Marisa Chappell's War on Welfare offers a detailed political history of the welfare debate from 1964 to 1984. Beginning with the rise of the welfare reform movement under President Lyndon Johnson's Administration's “War on Poverty,” the narrative focuses on explaining the demise of Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) in 1996.

Chapter 1 opens with the diverse cast of the Great Society's antipoverty coalition. Chappell's narrative challenges Gareth Davies' characterization of the Left's move to income entitlements in From Opportunity to Entitlement. Rather, The War on Welfare paints the Left as strongly influenced by Daniel Moynihan's ideas maligning welfare with the disintegration of black families. In Chappell's telling, “guaranteed income” was seen as key to preventing fathers' benevolent desertions to qualify their families for AFDC. In calling for a “practical system of income maintenance” to “raise all thirty-million [poor] Americans to at least the poverty level” (p. 63), the antipoverty coalition honed its attacks on AFDC, a program limiting assistance to single women heads of households with children and, therefore, incentivizing the breakup of black families. So popular were ideas of “guaranteed income” that Richard Nixon Republican Administration proposed it in the form of the Family Assistance Program (FAP), outlined in chapter 2. Disagreement within the ranks of the antipoverty coalition and political attacks from the right demanding more work requirements ultimately doomed this important opportunity for the antipoverty coalition to compromise.

Following the defeat of the FAP, chapter 3 outlines how majority-seeking liberals turned their attention from welfare reform to focus on “full employment”—a strategy to ameliorate alienation of the White working-class, Nixon's “forgotten Americans.” By the end of the 1970s, however, the economic and political realities had changed. The focus on male breadwinners and full-time workers, however, faced a new firestorm of criticism from feminists. Splintering from the antipoverty consensus, feminists argued that more needed to be done than simply “to marry off adult female recipients” (p. 103) to preserve the rapidly disappearing nuclear family. In addition, growing concerns about the “urban underclass” in the media blamed poverty on “culture” rather than historical disadvantage. As liberals' again pushed to reform AFDC under Jimmy Carter's Administration, chapter 4 describes how Carter's focus on fiscal austerity, feminism, and skepticism about the effectiveness of AFDC in poverty prevention resulted in tepid support for their proposals.

Fifteen years of AFDC fatigue and growing fragmentation of the antipoverty coalition led to their acquiescence to a “new consensus” under Ronald Regan's Administration, described in chapter 5. The Family Support Act of 1988, the embodiment of the “new consensus,” aimed to expand child support programs and investments in “work readiness” for poor women rather than providing guaranteed income. The main changes were not views on the right but views on the left—The War on Welfare notes how closely the “new consensus” resembled the anti-AFDC rhetoric of the previous decades.

Unlike explanations that treat the demise of AFDC a 1990s development or a function of the neoconservative shift in politics, The War on Welfare locates disenchantment with AFDC in the rhetoric of the anti-poverty coalition itself. Wedded to the role of the male-breadwinning and female homemaking, the coalition's arguments for guaranteed income grew increasingly anachronistic with increases in women's work. In addition, the feminization, racialization, and urbanization of AFDC in the 1960s and early 1970s influenced the perception that working-class Americans had little to gain—and dollars to lose—from welfare, which fueled political attacks from the Right and the Left that AFDC recipients were undeserving. Chappell's telling, thus, links the ultimate transformation of welfare to what Nixon called, “workfare,” to dissent both from the right and, perhaps more surprisingly, the left.

Overall, The War on Welfare makes a strong case for shared responsibility of both the right and the left in the ultimate demise of AFDC. Chappell's diverse set of primary sources—perspectives from businessmen, Civil Rights leaders, antipoverty organizations, political interests and the poverty constituencies themselves—chronicles decades of news to uncover the roots of AFDC's demise. But this tour de force in evidence struggles in presentation. Like the political tensions Chappell documents, the narrative meanders between organizations, periods, and political parties often leaving the readers to weave the larger story together. Another part of The War on Welfare that may trouble economists is the insertion of Chappell's own views about public policy. Her hasty rejection of claims that AFDC incentives affected marital status, family dysfunction, or longer-term entitlement dependency, for instance, neglects a large literature on this topic. It also provides a weak basis for her case that only the perception of the AFDC changed and needs explaining (p. 11).

In sum, an important contribution of The War on Welfare is a detailed compilation of historical sources—remarkable references for researchers interested in welfare policy and political history. No economic historian would take issue with a more historical understanding of the current welfare debate. But explaining the demise of welfare is a much taller order, indeed. The book is ultimately more successful in chronicling political discourse surrounding AFDC than explaining the program's demise.