By the early 1970s, those fighting to sustain community and personal rehabilitation strategies by employing social work technologies faltered. Rather, the debate began to focus more on direct resource transfers (e.g., cash, food, shelter, health care). There were many reasons for this, but surely one was the feeling that poverty was not a pathology. The poor needed money and not meddlesome service interventions. Critics of the emerging perspective countered with the allegation that merely giving the vulnerable money masked deeper challenges including possible individual and familial dysfunctions. This debate continues.

In my first professional position (1971) working for the State of Wisconsin’s human services agency, social work types dominated the key administrative positions. In fact, the traditional welfare functions had just been integrated into the agency administering classic human service systems. Oddly enough, this happened just as the federal government was divorcing the giving of money from any offer of social services to struggling families. By the time I migrated to the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin (1975), virtually all the important scholars doing poverty related work were economists.

This revolution did not occur over night. Sometime in the early 1970s, those fighting for community and personal rehabilitation strategies had pretty much backed away from playing an active role in the anti-poverty drama. The debate, as noted, had shifted to direct resource transfers. In fact, I noted that social workers were abandoning the field in the ‘war’ on poverty by the late 1960s, a retreat that picked up speed over time. I think they are still running. I served on the UW School of Social Work’s master’s program admissions committee for many years. When I ran across an applicant who expressed an interest in working with the poor, I would call for the paramedics so that I might be revived. I also continued to work with the State Human Services agency periodically. By the 1980s, you could fire a cannon down the agency hallways and not risk hitting any social workers. They largely had disappeared, probably all becoming marriage therapists.

By the time I was engaged in poverty work as an academic, the focus clearly had shifted to cash and cash-like transfers. For example, President Richard Nixon, despite his many flaws, proved to be a big spender on social programs, though he was not a fan of rehabilitative service programs. Among other things, he:

Instituted a cost of living provision to annually update benefits for Social Security benefits;

Federalized welfare for the blind, disabled, and aged under the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program;

Nationalized the Food Stamp program (now known as SNAP) so that it became virtually a funny-money Income floor or what economists termed a ‘negative Income tax;’

Supported and almost passed a real cash-based negative income tax. His ‘family assistance plan’ came within one vote of passing in the Senate;

A bit later, one of the most important anti–poverty measures was introduced, the Earned Income Tax Credit which continues to lift working families out of poverty to this day.

Despite all this progress, the underlying tensions evoked by the poverty wars never were far from the surface. Nixon dismantled or slashed many remnants of the original War On Poverty, oversaw the separation of human services from the transfer of cash to poor families with children, and vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Act.

War fueled deficit-spending (financing the Vietnam conflict), a robust social safety net, and declining income inequality worked their magic. In 1973, poverty would fall to its nadir, 11.1 percent, a figure we would not see again for several decades. Moreover, measures of inequality had also fallen dramatically with the share of the income pie going to the top 1 percent falling from about one-quarter in the late 1920s to slightly less than 10 percent in the 1970s.

In 1973, the Arab oil embargo disrupted the long hegemony of the U.S. economy. By this time, we had real competition in global markets. And the political right, emboldened by a strategic plan to reshape government in a hard conservative direction, paid close attention to the tactics laid out by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell. He called for the reframing of every institution underlying American governance and for transforming the very normative culture in how we thought about society. A new ‘war’ had been declared, this time on what was seen as an ‘activist’ government.

The original War On Poverty was losing momentum. So, what had we achieved? We found ourselves with a social safety net that yet reflected an earlier world view of the poor, one based on a notion of the ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ poor. For the worthy poor, those NOT expected to work, assistance was relatively more generous, included reasonable cash transfers, and was more likely to be seen as a federal responsibility. For those deemed unworthy, such as those expected to work like able-bodied male adults, assistance was meager at best, usually in the form of non-cash help, and remained largely a local responsibility. For those in the middle, like single mothers with children, we were torn. Control was split between the federal and state levels, remained uneven in terms of generosity across jurisdictions, and was increasingly conditioned on proper behaviors.

In addition, one could feel this ideological pushback gaining momentum, abetted by some alarming social trends. Many were frightened by civil discord (urban riots) and by what they saw as a breakdown in law and order. Moreover, there appeared to be a fracture in expected social conventions and norms. For example, the nonmarital birthrate began an inexorable rise from 5 percent in 1960 to about 40 percent before leveling off. And welfare rolls continued to expand through the 1960s and 1970s, not decline as many had predicted given a robust economic climate. Some feared that society was losing its mooring and blamed welfare for all the problems.

A growing right-wing pushback was aided in no small measure by a planned growth in the conservative voice, as was called for in the Powell strategy memo. In earlier debates, the American Enterprise Institute (created during WWII) had been one of the only think tanks opposing an expansionary public assault on poverty. By the end of the 1970s, contributions from wealthy donors had created a score more centers of conservative thought with the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation leading the way. The Virginia and Chicago Schools of conservative academic study also mounted a serious campaign to undermine the prevailing consensus around Keynsian economics.

In Washington, reform politics seemed exhausted. President Jimmie Carter’s Program for Better Job’s and Income was a last gasp for a positive national comprehensive reform as residual concerns about poverty appeared to be going the way of the Titanic, slipping slowly out of sight. Perhaps sensing the shift in where the debate would next settle (in the states), the Wisconsin Legislature mandated its own reform study … an initiative chaired by Economics Professor Robert Haveman and partly staffed by me. Between us, we developed a policy technocrat’s dream that included broad changes to the tax system, to the workforce development system, to the child support system, to name just a few. Some of our ideas saw the light of day, including the implementation of a state Earned Income Tax initiative and several significant child support reforms. Still, making headway was increasingly challenging, unlike a decade or so earlier. We would soon discover that even the vaunted ‘Wisconsin Idea’ would soon encounter rough waters, especially with the State’s new political elite.

Stay tuned!