Hell’s Kitchen to Harvard University

Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but raised in New York City, Moynihan’s marginal middle-class status was upended by the Depression and by his biological father’s abandonment of the family in 1937. Forced into a series of tenement houses and, at least briefly, onto public assistance, young Moynihan shined shoes at Times Square and Penn Station—experiences that became important parts of his political legend. Briefly employed on the docks during World War II, Moynihan rose from these more physically taxing jobs to a clipboard-carrying “checker” thanks to his ability to read and write. He entered City College in 1943, then enrolled in the Navy’s V-12 Officer Training Program at Middlebury College the following year. After the war, Moynihan returned to Tufts University, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. After failing a Foreign Service examination in 1949, Moynihan entered the doctoral program in International Relations at the Fletcher School and won a Fulbright Award to study at the London School of Economics.^{Footnote 15} As he progressed further into academic life, Moynihan came to believe that he had insight into the lived experience of working-class life that his peers lacked, a singular conviction that did much to shape the rest of his political career.^{Footnote 16}

Moynihan’s first exposure to the complicated politics of government bureaucracy came at a critical juncture in American political history. A series of chance meetings led the young Democrat to W. Averell Harriman’s New York gubernatorial campaign in 1954. Brought to Albany by Harriman’s research director, future Congressman Jonathan Bingham, Moynihan served as deputy to Milton Stewart, the governor-elect’s chief political adviser. Though Moynihan later quipped that state politics during the Harriman years was “jobs, jobs, jobs,” the actual efficacy of government employment as a political tool was waning in the mid-1950s.^{Footnote 17} While the distribution of government positions remained a matter of political concern, it had ceased to function in the traditional vote-for-employment model typical of the nineteenth-century political machine that Moynihan later wrote about in Beyond the Melting Pot, the volume he coauthored with Nathan Glazer in 1963.^{Footnote 18} While cultural deference, ethnic solidarity, and the strategic distribution of city jobs had once linked electoral politics and local state building, a half-century’s worth of civil service reform had, by the mid-twentieth century, placed the bulk of state jobs beyond the reach of easy political manipulation.^{Footnote 19} Those that remained were mostly low paying, generally unattractive, and too few in number to alter elections, particular in large urban centers. Patronage, Moynihan later observed in an article coauthored with James Q. Wilson, was no longer about the distribution of low-paying jobs to precinct captains, but rather the strategic dispersal of upper-level openings to balance party factions.^{Footnote 20}

Whatever its other benefits, Moynihan came to believe, the civil service system severed the ties between electoral politics and policymaking, creating a far more independent and self-interested bureaucracy. He had caught glimpses of the new militancy and spirited independence of government workers first hand. In February 1957, Harriman aide Paul Kryer warned of “the intense bitterness” among state workers, who charged the administration with “cynically making a political football of public employees.”^{Footnote 21} Indeed, later that same year, New York City subway workers struck, the most prominent in a series of stoppages that would ultimately transform the city’s labor relations by legitimizing collective bargaining.^{Footnote 22} While his papers offer only passing hints about the effects of these developments, Moynihan’s bland and unenthusiastic endorsement of the state’s civil service law to a local chapter of the Public Personnel Association in April 1957 betrayed something of his ambivalence toward the system.^{Footnote 23}

After two years in Bingham’s office, Moynihan became Assistant Secretary for Reports, responsible for collecting and relaying information from all major state departments and agencies. The position offered him unprecedented exposure to the wide world of policymaking.^{Footnote 24} As a speechwriter, deputy, and, after 1958, Acting Secretary, Moynihan played an important role in shaping and framing Harriman’s agenda, including his antipoverty program.^{Footnote 25} After Harriman lost his reelection bid to Nelson Rockefeller, Moynihan moved to Syracuse University to direct the State Government Research Project and write a history of the administration. It was based on these experiences and his brief service on the New York State Commission on Tenure (a five-person body charged with deciding teachers’ appeals on salary and job-retention issues) that Moynihan published his first thoughts on the civil service system.^{Footnote 26} Reflecting on his time in Albany with former state budget director Clark Ahlberg in 1960, Moynihan identified the civil service system as the key “problem” in political transitions. Teachers, social workers, and other government employees, they argued, were “most resistant to suggestions for change and quickest to sense ‘politics’ where the slightest adjustment or shift in emphasis was proposed,” often giving the impression to newly elected officials of “a hostile and vigorous garrison entrenched behind statutes which he must somehow breach.” Acknowledging that the innovative and cooperative civil servant was a potentially powerful tool for the reformer, they nonetheless concluded that, in general, “the ease of transition in administration will be in inverse proportion to the professionalization of the bureaucracy.”^{Footnote 27}

Moynihan carried these concerns about bureaucratic inertia into his work in the early Kennedy administration. After working locally for the Democratic ticket in 1960, Moynihan secured a position as Special Assistant at the Department of Labor in 1961. He soon attracted the attention of Secretary Arthur Goldberg, who appointed Moynihan as staff director for the Task Force on Labor Relations in the Federal Service in June 1961. Responding to mounting workplace agitation and growing recognition that the federal government’s traditional opposition to collective organization was unworkable and counterproductive, Kennedy charged the Task Force with creating a single, uniform policy for civilian federal employment.^{Footnote 28} Given the unenviable job of marshaling the contradictory positions and demands of the Civil Service Commission, Bureau of the Budget, Department of Defense, the AFL-CIO, and a host of individual unions into a coherent policy statement, Moynihan crafted a report that called for the extension of formal employee representation to the federal government and implemented a limited form of collective bargaining.^{Footnote 29}

Moynihan’s endorsement of public-sector collective bargaining was rooted in his identification with New Deal liberalism but tempered by his concerns about its impact on the operation of government.^{Footnote 30} In a pivotal November 1961 memorandum, he cautioned that the “coarse, disputatious, exaggerated” and “not always truthful” language of private-sector collective bargaining stood sharply at odds with the need for clarity, honesty, and transparency in the operation of government.^{Footnote 31} While acknowledging the basic legitimacy of government workers’ demand for a voice in their wages, hours, and working conditions, he staunchly opposed any move to expand their role in policymaking. Later, he would defend the new system against charges that it was biased toward the unions by citing its broad embrace of managerial prerogatives, insisting that the Task Force had recognized that “agency heads must retain the right to make the ultimate decisions” and “always be free to act in the public interest” when dealing with their organized employees.^{Footnote 32} The final product reflected some of these ambiguities. Kennedy, bowing to conservatives within the administration, opted for a narrowed scope of bargaining and weakened form of representation.^{Footnote 33} Yet whatever its shortcomings, Executive Order 10988, issued in January 1962, did as much as any other development to legitimize public sector unionization in the decades that followed.^{Footnote 34}

Moynihan’s experience at the Department of Labor reinforced his earlier convictions and informed his subsequent criticism of the Great Society.^{Footnote 35} Promoted to Assistant Secretary for Policy Planning and Research in early 1963, Moynihan began to focus on the welfare system and the crisis of the African American family. His controversial February 1964 declaration that welfare was “rotting the poor” by making “poverty more endurable instead of providing a door of escape from it” drew public attention.^{Footnote 36} Less noticed were comments to New York University’s Graduate School of Social Work a few weeks later, when Moynihan implicated social workers in the construction and perpetuation of that same system. Likening their organizing of clients to “a precinct workers’ doorbell-ringing campaign,” Moynihan insisted that their outreach role was inherently political.^{Footnote 37} They had to constantly convince elected officials and the public to direct money to antipoverty programs, creating a dangerous set of incentives for social welfare professionals, particularly given the absence of reliable information about the effectiveness of underlying programs. A few weeks after his NYU address, Moynihan sharpened the indictment and connected it to the problems of African Americans. “I think that the problem of the Negro family is practically the property of the American government,” Moynihan stated in his address to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. “We spend most of our money on this, in health, in welfare, and on employment, and yet we know nothing about it, or not much about it,” Moynihan lamented, “and one of the reasons is that we are not supposed to know anything about it.”^{Footnote 38}

By mid-1964, then, Moynihan had concluded that the existing welfare system was doing little to help the black poor and that no one seemed to know why. By his own account, he was skeptical of the Johnson administration’s faith in the combination of formal equality and economic growth. The legal rights guaranteed to African Americans by the Civil Rights Act, Moynihan wrote to Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz in November, “was not going to make any difference in their lives.”^{Footnote 39} He set out to figure out what might. He began by drafting a twelve-page, single-spaced memorandum outlining a new approach built around family allowances, federally funded birth control clinics, and massive government employment programs. He believed that focusing on the structure and circumstance of the poor black family was good policy as well as good politics—that it offered “the possibility of enlisting the support of conservative groups for quite radical social programs.”^{Footnote 40} After consulting with Kenneth Clark, Hylan Lewis, and Herbert Hill, Moynihan launched a deeper study.

Begun in late December 1964 and completed in just over three months, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action featured two key conclusions: that there were decisive and demonstrable causal links between unemployment, poverty, and family breakup; and second, that despite the dramatic expansion of investment, the problem was getting worse. Working with Paul Barton and Ellen Broderick, Moynihan distilled decades of social science into a biting critique of the limits of formal legal equality. Moynihan identified social and historical developments (including slavery, Reconstruction, and deindustrialization) as the driving forces behind a “tangle of pathology” that devastated the black community and crippled the black family (evident in racial disparities in divorce, illegitimacy, and female-headed household rates, among other measures).^{Footnote 41} It was a devastating indictment. “Freedom” was “not enough,” Moynihan told Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz in early February 1965.^{Footnote 42} The right to compete in the marketplace meant little, Moynihan noted on May 3, without “the democratic ideal of Equality . . . equally good education, equally good housing, equally good jobs.”^{Footnote 43}

Often overlooked in the outpouring of scholarship and commentary on the Moynihan Report is its connection to this broader antibureaucratic impulse.^{Footnote 44} While in the process of drafting the report in February 1965, Moynihan presented his clearest warning to date against the drift of social policy toward “surrogate family services” to an antipoverty forum at the University of California, Berkeley. Convinced that the federal government had to address the devastating impact of unemployment on African American family structures, Moynihan cast doubt on the efficacy of programs designed “to change the poor who are produced by the system, rather than to change the system that produces the poor.” Too often, he said, they amounted to “an effort by middle class persons who will usually be of quite a different ethnic and religious background, to persuade lower class persons of another background to be different from what God, or the social system, or the climate, or whatever, made them.”^{Footnote 45} Within the report, Moynihan drew on Edward Wight Bakke, whose 1940 study identified the elevation of the (female) social worker, along with the wife, as two of the debilitating effects of poverty on traditional, male-headed family structures. Also following Bakke, Moynihan suggested that work relief was critical to bringing the family out of poverty because it was the only way to restore male authority over both his wife and the welfare worker.^{Footnote 46} While the report was infamously short on specific remedies (its stated purpose was “to define a problem, rather than propose solutions to it”),^{Footnote 47} Moynihan used an early May memorandum to call for, among other things, the implementation of a system of income support for two-parent households.^{Footnote 48}

Cowed by the backlash to the Black Family Report and convinced that the Great Society’s increasing emphasis on rehabilitative services was, at best, counterproductive, Moynihan resigned from the Johnson White House in July 1965. After an unsuccessful foray into New York City politics, Moynihan took a year at the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University before moving to the Harvard University–Massachusetts Institute for Technology Joint Center for Urban Studies.^{Footnote 49}

Just months after leaving Washington, Moynihan published his first inquiry into “the enormous expansion in the size and scope of what we might loosely call the public services.” Building on the work of friend and former collaborator Nathan Glazer, Moynihan argued that the shift from the basic income maintenance programs of the New Deal to the elaborate rehabilitative systems of the Great Society was not traceable to a clear, unifying intellectual or policy revelation (e.g., the Beveridge Report), but rather was rooted in the emergence of professional advocacy organizations.^{Footnote 50} Whereas Glazer had suggested that “the fate of the poor” had been left to teachers and social workers because of the disinterestedness of business, labor, and middle-class reformers, Moynihan traced it to a broad set of historical forces, including the expansion of higher education, the subsequent growth of graduate schools, and an increase in academic specialization. Educational training confirmed received wisdom, creating a powerful and relatively coherent intellectual current, Moynihan maintained. When poverty emerged as a point of national focus in the early 1960s, he charged, the social work profession stood ready to push programs that required and reinforced their own special skills.^{Footnote 51}

The forum was as important as the argument. “The Professionalization of Reform” was the headline piece in the inaugural issue of The Public Interest, an intellectual journal that editors Daniel Bell and Irving Krisol described as “a middle-aged magazine for middle-aged readers,” designed to highlight “what men would choose if they saw clearly, thought rationally, acted disinterestedly and benevolently.”^{Footnote 52} Ostensibly an outlet for dispassionate expertise—Moynihan would later recall that it was “suffused with social ambition, but argued for a little more measurement and a little less promising”—The Public Interest emerged in the mid-1960s as a crucial outlet for disenchanted liberals and formative space for neoconservatism.^{Footnote 53}

Moynihan became a frequent contributor, publishing six articles over the journal’s first five years, but he never accepted the neoconservative political label.^{Footnote 54} Rather, he cast himself as a centrist critic of a drifting liberalism—the heir to and defender of the traditions of Al Smith and Franklin Roosevelt. More than just a reaction to criticism over The Negro Family, Moynihan came to believe by the mid-1960s that the missteps of the Great Society threatened to undermine the credibility of American social policy.^{Footnote 55} In a widely publicized September address to the National Board of Americans for Democratic Action, Moynihan urged American liberals to “divest themselves of the notion that the nation, especially the cities of the nation, can be run from agencies in Washington.” This “Potomac fever,” he charged, exacerbated liberalism’s trend of creating bureaucratic structures invested in the perpetuation of failing policy approaches. Quoting a then-forthcoming article by Glazer, Moynihan longed for “the open field of the New Deal, which was not littered with the carcasses of half successful and hardly successful programs, each in the hands of a hardening bureaucracy.” What was needed, Moynihan argued, was nothing short of a fundamental reorganization of domestic liberalism, one that began by recognizing that the federal government was “good at collecting revenues, and rather bad at disbursing services.”^{Footnote 56} A few months later, Moynihan expressed a similar sentiment in a piece titled “Where Liberals Went Wrong,” suggesting that contemporary liberalism “paid too little heed to the limited capacities of government to bring about social change” and lamenting that too many American liberals “have been unable to acquire from life what conservatives seemed to be endowed with at birth, namely, a healthy skepticism of the powers of government agencies to do good.”^{Footnote 57}

Moynihan’s critique of the welfare system fused a general concern about the efficacy of the services strategy with a direct indictment of social-policy-by-bureaucracy. Unable to replace the categorical grants established during the New Deal with a universal welfare state, postwar social reformers and social work professionals had embraced rehabilitation as an indirect means of achieving a more comprehensive social policy. First introduced into federal policy by the 1956 amendments to the Social Security Act, expanded with the 1961 creation of the work/training requirements for the ADC-UP program, and embraced with the Public Welfare Amendments of 1962, rehabilitation became the core tenet of social policy reform by the mid-1960s, one flexible enough to appeal to those eager to expand benefits as well as those convinced of the need to take a harder line against “chiselers” and “cheaters” on relief rolls.^{Footnote 58}

In early 1968, Moynihan returned to The Public Interest to unleash a scathing rebuke of what “professionalization” had wrought. The longest article published in the journal to date, “The Crisis in Welfare” began with the striking assertion that the fundamental problem with the existing system was that it functioned too well:

Offered only indirect and ineffective oversight anyway, Moynihan charged, elected officials found it far more convenient to turn over control of a system that touched on sensitive areas of public life—race, religion, sex, and the family—to an unelected bureaucracy. Insulated from careful public scrutiny, Moynihan argued, the premises and programs of the welfare system went unchallenged even as its shortcomings became more obvious. By ignoring data that tied welfare to family breakup and family breakup to economic and social devastation, welfare professionals avoided drawing public attention to limited efficacy of traditional casework and counseling. For Moynihan, this trend was most obvious (and insidious) in 1962. Offered the opportunity to help chart a new course in public relief, welfare professionals appeared before congressional committees to defend the status quo and press for its further expansion. “The key conception of the amendments,” Moynihan noted, “was the need to provide increased professional services to the poor in order to restore their ability to support themselves: ergo, first train more social workers.” That, Moynihan concluded, was “a system known as feeding the sparrows by feeding the horses.”^{Footnote 60}

Seized on by the press, Moynihan’s brought to a wider audience the argument that existing approaches to social provision were not simply inadequate or ineffective, but that their shortcomings could be traced back to the strength of existing personnel and bureaucratic structures.^{Footnote 61} Many of the early architects of the War on Poverty had also been moved by convictions about the limits of the existing social welfare bureaucracy. Yet to Moynihan, they had taken these legitimate concerns and moved in the wrong direction. Uncritically embracing a groundswell of new social scientific theory, they called for circumventing the unresponsive structures by erecting a system of new ones that were locally controlled.^{Footnote 62} The chief beneficiaries of Community Action turned out not to be the poor, Moynihan insisted, but rather those contracted to provide the poor with a way out of their poverty.^{Footnote 63}

The Income Strategy and the Family Assistance Plan

Moynihan believed that the logical alternative to the services strategy was a system of income support. “I can imagine,” Moynihan began testimony to a Senate subcommittee in December 1966, “a good argument being made that if there is an extra thousand dollars a year to go round for each family in the nation, or every poor family, that the best thing would be to give them the cash and let them spend it on things they think they need most.” To spend them instead on services of questionable effectiveness, he continued, “is to risk being thought ridiculous or worse by members of the public, and we would delude ourselves if we did not see that this judgment has already been reached by large numbers.”^{Footnote 64}

The income strategy drew support from quarters ranging from economists and businessmen to the civil rights and welfare rights movements in the mid-1960s.^{Footnote 65} The National Commission on Civil Disorders identified the welfare system as one of the twelve “deeply held grievances” behind the wave of 1967 riots and called for the development of an inclusive system of income supplementation as a partial remedy.^{Footnote 66} Johnson’s Presidential Commission on Income Maintenance embraced it as a means of finally erasing the distinction between welfare recipients and the working poor.^{Footnote 67} Conservative economists cast it an efficient alterative to the minimum wage and grab bag of social programs.^{Footnote 68} Martin Luther King Jr. embraced it as a direct and empowering challenge to “the piecemeal and pygmy” programs that each sought “to solve poverty by first solving something else.”^{Footnote 69} As Brian Steensland has noted, the popularity of the guaranteed annual income reflected its protean character: advocates could invest the income strategy with their own agendas, and, in so doing, address concerns that transcended poverty.^{Footnote 70}

While the Negative Income Tax and Guaranteed Annual Income were the two most popular manifestations of the growing interest in an income strategy, Moynihan pushed for a children’s allowance. A concept popularized by Paul Douglas in his 1925 Wages and the Family and renewed in the mid-1950s by Richard Neuberger, it had been left behind by the shift toward rehabilitation. Moynihan believed that it offered the most politically palatable version of a universal income policy. Under his plan, every family would receive a benefit—$8 per month per child under the age of six, $12 per month per older child. Moynihan estimated its cost at a whopping $9 billion, but emphasized its efficiency. “I think our problem has been too much concentration on doing things for the poor and not enough concentration on giving them money,” he told the New York Times in February 1967.^{Footnote 71} “You could run a family-allowance system in the United States with 200 people in Baltimore.”^{Footnote 72} Combined with an audacious $1 billion proposal to guarantee every able-bodied American a job (by having the government foot two-thirds of the wage bill and pay a small bonus to employers for taking on “unemployables”), Moynihan believed that the country could mitigate poverty and strengthen families while reducing the ranks of bureaucrats who profited from the failures of the programs that they ran.^{Footnote 73}

Politically isolated by liberal backlash to The Negro Family and increasingly skeptical of the drift of the Great Society, Moynihan saw in Nixon an opportunity to forge an income-centered social policy. It offered him a way back into the upper echelons of policymaking and a chance to shape and implement a system of social provision “unmediated,” as Moynihan biographer Geoffrey Hodgson later wrote, “by officious and uncomprehending middle-class professors and bureaucrats.”^{Footnote 74} Unable to get his first choice (secretary of transportation), Moynihan eagerly accepted the offer to chair a domestic counterpart to the National Security Council, believing that Nixon’s instinctive preference for foreign affairs offered the chance to play a formative role in shaping the administration’s domestic agenda.^{Footnote 75} For his part, Nixon had read some of Moynihan’s work, including the 1967 ADA speech.^{Footnote 76} In announcing the appointment on December 10, Nixon lauded Moynihan for recognizing both “the responsibilities of government as well as the limitations of government.”^{Footnote 77}

While the appointment proved popular in the press, few expected it to substantively alter the administration’s domestic agenda.^{Footnote 78} The Chicago Tribune editorialized that Moynihan would serve as the “devil’s advocate” within Nixon’s inner circle, but thought it “unlikely . . . that Nixon would ever embrace Moynihan’s concepts of a family allowance for the poor.”^{Footnote 79} Welfare had not figured prominently in the 1968 campaign, and Nixon had specifically opposed the Negative Income Tax.^{Footnote 80} Though the administration’s Task Force on Public Welfare recommended significant reforms to the federal system and though Nixon himself responded to a pre-Inauguration memo from Moynihan linking the “welfare machine” to the “pathologies” afflicting urban American by announcing that the “whole thing smells to high heaven and we should get charging on it immediately,” the issue received just passing treatment at the first meeting of the Council of Urban Affairs.^{Footnote 81} Even Moynihan neglected to mention it as a priority in the press conference that followed.^{Footnote 82}

Yet on a core level, Nixon shared Moynihan’s distrust of bureaucracy, his concern about the relationship between poverty and family breakup, and his political instincts about the potential appeal of the income strategy to the white working-class taxpayer. During the campaign, Nixon had responded favorably to a memorandum from Patrick Buchanan which claimed that the Johnson administration had made “a concerted effort . . . to urge people to apply for welfare” by noting that the point might be “good for a tough statement later” and specifically highlighting “the point about how welfare workers urge people to go on welfare.”^{Footnote 83} Nixon later recalled that Moynihan had come into the Oval Office early in his administration with “an uncharacteristic plea for caution” when it came to rolling back the War on Poverty, warning that “all of the Great Society activist constituencies are laying out there in wait . . . poised to get you if you try to come after them,” further evidence that existing policies seemed designed to serve interests beyond those of the poor.^{Footnote 84}

Despite the absence of welfare reform from the initial discussion, then, there was reason for Moynihan to be optimistic. Nixon had urged the CUA not to be “too cautious” in setting the new administration’s agenda. Over the next three months, Moynihan worked tirelessly to persuade the president to make the income strategy a signature domestic initiative and cornerstone of a new working- and middle-class political strategy.^{Footnote 85} Though Moynihan played little role in the construction of the Family Assistance Plan, initially preferring the establishment of a universal family allowance or an overhaul of AFDC, he was crucial in selling FAP to Nixon.

Moynihan’s campaign began even before he became aware of the existence of the far-reaching proposal. In a late January memorandum on the New York City welfare crisis, Moynihan noted that the city welfare rolls had swelled from four hundred thousand to more than one million between 1966 and 1969. Eschewing common explanations (such as migration from the rural south and the mobilization of the welfare rights movement), Moynihan blamed the lax attitude of caseworkers for rising caseloads, citing a nearly 50 percent drop in rejection rates for AFDC applications. Though Moynihan acknowledged that the “underlying cause” of the crisis was the paucity of adequately paying jobs for male heads of household, his recommendation had little to do with economic structure.^{Footnote 86} “I believe the time has come for a President to state what increasingly is understood,” Moynihan wrote, “that welfare as we know it is a bankrupt and destructive system” that “destroys those who receive it and corrupts those who dispense it.”^{Footnote 87} Moynihan followed up the next day by sending the president a chart demonstrating the disaggregation of AFDC rolls and unemployment rates during the 1960s.^{Footnote 88} When Nixon asked Moynihan to explain the disjuncture, Moynihan noted that, among other factors, acceptance rates had risen by nearly 20 percent nationwide, estimating that as many as two in five new welfare cases were attributable to the more lenient attitudes of caseworkers.^{Footnote 89} Presented with this research at a CUA meeting on March 6, Nixon declared that the Great Society had fostered a “no fault” attitude among the poor and asked Moynihan for additional information on the “social acceptability of welfare.”^{Footnote 90} The response came a week later. Cautioning that the data was limited and preliminary, Moynihan acknowledged that AFDC had become “less stigmatizing now than in the past,” but again suggested that part of that attitude stemmed from the conduct of the welfare bureaucracy. “We have information—which we cannot prove, for which indeed we have no data whatsoever, but which comes from a usually reliable observer—that New York City has gone crazy,” Moynihan wrote with typical flair. “[Mayor John V.] Lindsay’s welfare administrators seem determined to give the city away,” he continued, extending benefits practically upon request, to the point that between 30 and 40 percent of all city recipients should not qualify “by any reasonable test of poverty.”^{Footnote 91}

Moynihan benefited from almost unparalleled access to Nixon. In addition to the more than 4,750 minutes he personally spent with the president in the opening six months of the administration, he sent the president dozens of written messages.^{Footnote 92} Moynihan’s deputy, Stephen Hess, remembered the written pieces as crucial to the relationship between “the professor and the president.” Longer, broader, and more complicated than the White House norm and littered with literary and historical references, Moynihan’s memos conveyed an intellectual status that Nixon relished.^{Footnote 93} They covered as wide a range of issues and concerns as the CUA’s expansive portfolio would allow, but most came back to matters of social policy. In his exceptional recent account of the history of the guaranteed annual income in American politics, sociologist Brian Steensland noted that Moynihan’s unrelenting barrage of memoranda and charts “inadvertently prepared the groundwork” for Nixon to embrace the Family Assistance Plan.^{Footnote 94} Unaware of the proposal’s existence through much of the winter, Moynihan could hardly have self-consciously prepared the president to embrace it. Yet the campaign was the logical extension of his earlier convictions, and, if not directed specifically at FAP, very much designed to legitimize a substantial break from the status quo.

As late as February, it seemed likely that the administration would proceed on a more modest revision of AFDC along the lines of the Task Force recommendations. It was only when Richard Nathan reached out to staffers in HEW in an attempt to bolster the proposal’s support that advocates of a more dramatic proposal had an opening. Drafted by Worth Bateman, Alice Rivlin, and other holdovers from the Johnson administration and endorsed by John Venemen, the new undersecretary at HEW, the far-reaching proposal (then still known as the Family Security System) went far beyond the transition Task Force’s plan of increasing federal funding to correct regional disparities in benefits, proposing a guaranteed annual income that would channel cash not just to unemployed, single-parent households, but to all working poor families. After months of tweaking, the proposal was presented to the CUA in late March.^{Footnote 95}

Abandoning his earlier endorsement of the Task Force recommendations, Moynihan seized on the new proposal, promising Nixon that it would “abolish poverty for dependent children and the working poor,” while simultaneously cutting the government’s long-term expenditures on social provision. “The tremendous costs of the poverty program come from services,” Moynihan counseled on March 26. “Almost all this money goes to middle class teaches and the like,” whereas FAP promised to channel the money directly to the poor.^{Footnote 96} When Moynihan briefed Nixon on the proposal before the full CUA, he promised that it would purge thousands of social workers from the federal payrolls. Nixon’s eyes “lit up,” or so Martin Anderson recalled, no fan of the proposal.^{Footnote 97}

Intrigued, Nixon asked Moynihan and other staffers to join him at his vacation home in Key Biscayne, Florida, over Easter weekend in early April to discuss the issue further. There, Moynihan promised Nixon that for “two weeks’ growth in the Gross National Product,” he could enact “the first fundamental change in public welfare since the 1930s,” push the United States “far ahead” of other industrial democracies, and solidify his own reputation as a pragmatic reformer.^{Footnote 98} At the end of the discussion, Nixon asked whether FAP would eliminate the welfare worker; Moynihan promised that it would “wipe them out.”^{Footnote 99} Burns confided that the exchange left him convinced that Nixon was leaning toward the proposal, and set about developing an alternative program.^{Footnote 100} Debate about the exact form of the proposal continued for three months and eventually required a compromise measure with stronger work incentives brokered by Secretary of Labor George P. Schultz, but Nixon made his decision to back some form of the income strategy by the end of April.^{Footnote 101}

While conservative critics mobilized against the program, Moynihan strengthened the political case for it. When Burns presented Nixon with a copy of Pete Hamill’s “The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class” as a warning about the potential white working-class backlash against welfare reform, Moynihan seized the chance to develop a class-centered justification for the broader income strategy.^{Footnote 102} The best way to address the political alienation of the white working class was “to enable the working class to see what it is getting out of government, and even, perhaps, to provide it more.”^{Footnote 103} Too often, he continued, the “service dispensing groups are preoccupied with the black problem and at times seemed to resent hearing that there are whites who are in difficulty as well.”^{Footnote 104} Worse, the existing social welfare system offered the working poor few tangible benefits, regardless of race. “The difficulty here,” Moynihan reminded the president, “is that the immediate rewards of the services strategy go primarily to middle class persons in the form of rapidly rising professional salaries.”^{Footnote 105} The FAP bypassed these groups, providing the poor and working poor with cash rather than counsel, enabling them to purchase goods and services in the same marketplace as the rest of the society. “Thus the government does not appear to be playing favorites, by providing sumptuous special services for one group—public housing, welfare, compensatory education—while ignoring the needs of others who are only moderately better off.”^{Footnote 106} By abandoning the service strategy for an income strategy, Moynihan concluded, Nixon was poised to launch nothing less than a “social revolution which preserves the fabric of American society rather than tearing it to shreds.”^{Footnote 107} “At long last,” he promised, “the people-in-between would begin benefiting from the efforts of government to address the long standing and fully documented grievances of the people at the bottom.”^{Footnote 108}

By connecting welfare reform to a broader working-class political strategy, Moynihan effectively insulated FAP from its conservative critics and secured Nixon’s support, at least through early 1970. Despite strong opposition from Burns (who warned that the proposal would increase the federal deficit, exacerbate social tensions, and fund “hippies and revolutionaries”) and Vice President Spiro Agnew (who claimed FAP would “bring the addictive philosophy of welfare to those who are presently self-reliant, even if not as comfortable as they would like to be”), the Family Assistance Plan became a central component of Nixon’s “New Federalism,” unveiled in a nationally televised address on August 8, 1969.^{Footnote 109} Whatever his later concerns about the program, it seems clear that the president accepted Moynihan’s core argument about the deficiencies of the existing system. In his memoirs, Nixon reflected:

For Moynihan, the announcement of FAP marked a personal and political landmark—a triumphant comeback from the marginalization that followed the release of The Negro Family. He told the New York Times that watching the August telecast sparked a sense of relief as well as accomplishment. “I felt I was finally rid of a subject. A subject that had just—that had spoiled my life.”^{Footnote 111} HEW Secretary Robert Finch credited Moynihan with keeping welfare reform “at the top of the heap, right on the front burner” despite unrelenting opposition from most of the cabinet and senior staff.^{Footnote 112} In November, Moynihan was elevated to senior counselor, replacing Burns.^{Footnote 113}

Early returns were promising. Moynihan called FAP “the most important piece of social legislation sent to Congress in a generation” and predicted easy passage by the end of October.^{Footnote 114} One administration study estimated that 95 percent of the editorial responses were positive.^{Footnote 115} In the month that followed the announcement, the White House received some 2,700 letters and telegrams regarding FAP, more than 90 percent of which were favorably disposed.^{Footnote 116} Moynihan mounted a campaign in support of its passage. He appeared on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line, casting FAP as an attempt to reverse the decade-long emphases on “help[ing] poor people by hiring middle-class people” and by shifting toward a “market strategy” of social provision.^{Footnote 117} He even used the opposition of organized welfare workers as proof of the program’s importance. On NBC’s The Today Show in mid-July 1970, Moynihan unleashed a scathing attack on the self-interest of organized welfare bureaucrats. “I’m afraid social workers are against this program because they fear it might put social workers out of work,” Moynihan argued. “People who make a living—and I’m afraid you could make a good living—giving advice to the poor somehow are frightened by the idea of giving them money and letting them run their own lives.”^{Footnote 118}

The House of Representatives passed an amended version of the plan by a margin of nearly one hundred votes in April 1970, but within six months the initiative was in serious political jeopardy. Congressional liberals, bowing to pressure from the National Welfare Rights Organization and other liberal interest groups, insisted that the benefit levels be increased from $1,600 to $5,500. Conservatives, wary of the cost of the new program, suspicious of its dramatic expansion of federal power, and unconvinced by its work incentives, offered little support. The plan stalled in the Senate Finance Committee. Though the administration reintroduced it the following year, Nixon’s interest waned.^{Footnote 119} Foreign and domestic developments (the bombing of Cambodia, subsequent revival of the antiwar movement on college campuses, the shootings at Kent State and Jackson State, and the hardhat rally in New York City) diverted the Senate and distracted Nixon. Faced with a choice between lobbying for his foreign policy and pushing welfare reform, he retreated from the domestic agenda.^{Footnote 120}

Moynihan later saw this international context as crucial to the program’s demise, but when he reflected on the ill-fated legacy of FAP, he reserved his sharpest criticism for welfare professionals and their liberal allies in Congress.^{Footnote 121} From the first hints of the Nixon plan through its final defeat in 1971, Moynihan wrote in The Politics of a Guaranteed Income, organizations like the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) “did all in their power to insure that a guaranteed income was not enacted,” initially by demanding unreasonably high benefit levels, and later by using legislative minutiae to cast the program as “oppressive, repressive, regressive, and worse.”^{Footnote 122} While the content of their criticisms paralleled those of other groups, “the style of the professionals, unyielding, often enragé, was quite different, while their assertions, delivered with the authority of persons who knew, frequently approached and on occasion must have involved conscious dishonesty.”^{Footnote 123} Caustically noting that the welfare professionals may have simply been “innocent of anything but pretending to a competence they do not posses in themselves nor inculcate in others,” Moynihan identified their material investment in the (failing) service system as dominant motivation.^{Footnote 124} “A proposal to put an end to poverty . . . through direct cash payments was by any definition a threat to an agency proceeding at the same task by indirect means,” Moynihan wrote.^{Footnote 125} By targeting AFDC, “the parish pump of the welfare worker,” Nixon’s program challenged the small, insulated world of the welfare worker. “All the rules would change, all agreements would be off,” he observed, “To those whose life had been lived with those rules, and whose skill was the knowledge of them, this could only be threatening.”^{Footnote 126}

“Cui Bono?”

Nearly two years after leaving the White House, Moynihan used a New York Times column to describe the landscape of his upstate home as “a scene of public affluence and private squalor.”^{Footnote 127} The newly opened Interstate 88, the local expansions of the State University of New York, and the visible presence of the Pepacton and Cannonsville Reservoirs all served as markers of the state’s presence, yet “the pockets of the people—milking cows, sawing logs, hunting ginseng—empty out.” “The difference in physical size, in health, of those who live off the public sector of Delaware County and those who live off the private sector,” Moynihan wrote, “is literally that which Orwell described between the upper classes and the working classes of prewar Britain.”^{Footnote 128}

Moynihan continued to press his critique of government workers in the years after he left the Nixon administration.^{Footnote 129} In early 1972, he used a symposium on Serrano v. Priest to extend the horses-and-sparrow logic to teachers.^{Footnote 130} Drawing on the work of sociologist James S. Coleman, Moynihan warned his University of Illinois audience against exaggerating the progressive implications of educational expenditures. “The simple proposition,” Moynihan claimed, “is the more tax money you spend on education, the more tax money you give to the middle class.” He continued: “I don’t know if this is good or bad. It is presumably good for teachers, but whether it is bad for people who work in automobile factories, I don’t know. I am quite serious in saying I don’t know, albeit my general tendency is to be suspicious of programs in which the middle class undertake to help society by helping themselves.”^{Footnote 131}

Moynihan published an expanded version of the remarks in The Public Interest later that year. Arguing that the activism of the court in Serrano embodied a dangerous trend, “an autogamous mode of government growth: big government ordering itself to become bigger,” Moynihan posed the ancient question, “‘Cui bono?’—to whose benefit do these decisions redound?”^{Footnote 132} Too frequently, he claimed, “the rhetoric of disinterested public service” cloaked “what are often no more than raids on the Treasury.”^{Footnote 133} The practice highlighted a central contradiction in public policy. “We don’t presume disinterestedness on the part of persons whose interests reside in the growth and prosperity of the private sector of the economy,” Moynihan asserted. “Why should those whose interests reside in the growth of the public sector be treated differently?”^{Footnote 134} Social legislation came to have “the effect of narcotic drugs on the addict: Ever stronger doses are required, first to achieve the remembered euphoria of the early stages of addiction, and then merely to maintain the absence of distress.”^{Footnote 135} “Caution about ‘big government’ can derive from more than opposition to heavy taxes,” Moynihan continued.^{Footnote 136} Too many, much social policy amounted to little more than “taking money from the pockets of people who need it considerably more than into whose pockets it will be put.”^{Footnote 137}

Over the next decade, the critique that Moynihan had helped to shape and legitimize entered the mainstream of American politics. Conservative publisher William Rusher placed government workers squarely among the nonproductive members of society, casting the welfare system as “a permanent parasite on the body politics . . . carefully tended and forever subtly expanded by the verbalizers as justification for their own existence and growth.”^{Footnote 138} Then-presidential candidate Jimmy Carter denounced the federal government as “a horrible bureaucratic mess” that was “disorganized, wasteful, has no purpose, and its policies—when they exist—are incomprehensible or devised by special-interest groups with little or no regard for the welfare of the average American citizen.”^{Footnote 139} Proposition 13 architect Howard Jarvis effectively wielded a populist, anti-government-worker language to blunt the measure’s regressive effects, assuring middle-class taxpayers that they could have their valued public services and lower property taxes by slashing public payrolls.

Moynihan saw the landmark California measure as validation, suggesting it was best understood as a reaction against a “new social class” that was united less by a coherent policy than by the singular conviction that “there should be a great deal of policy, whatever the content might be.”^{Footnote 140} Just as President Franklin Roosevelt had once “saved the American business class from itself,” Moynihan predicted, a national leader would instruct the massive class of government workers to “learn the limits of government” and recognize “when their high-sounding pronouncements about helping others can be little more than a justification for helping themselves.”^{Footnote 141}

Moynihan continued to espouse that message. He won election to the U.S. Senate in 1976 by striking a middle road between the New Politics and the New Right.^{Footnote 142} A key theme of his victorious campaign, Moynihan later wrote in The New Republic, was the “parasitism . . . found at every level of society, and not least in the hoard of New Yorkers who live well looking after the poor.”^{Footnote 143} Invoking once more the metaphor of sparrows and horses, Moynihan went further than he ever had in laying out its implications. “No one senses the threat to freedom posed by this growing dependence,” he wrote.^{Footnote 144} “A whole new class of public-sector employees has entered the scene, and it appears we are well on our way to becoming a society of public affluence and private squalor—until the crisis of government arrives and the future becomes more problematic.”^{Footnote 145}

Moynihan denied that his was an “illiberal” campaign. “I ran as a liberal willing to be critical of what liberals had done.”^{Footnote 146} He believed his was consistent with the Democratic Party’s best traditions. He also believed that those traditions had to evolve. Franklin Roosevelt, he noted, had called for “public yardsticks” in order to keep private utilities fair and honest. Now the country needed “private yardsticks” to keep public operations accountable.^{Footnote 147} Moynihan ran three hundred thousand votes ahead of Carter. The reason, he concluded, was that his stump speech hit on a fundamental concern of New Yorkers. “Jobs. Jobs. Jobs. Not government jobs, not jobs to make government bigger, but rather jobs to make government for us, once more solvent, and once more our own.”^{Footnote 148}

Forty years on, American liberalism is still dealing with that challenge.