon of the "welfare mother," who has a string of four-to-six children fathered by a variety of men without ever marrying, was virtually unknown...

...By marrying, they would encourage men to work and at the same time start raising children who are not virtually programmed for juvenile delinquency...

...Certainly, some kind of financial assistance is essential...

...In The State Against Blacks, Williams chronicles how blacks have been excluded from almost every manner of trade and small business by union and government regulations...

...It is a well-established principle in biology that when monogamy breaksdown, the sexual competition between males becomes far more violent...

...As a civil rights worker in the 1960s, I visited hundreds of sharecropper cabins in Mississippi and Alabama and recall hardly ever encountering a female-headed household...

...Republicans, for -their part, preach supply-side economics—which has dramatically reduced unemployment, but still seems incapable of picking up the most unemployable...

...Ever since the Williamsburg, Virginia Conference on Poverty and Policy in 1984, sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services, a consensus has emerged among poverty specialists that "women can be helped, but men can't...

...In the moving business, blacks have done well at the local level but are virtually excluded from the more lucrative interstate market by the Interstate Commerce Commission...

...But afterwards they must realize that, as able-bodied citizens, they're on their own...

...Almost 60 percent of black babies are born illegitimate...

...But no new cases would be opened...

...Unions, licensed carpenters and electricians, taxi-medallion owners, civil-service employees—none of these are going to give up their government-sponsored monopolies...

...A homestead grant would give them something to look forward to in life—and also distribute benefits more equitably between the sexes...

...This same situation is repeated in areas like union hiring, taxi licensing, and civil-service procedures...

...Certainly, not all deserving people got land...

...But the father-and-son Theatrical What most welfare reformers don't want to discuss is that workfare will do nothing to put the black family back together...

...Yet the carefully muted premise of workfare is just the opposite...

...The whole point would be to give teenagers something to look forward to, an organizing principle around which to control their present behavior...

...A lthough it's difficult to remember now, one of the major social stigmas attached to blacks in the 1930s was not that they "wouldn't work" but that they were too willing to work...

...Neither prediction turned out to be true," Dash noted...

...What can the larger society offer in such a situation...

...That's the kind of principle we should be pursuing...

...The first thing we must do is take a holistic approach—look at the entire life cycle of a member of the underclass and ask ourselves where the intervention of the state can be expected to do the most good...

...Thus, the way was opened for full statutory use of the welfare system by unmarried mothers...

...Ironically, both authors conclude that it was the very success of suburban open-housing that led to the isolation and deterioration of lower-class black life in the central cities...

...Paul Weyrich, of the Free Congress Foundation, has proposed a pact between conservatives and minority leaders over welfare reform...

...But for the most part, because unions, licensing boards, and civil-service procedures form a discriminatory barrier, blacks remain out in the cold...

...And why would high unemployment lead to a failure in family formation anyway...

...The program continued until 1916...

...Altogether, 80 million acres were granted to 500,000 claimants...

...26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1988 Stage Employees (mostly made up of Bronx Irish families) controls hiring...

...Black sharecroppers may have been a peasantry, but they were a peasantry no different from thousands of others around the world...

...The Reagan Administration found this out when it recently proposed repealing Davis-Bacon and met a deafening silence from black politicians...

...The work could be done just as well, if not better, by forty stagehands making $20,000 a year...

...Under the tutelage of the government, black women will be helped to become as financially independent as possible of black men...

...The annual cost would thus be $7.5 billion—half of what AFDC costs today...

...What most welfare reformers don't want to discuss, however—and what many may not even realize—is that workfare will do nothing to put the black family back together...

...A series of court suits knocked down the few methods by which the states had tried to limit access to AFDC...

...So the administration tried to remove any disincentives by extending AFDC to intact families where the breadwinner was unemployed...

...Using plantation ledgers that meticulously recorded births and marriages, Gutman showed that the vast majority of blacks —about 75 percent—lived in stable, monogamous, two-parent families throughout slavery...

...A somewhat different explanation has been offered by journalist Nicholas Lemann in "The Origins of the Underclass," a two-part series in the Atlantic 'The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass and Public Policy...

...A one-year residency requirement was the most common qualifier...

...This same pattern persisted right up through 1925 (when Gutman, perplexingly, ends his study...

...All saw America as a land of opportunity, and even among the poor there was a strong sense that hard work and long-term effort would pay off—which, with astonishing regularity, it did...

...With no relation whatsoever tothe nearly full-employment economy, the "welfare culture" of single-parent households quickly became the norm in low-income black communities...

...Daniel Patrick Moynihanworked from this premise in his 1965 Report on the Black Family, which first raised alarms about the growing black matriarchy...

...The dirty little secret among welfare reformers right now is that they have essentially given up on black men...

...The principle of the Homestead program could be made the basis of a policy that would give impoverished youth the "hand up" in their effort to become productive members of society...

...probably a lot of undeserving people got what they shouldn't have...

...Lemann argues that the underclass already existed among black tenant farmers in the South...

...Youngsters who try to do well at school are ostracized by their peers for "acting white...

...As Mikhail Bernstam and Peter Swan of the Hoover Institution recently put it, the government has become "the marriage partner of last resort"—maybe even of first resort, since almost 90 percent of black teenage mothers no longer marry...

...Several cities—Detroit, Washington, and Los Angeles, for example—have undergone "murder explosions," where rates of mortality among youth gangs suddenly apWilliam flicker is The American Spectator's New York correspondent...

...Another notable example is Carnegie Hall, which operates with eleven stagehands, all of whom make more than $90,000 in salary and overtime...

...About 1.5 million elderly receive pensions totaling $3 billion a year...

...A similar program is now The dirty little secret among welfare reformers right now is that they have essentially given up on black men...

...Another option could be to allow individuals to "bank" their grants and receive $10,000 each at age 25, when they could put it to even better use...

...Elsewhere, unions have been left with enormous control over the labor market...

...The turning point was the $82 million Manpower Development Research Corporation (MDRC), whose five-year, 21-city effort was chronicled by Ken Auletta in The Underclass...

...The results are often astonishing...

...Then in the 1950s, many states began extending AFDC to illegitimate children whose mothers had never married...

...They "regulate themselves"—which means, of course, awarding jobs to relatives and friends, with turf wars and nepotism governing the marketplace...

...As late as 1948, black teenage unemployment was actually lower than white teenage unemployment...

...Crime rates soar...

...For a while America did have another kind of family policy, through the income-tax deduction...

...And so the Democrats continue to try to gather everyone under one tent...

...Other studies have since produced similar findings...

...Consequently, less than 1 percent are held by blacks...

...Regulation of the labor market, which assured the prosperity of the middle class, has limited the ability of the poor to work their way out of poverty...

...There is no reason that the poor should be held hostage to the ill-conceived utopias or the misguided charity of baleful bureaucrats...

...Anyone on AFDC in 1990 could remain on the rolls so long as they were eligible—or they could "cash in" their benefits for a similar one-time $5,000 grant...

...Because every male is no longer assured a reasonable chance of finding a mate (the implicit social contract of monogamy), the battle for access to women becomes much more intense...

...D erhaps no problem poses a greater 1 danger to the future of American society than the emergence of a seemingly permanent "underclass" built around the single-parent, female-headed household...

...AFDC as we now know it would thus be phased out over the next generation and return to being a program only for widows and orphans...

...In one year alone-1866-60 percent of the adult female population of several Southern counties were legally married before civil officials...

...The Wall Street Journal recently visited a Los Angeles high school where one-quarter of the female student body gives birth every year...

...Instead, we were required to hire union labor...

...Besides setting up nationwide old age benefits, funded through workers' contributions, the Social Security Act also created four small pension programs for nonworkers deemed the "deserving poor": (1) the elderly who had not built a sufficient work record, (2) the blind, (3) the disabled, and (4) widows and orphans...

...But the principle of the Homestead program could be made the basis of a policy that would give impoverished youth the "hand up" in their effort to become productive members of society...

...In 1985, when House of Umoja began building its Marcus Garvey Business Development Center, it received a federal grant...

...Blacks made several attempts to get inside the tent by forming their own unions, but were almost always blocked by white-dominated unions and regulatory bodies...

...This is no accident...

...Civilizations have been living with unemployment throughout history...

...Any question of whether poor black men can break back into this family structure is essentially moot...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1988 27 wending its way through Congress under the aegis of Daniel Patrick Moynihan...

...But among today's underclass, particularly among American blacks, efforts at improvement seem to lead backwards...

...Over the brief period 1967-1970—as the civil rights revolution crested and the economy neared full employment—the national percentage of eligible single black mothers on welfare zoomed from 62 to 91 percent...

...But they don't recognize the causes...

...The people on welfare [today are] primarily children of sharecroppers from what Southern blacks call 'the rural.' " Lemann traces the origin of today's urban underclass to two migrations: (1) the migration of Southern black sharecroppers to the North in the fifties and sixties, and (2) the subsequent exodus of the black middle class from urban ghettos made possible by open-housing laws...

...Young people simply cannot imagine an adult life beyond age 19 or so...

...The grant would replace AFDC...

...Numerous accounts show that Southern black sharecroppers lived pretty much the way white sharecroppers did—large families, certainly, but intact husband-and-wife families all the same...

...After the Civil War, the construction trades were filled with black workers, particularly in the South...

...Even more important, however, the "New Homestead Program" would give poor teenagers a reasonable chance of getting a start at the age when they should be taking their first steps toward independence...

...These "welfare families" form a solid core of poverty around which a tangle of pathologies cluster...

...The poor have thus become caught in a pincer movement...

...None of the male groups responded to the incentives...

...proach the levels of guerrilla combat...

...What is going on here...

...I propose there is...

...And since black teenagers now have the highest rate of fertility in the world—almost nine times that of some Western populations and four times the rate of middle-class blacks alone—how long will it be before such anti-family, antisocial behavior completely overwhelms our society...

...After Emancipation, nearly all these slave marriages werelegally sanctioned by Reconstruction authorities...

...Some reformers would probably want to attach all kinds of conditions to the grant—you must graduate from high school, you must have a job, you cannot have illegitimate children...

...From 1960 to 1984, single people faced an essentially flat tax rate, while couples with two children saw their taxes rise 43 percent and couples with four children a remarkable 223 percent...

...Nor is any leadership likely to come from the black community...

...The boys expect to be strung out or dead by 25, the girls to be grandmothers by 35...

...In cities both North and South, the majority of blacks lived in two-parent homes...

...Illegitimacy was common and "marriage ceremonies little observed" among lower-class blacks, he says...

...They have merely been overshadowed for a while by the collectivist fantasies that have mesmerized the intelligentsia—and, to some extent, the public as well...

...The same protections against "cheap labor" was extended by the New Deal into almost every walk of life...

...Instead, he found a world where, for boys and girls alike, having a child has become a "rite of passage...

...The first three programs still pay out small pensions to qualifying people with low incomes...

...2) Under the direction of the state, they will undergo intensive educational efforts to teach them to function fairly independently...

...To be sure, there were often teenage daughters around with illegitimate children, but these were always part of an extended household...

...In The State Against Blacks, Walter Williams cites a 1910 study showing labor-force participation by 71 percent of the black population over nine years old, as opposed to only 51 percent among whites...

...Today, the law's effects remain much the same...

...Meanwhile, the black family continues to disintegrate...

...and the chances that ordinary human institutions like marriage and the family can be re-established become increasingly remote...

...Liberals said teenage births came because girls were ignorant of birth-control or were leading dreary lives and wanted someone to love...

...Not surprisingly, he is entirely ignorant of Gutman's work...

...If a 15-year-old does not have a baby with her current boyfriend right now, there will never be another chance for her...

...3) If all goes well, they will be turned back to society within a few years—as capable as possible of raising their children without the help of men...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1988 25 in 1986...

...The ICC granted 16,000 permits for interstate moving in 1935 and 13,000 remain today, with only a handful of new licenses granted...

...They are grownups at 12, want children as quickly as possible (in order to prove their manor womanhood), and place enormous peer pressure on any "goody two-shoes" who is not sexually active or pregnant by age 15...

...T he reasons for the collapse of 1 black culture, then, are fairly clear...

...The litany of problems in black, lower-class communities needs no introduction...

...A husband and wife, each with a $10,000 grant, could makea down payment on half the homes sold in this country...

...As for Lemann's explanation, there is simply no historical evidence for it...

...28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1988...

...What would such a "New Homestead Program" cost...

...For instance, House of Umoja, a black self-help organization in Philadelphia, put its entire membership of young ex-delinquents to work in 1983 building its Martin Luther King Center with a grant from CBS...

...Does anyone seriously believe that the "economic buffets" of the sixties and seventies were worse than those of the 1930s...

...During the 1920s, northern builders found they could avoid high labor-union costs by putting together itinerant crews of Southern blacks...

...Construction unions, finding themselves out-competed, ran to Congress requesting a law that would require federally funded projects to pay "prevailing union wages...

...I suggest that we should revive—metaphorically, at least—what was perhaps America's most successful effort to even the scales between rich and poor: the Homestead program...

...It's easy to calculate...

...It was finally found—unfortunately--in an obscure portion of the Social Security Act of 1935...

...One successful black-owned moving company in Kansas City spent twenty years and $300,000 in legal fees trying to get the ICC to grant it an interstate license...

...They worked hard and formed stable families...

...The government simply must stop subsidizing the failure of family formation...

...No more marrying the government, no more chronic dependency, no more living off state subsidies for anti-social, anti-familial behavior...

...According to the original regulations, a child became eligible if he lost one parent...

...The big question is, does anybody really care to do anything about it...

...Sharecropping demanded intense physical labor, and I doubt if a landowner would even lease land to a sharecropping family thatdid not have an adult male present...

...Lemann's argument is merely a muddled resurrection of the old argument that the black family was destroyed during slavery...

...But I believe there must be some assumption of responsibility...

...More and more, poor blacks are becoming irrevocably alienated from the mainstream of American culture...

...Wilson maintains that the American economy has been buffeted by "severe economic downturns" and "a decline in manufacturing industries" over the last twenty years, which have unduly affected black men...

...Previous generations of Americans have known poverty, but to none did it seem so hopeless...

...If people blow the whole $5000 on drugs or clothes, that's their problem...

...This led to a flurry of efforts to redefine the program, but nothing came of it...

...Although in some ways mutually contradictory, these efforts by Wilson and Lemann have persuaded most liberal scholars that an explanation for the rise of the underclass has been found...

...The idea of postponing any kind of gratification in order to facilitate somegreater future goal has become completely lost...

...Thus, black communities have essentially become a free-for-all where men compete murderously among themselves for the symbols of power (drugs, money, whatever), while women and children remain ensconced in single-parent homes, living off the government...

...Slaves practiced their own marital restrictions (no cross-cousin marriages) and had their own wedding ceremonies ("jumping the broomstick...

...Meanwhile, AFDC—that great historical accident —has offered poor women an alternative occupation: single motherhood...

...Children bring guns to school...

...As a compromise, both parties seem to have settled on something called "workfare...

...This is now the rate for all families...

...This development raised grave concerns in the Kennedy Administration that AFDC was "breaking up families," or even encouraging illegitimacy...

...We found that under Davis-Bacon, we couldn't hire our own members to do most construction jobs," said Sister Falaka Fattah, the founder of House of Umoja...

...The initial effort was the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931—a piece of legislation that in many ways foreshadowed the New Deal...

...The minimum wage was the capstone to this effort...

...When this system reaches its limits, Republicans ask churches to make up the difference, or pretend the problems don't exist...

...In fact—as Wilson and Lemann are both aware—recent research has shown that black Southern migrants actually do better than native northern blacks at getting jobs and establishing stable lives when they first come North—a reversal of the usual immigrant pattern...

...There are too many people benefiting from the regulated labor market for it to be seriously challenged by either political party...

...The first principle of such a system, of course, would be to cut the link between welfare benefits and fertility...

...Family, community, initiative, self-reliance—the traditional qualities that made America—have not been defeated by the twentieth century...

...Gutman shows this was extremely rare...

...Thus, the entire purpose of the project—giving young blacks some work experience—was defeated by federal law...

...Most of the recipients were black...

...Thus when Wilson, Lemann, and others blame "structural unemployment" for the unusual difficulties of contemporary blacks, they are not entirely wrong...

...T hus, although nobody wants to 1 admit it, the new "workfare" system is essentially going to look like this: (1) Female teenagers will qualify for the program by getting pregnant...

...Sharecroppers were economically dependent on "the big house"—meaning the white landowner...

...When philanthropist Eugene Lang promised a class of Harlem sixth-graders seven years ago that he would pay for their college education if they finished high school, nearly all of them did just that...

...I will not spend too much time detailing the weaknesses of these two theses, since they should be plain enough...

...Black teenagers in these circumstances have absolutely no sense of the future...

...Moynihan was concerned because black female-headed households had reached 20 percent...

...The last category was called "aid to dependent children...

...It isn't...

...Before moving in, Dash said, he had been given several interpretations of teenage pregnancies...

...The poor are the people who most need to be liberated from the dead hand of government...

...But the program worked...