Peter Edelman's Searching for America's Heart and Michael B. Katz's The Price of Citizenship
Glenn, David
SEARCHING FOR AMERICA'S HEART: RFK AND THE RENEWAL OF HOPE by Peter Edelman Houghton Mifflin, 2001 262 pp $26 THE PRICE OF CITIZENSHIP: REDEFINING THE AMERICAN WELFARE STATE by Michael B....
...Such a movement to expand the safety net for the working poor is obviously necessary...
...Katz's The Price of Citizenship is a dense historical overview of U.S...
...That completes the system...
...The solution to this dilemma isn't obvious, and Katz offers no particular prescriptions...
...radicals were still celebrating Leninism and/or plunging into hyperlocalized "neighborhood organizing" projects...
...Edelman is certainly aware of popular movements— he writes respectfully of the United Farm Workers and Boston community organizers— but in the book's telling they seem to come and go like the weather...
...Laura's own bully-therapeutic vocabulary: this is deep denial...
...DISSENT / Summer 2001 n 105...
...T]hey never described the structural changes in the economy in terms that adequately explained why people 102 n DISSENT / Summer 2001 BOOKS across a wide income spectrum were losing ground at such a rapid rate...
...welfare policies shouldn't be looked at in isolation, but as part of a much broader fabric of public and private social insurance...
...When one thinks of it, a whole socialistic system lies in that suggestion...
...But as Katz argues, framing social justice only around job-holders is a dubious business...
...At all costs, though, we must avoid replicating the follies of AFDC: its stinginess, intrusiveness, and perverse incentives against employment and family formation...
...If we look back to the 1970s and 1980s, we can identify several unhappy trends: The labor movement was devoting fewer and fewer resources to organizing...
...What does she need...
...Where were the liberals, indeed...
...The essence of RFK's domestic prescription was jobs...
...So we've helped her with things like gas and rent and car insurance...
...Samuel Gompers's American Federation of Labor, for example, opposed the creation of public unemployment insurance and compulsory public health insurance, arguing that unions alone should protect their members...
...asks Edelman...
...Admirable...
...When they daydream about reform, these characters sometimes move toward the extremes of Fabian tyranny: "I have a theory that when an engagement has lasted ten years, with constancy on both sides, and poverty still prevents marriage, the State ought to make provision for the man in some way, according to his social standing...
...Laura: Is she wasting money...
...Because the U.S...
...Not exactly...
...DISSENT / Summer 2001 n 103 BOOKS There is a plausible case to be made that the 1996 welfare reform law will, perversely, strengthen the safety net in the long run by bringing labor and other interest groups together into new alliances...
...A similar kind of moving target confronts low-wage workers and welfare recipients in the United States today...
...The punitive, cold-turkey model of welfare reform enacted in 1996 brought that debate to a predictable conclusion...
...Social insurance had drained public assistance of most of the sympathetic or "deserving" poor...
...At this point—in the absence of strong popular movements for full employment—it became all too easy for politicians to blame the social crisis of the inner cities on a single cause: welfare...
...You're making me work too hard...
...B]y the late 1950s, all the pieces needed for a narrow, derogatory definition of welfare had fallen into place...
...If America's poor are perceived as "fellow workers"— so this argument runs—the public will be more likely to support decent public policies, not only for the very poor but for the broader working class...
...Caller: She can't quite make her bills...
...Within its limits, Edelman's book is often compelling...
...The left might also fight for a universal caregivers' allowance of the sort sketched by Eva Kittay and other feminist theorists...
...DAVID GLENN is writing a book on the city of Milwaukee and the future of the social contract...
...Like the polity at large, she refuses to acknowledge that fulltime, minimum-wage labor can still leave families far short of meeting basic needs (especially housing...
...THE ANIMATING question of Edelman's book—it also hovers in the background of Katz's—is how the United States moved so quickly from the mood of 1965, when the federal government dramatically expanded the public safety net, to the present moment, when cash welfare entitlements have been abolished and congressional leaders are eying the privatization of Social Security and Medicare...
...After making the usual inquiries about the daughter's marital history, and so on, Schlessinger asked the caller why someone employed full time could possibly need financial assistance: Dr...
...Beneath the surface of their expansive reformist rhetoric lies a fear and loathing of their not-so-skilled, not-so-independent compatriots...
...Laura: I thought you said she worked full time...
...Unless you like to add that no engagement is permitted except between people who have passed a certain examination...
...Laura: Then help her move into a place that she can afford...
...Although his sympathies are clearly on the left, Katz is scrupulous about presenting a broad range of argument and cautious about offering policy presciptions...
...As the economy softened and real incomes stagnated, especially after 1973, AFDC recipients were ripe for demonization as parasites on the labor of taxpayers...
...Not want...
...This plan was far from perfect—it would have provided income at only around 60 percent of the federal poverty line—but at least it would have unraveled the knots in which AFDC and its successors tie their recipients...
...Edelman's Searching for America's Heart is a much shorter and more idiosyncratic work, built partly around memoirs of his years as a staffer for Robert Kennedy and his later tenure as an official in Bill Clinton's Department of Health and Human Services, from which he resigned in protest after Clinton signed the 1996 welfare reform bill...
...Laura: Okay, so, is she using all her money for her bills...
...Caller: She does...
...If," remarked Rhoda, "it were first provided that no marriage should take place until after a ten years' engagement...
...equivalent, let us say, to that which confers a university degree...
...And no marriage, except where both, for the whole decennium, have earned their living by work that the State recognizes...
...Social Security "reform" may have dropped off of President Bush's agenda for now, but there is every reason to believe it will return...
...In Butte County, California, where I live today, roughly five thousand households receive time-limited welfare benefits...
...and the D.C.-based liberal policy world was drunk on post-Roe, post-Watergate complacency...
...The expansion of the Earned In104 n DISSENT / Summer 2001 BOOKS come Tax Credit has eased some of the burden of the working poor, but serious poverty remains...
...Hence the gauzy metaphor of Edelman's title: once America had "heart," and now that heart seems mysteriously to have been misplaced...
...Only by studying this larger picture can we intelligently argue about the fundamental questions of work and family that are conjured by the word "welfare...
...True full employment is not on the horizon, and, "as the definition of citizenship increasingly includes work, more Americans will find themselves, at least from time to time, strangers in their own country, outside the circle to which they thought they belonged...
...Okay: Don't give her money...
...Where were all the liberals while this was occurring...
...and for a series of items to help children and young adults be better prepared for the job market...
...As Katz notes, the 1988 Family Support Act—an important precursor to the 1996 reform—was built on fantasy: "At a time of declining real wages and fringe benefits, [the bill's authors] asserted that after one year, former welfare clients would support themselves—and pay for child care and health insurance— through work...
...Work," he said over and over, "is, in a real sense, what this country is all about...
...must, if they are not to be despicable persons, somehow find serious work," says Mary Barfoot...
...too many U.S...
...Imagine a system that would provide all citizens, regardless of income or sex, five years of support, to be used either consecutively or in small batches, for child-raising or caring for disabled family members...
...But when welfare recipients move into the labor market, are they welcomed with open arms as fellow citizens...
...KATZ'S The Price of Citizenship sheds a different light on the where-were-theliberals question...
...And my question is: Should we help her with money, because she will probably never earn very much, and do we link that money help in any way to her continuing immoral lifestyle...
...Then you can take the baby away because of abuse and neglect...
...The half-truth at the center of the last decade's welfare reform is the notion that work provides independence, dignity, and stability...
...Katz quotes a former Clinton Health and Human Services official named Olivia Golden, who hopes that the law will bring a shift toward "seeing [welfare] recipients as workers, as fellow citizens...
...To use Dr...
...In Milwaukee, the city whose welfare rolls have dropped most dramatically, a growing coalition of churches, neighborhood groups, and unions has been waging an aggressive campaign to improve unemployment insurance and to reform Wisconsin's bankruptcy laws, so that workers' back wages will be paid before creditors...
...This is a central theme of both PeDISSENT / Summer 2001 n 101 BOOKS ter Edelman's and Michael Katz's important new books: U.S...
...A strong foothold in a (relatively) dignified occupation should give their students freedom and independence...
...Unfortunately, the structure of Edelman's book undermines a full discussion of these questions...
...Work and not welfare, although he strongly opposed solving the problems of welfare "by slogans—by getting tough----or cutting back, by making the system even more harsh and punitive than it now is...
...The vast majority of girls...
...More generally, the public mood contains an ugly, social Darwinist element that hardly matches Golden's hopes of solidarity and fellow-citizenship...
...public assistance programs for the long-term unemployed, which have always been stingy, invasive, and perversely designed...
...And many states have recently created (imperfect, fragile) new child care and health care programs to accompany welfare reform...
...Laura: What does she need...
...B]ut that would have been expensive," Edelman writes, "and President Johnson turned him down, opting instead for community action...
...This is excellent rhetoric (especially if we mentally correct RFK's sexist assumptions about work and parenting...
...But there's a wrinkle: Gissing's characters (like the author himself) have an impatience— sliding into contempt—for women who are not already, by their lights, free and independent citizens...
...Caller: Well, she does somewhat...
...In 1996, the AFL-CIO took the lead in fighting for an increased minimum wage, a victory that benefited not only union members but millions of other workers...
...SEARCHING FOR AMERICA'S HEART: RFK AND THE RENEWAL OF HOPE by Peter Edelman Houghton Mifflin, 2001 262 pp $26 THE PRICE OF CITIZENSHIP: REDEFINING THE AMERICAN WELFARE STATE by Michael B. Katz Metropolitan, 2001 469 pp $35 THE LONDON feminists at the center of George Gissing's 1893 novel The Odd Women have a vision: They will train unmarried women to perform clerical work...
...Indeed, Edelman tells us that he was bitterly angry with Kennedy during the last few days before his assassination, because of a crude appeal Kennedy made to the racism of California suburbanites: he "accused [Eugene] McCarthy of wanting to transport to Orange County a large number of blacks who were unprepared to live there...
...public assistance and social insurance policies...
...Great Society programs—together with the welfare rights movement of the 1960s—dramatically increased Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) rolls, but they failed to address this fundamental divide...
...None of these postures was conducive to building an aggressive, sustainable movement to end poverty and bring corporate power to heel...
...True full employment, at a living wage, would completely transform the playing field for hundreds of thousands of U.S...
...Providing a man a job" is "the most important step we can take, [but it] will not improve the schools his children attend or assure that medical care will be available even though he can't afford it...
...He has a great deal to say about the personal virtues and misdeeds of RFK and Clinton, but makes few systematic arguments about how the external political environment made Kennedy's and Clinton's actions possible...
...Kennedy's call for family-supporting jobs may sound like homespun American virtue, but a serious effort to guarantee such jobs would require a far tougher battle than, say, the creation of Medicare...
...At the same time, the county district attorney's office has nearly three thousand open welfare-fraud investigations, which involve snooping in bank accounts and backyards for signs of unreported income and "men in the house...
...low-wage employers...
...Perhaps we will see a revival of the Nixon-era guaranteed-income proposal (something that Ralph Nader occasionally promoted in 2000...
...On April 3, a woman called in to Laura Schlessinger's radio program and said, [M]y question is about our oldest daughter, who is low-mental-functioning, although she is employed full-time...
...The two books raise similar questions, but are very different in tone and range...
...If we eliminate what some economists have called "threat labor"—the millions of workers unemployed and in prison, who serve as object lessons to the working poor—the structures of power in our workplaces and stock exchanges would be very different...
...In his celebration of RFK, he manages to avoid hagiography...
...They left the field too open to those who were blaming welfare for everything...
...If recipients earn outside income or choose to form a two-adult household, they quickly lose all cash benefits...
...Many of the same institutions that have fought hardest for welfare reform have also been laboring to minimize the dignity and stability of U.S...
...On the other hand, the enactment of welfare reform has not stopped the drive toward scaling back and privatizing other elements of the safety net...
...Meanwhile—as if to prove Golden's point—a welfare rights group's campaign to denounce the financial misdeeds of Milwaukee's private welfare agencies has attracted much less attention and generated much less energy...
...But in his liberal-technocratic way, Kennedy probably failed to appreciate just how radical these notions were...
...A]ction on all these matters in concert will build a community...
...Caller: She's on her own, but I think we've found about the cheapest option there is...
...The conservative movement was utterly corrupt, they believed, and in any case the courts would step in to fix our injustices...
...At some point, labor and other social movements may come together to force the nation to decide: if a free adult gets out of bed and works forty hours a week, shouldn't she or he be guaranteed a decent standard of living...
...When she doesn't provide for the child, take the child away from her...
...They want all citizens to have independent, dignified labor—but they also believe that only highly skilled (and absurdly self-denying) people can actually earn much dignity...
...When one thinks of it, a whole socialistic system lies in that suggestion...
...Notice how Gissing's characters have moved the goalposts...
...It's an attractive vision, and a prophetic one...
...welfare state is such a complex hodgepodge of public programs, private charity, and private insurance, many potentially progressive interest groups have historically been nervous about expanding the public safety net, lest they lose their own bird-in-the-hand niches...
...And he convincingly argues that RFK struck the right balance in the late-1960s battles over welfare policy: he fought for increased benefits and for programs that would reconnect AFDC recipients with the labor market...
...Yes," [Everard] assented...
...As recently as 1993, the AFL-CIO was reluctant to throw its weight behind Clinton's health reform plan...
...Nor did he propose work in isolation...
...As our social programs are increasingly tied to employment, what will happen to people who do not or cannot work...
...THERE IS REASON to believe that something like this is actually happening...
...Wage labor will be their ticket away from the sexism and superstition that drained the souls of middle-class Victorian women...
...social insurance programs (mostly tied to employment) and U.S...
...Katz offers one answer to this question: the Great Society, for all its ambition, did almost nothing to bridge the historic divide between U.S...
...Because the child shouldn't be with her anyway...
...The research with which they justified their claims supported none of these assumptions...
...In the last century, the labor market, for all its injustice, has allowed millions of women to fight their way partly free from the cult of domesticity...
...low-wage jobs—by fighting unions, resisting minimum-wage increases, dropping health benefits, raiding pensions, attacking workers' compensation, and weakening unemployment insurance...
...Eight years later, the Nixon administration floated an unsuccessful proposal for a universal guaranteed income, contingent on participation in work or training programs...
...She is a single mom of a nine-month-old boy...
...Both Edelman and Katz mention a debate from the early months of Lyndon Johnson's administration: Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz proposed a large-scale public jobs program that would have attacked poverty by transforming local labor markets...
...Is the baby not eating...
...Public policy had cemented a wall between public assistance and social insurance...
...The failure of proposals like Wirtz's and Nixon's meant that many AFDC recipients continued to be radically disconnected from the labor market...
...This is a crucial question, but Edelman has surprisingly little to say about it...
Vol. 48 • July 2001 • No. 3
