Big news! Glenn Beck has discovered the 1960s writings of
Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, the husband-and-wife team
that gave birth to the Welfare Rights Movement and plotted the
bankruptcy of the federal government. Cloward died in 2001 but
Piven, now 78, is still teaching at the City University of New York
Graduate Center and writing manifestos for The Nation.
Cloward and Piven — ah, those names. To me they have
always been an abstraction, some mysterious academics closeted away
somewhere on the West Side of Manhattan, directing the armies of
the poor to the next barricade from their cloistered hideaway. And
oh my, were they effective. I wrote a book about crime in the 1980s
and a considerable number of articles about the welfare system in
the 1990s and Cloward and Piven were all over the place. To me it’s
almost startling to find they are real people — just as Piven, who
is now receiving death threats for her writings, must be astonished
to find there are actually people out there paying attention to
what she has to say.
Cloward seems almost admirable in some respects. He was an
ensign in the Navy during World War II and reenlisted in the Army
during the Korean War, but then he got into social work at Columbia
University and ended up wallowing in the mires of academic
sociology. In 1961, he and Lloyd Ohlin, another academic all-star,
wrote Delinquency and Opportunity: A Theory of Delinquent
Gangs, which became square one of the “new approach to crime”
that dominated the 1960s. Cloward and Ohlin had a simple thesis —
criminals, particularly juvenile delinquents, were just like
everybody else: ambitious, red-blooded Americans intent on success.
Their only problem was that they were poor and had no legitimate
outlets for their ambition. A street kid joining a gang and engaged
in petty crime was no different from an affluent suburban youth
joining the Young Rotarians and selling hot dogs at a football
game. Both were expressing their ambition through the career paths
open to them. Crime and delinquency were defined by economic
circumstances, or — as it came to be expressed succinctly —
“poverty causes crime.”
The principal corollary to this theory was that the worst
thing to do was to put such youth in jail. They only picked up the
mores of serious offenders and became hardened criminals. The
argument became the foundation of the “deprisonization” movement,
which became our national crime policy when Ohlin became a director
of President Johnson’s Commission on Law Enforcement and
Administration of Justice and lead author of The Challenge of
Crime in a Free Society, published in 1967. Billed as the
“Blueprint to Banish Crime Forever,” the famous “Crime Report”
recommended: a) ending poverty, b) improving education, c)
eliminating racial inequality, and d) letting almost everybody out
of jail. The deprisonization worked so effectively that, as James
Q. Wilson would point out in Thinking About Crime (1975),
by 1970 crime rates had tripled yet there were fewer people in
prison.
The ensuing crime wave became perhaps America’s longest
and most brutal undeclared war. I once calculated that if murder
rates had remained where they were in 1965 — and where they have
descended once again since we returned to law enforcement in the
1990s — 500,000 Americans would not have lost their lives. Crime
so dominated the national consciousness that it cost Michael
Dukakis the 1988 election when he gave a mealy-mouthed answer to
Bernard Shaw’s question, “What would you do if Kitty Dukakis were
raped and murdered?” (He said he’d call an international drug
conference.) It was the #2 item in the Contract With America when
the Republicans took over Congress in 1994. Today, with crime rates
back to their early 1960s levels — despite 9 percent unemployment
— the days when theories such as those in Delinquency and
Opportunity nearly paralyzed the nation are almost
forgotten.
DELINQUENCY AND OPPORTUNITY was
indeed a theory. Throughout the book, Cloward and Ohlin
barely mentioned a single individual delinquent (although Ohlin had
worked as a parole advisor in Illinois). The authors presented no
statistics, no research, no real people. It was all theory —
“Criminals are just like you, they just have less opportunity.” The
personal predilections of criminals toward violence or risk-taking
played no part. That unchecked crime turned poor neighborhoods into
war zones, that the poor themselves were the principal victims of
crime, that crime and its disruption limited the opportunities of
thousands of other people — all were overlooked. But it made a
good theory.
In 1966 Cloward and Piven had married and moved on to
write “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty,” the
article in The Nation that 45 years later has captured
Glenn Beck’s attention. Cloward and Piven suggested a simple, if
cynical, strategy for “ending poverty.” The welfare law — the
notorious AFDC (Aid to Financially Dependent Children) — was
filled with special allowances for furniture, clothing, and
back-to-school expenses that nobody ever claimed. Millions of
people were eligible for welfare but never applied. All you had to
do, after all, was have a baby out of wedlock. Many states refused
to apply these laws while others kept them hidden from applicants.
But a full-scale national effort to get everybody signed up for
welfare would bankrupt the system, paving the way — in good
Marxist fashion — for something much better. The “Cloward-Piven
Strategy,” later expanded into Regulating the Poor (1971),
became the foundation of the Welfare Rights Movement, which Cloward
and Piven founded in 1968 and whose main accomplishment was to get
millions of unwed mothers to apply for government assistance, so
that the term “single-parent home” not only entered the lexicon but
became a national phenomenon.
I have a bit of personal experience in this story. In the
summer of 1969 I went to Alabama to work for the Southern Rural
Research Project, an outgrowth of the civil rights movement, which
was promoting Welfare Rights in the South. I had been in
Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964 and wanted to go
back. I was a bit disappointed to find that the emphasis had
switched from voting rights to welfare rights, but participated all
the same. It was a good experience
I learned, most of all, that welfare was a very
destructive system. I saw that almost every teenage girl in town
already had a baby but was living at home, turning the baby over to
the grandmother while continuing a relatively carefree teenage
life. After the second or third child, however, the grandmother
would kick her out and she would marry the father of her most
recent child. That was how families were formed. I later found by
reading Herbert Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and
Freedom and several other books that this pattern can be
traced all the way back through slavery and into African cultural
patterns. “Children of fortune” (i.e., children of unknown fathers)
were commonplace in slavery and remain so in Africa today. Yet
families do form. Eighty percent of the families in Gutman’s
plantation records had two parents and the rate of two-parent
families among African-Americans living in Harlem in the 1920s was
close to 90 percent.
What the welfare system did was interrupt this process. By
the time a teenage girl had her second or third child she didn’t
need to marry her boyfriend — she could go on welfare. In fact she
would be penalized if she didn’t. She would lose her welfare
benefits, her Medicaid card, and the general solicitations of the
state. Walter Williams is perfectly correct in
saying the welfare system destroyed the black
family.
I learned other things as well. I learned about human
nature. In fact, I always date the beginnings of my conservative
leanings to a sunny day that summer when I walked into a cotton
field to tell an elderly black man and woman who were tending their
crop about the wonders of the welfare system. They were old enough
to qualify for Old Age Assistance, I said, and their low income was
probably sufficient. Therefore they should accompany me down to the
welfare office to apply. They stood there nodding and smiling in
that silent way until I suddenly realized the old man had tears in
his eyes. It hit me like a thunderbolt. This couple had worked all
their lives to achieve what they valued most — their independence
and self-respect — and now I was telling them they should give it
up to become wards of the government. I walked out of that field
thinking, “I wonder if I’m doing the right thing down here.” It has
been a long journey but it started right there.
SO I CONGRATULATE the late Richard Cloward and the late
Leonard Ohlin and Frances Fox Piven for all the wonderful
theorizing they have accomplished in their careers. Cloward did try
once to put his ideas into practice. In 1963 he founded
Mobilization for Youth, a government-funded organization dedicated
to implementing his theories about delinquency and opportunity.
Mobilization for Youth lasted about a decade but in 1968 spawned
MFY Legal Services, a federally funded employment opportunity for
lawyers that still functions on the Lower East Side of New York
long after Mobilization for Youth’s original intentions have been
forgotten.
I could even feel sorry for Piven, finding herself
suddenly the object of wrathful attention after years of living in
the cocoon of academia. She is, after all, 78 years old. But then I
read
what she has been writing recently in The
Nation:
An effective movement of the unemployed [in America] will have
to look something like the strikes and riots that have spread
across Greece in response to the austerity measures forced
on the Greek government by the European Union or like the
student protests that recently spread with lightning speed across
England in response to the prospect of greatly increased school
fees.
Now I know Piven really doesn’t mean
what she’s saying here. She doesn’t want to see the kind of civil
disobedience riots where a 34-year-old pregnant mother was burned
to death when Greek rioters set fire to a bank — at least not in
her neighborhood. Riots don’t involve real people, any more than
juvenile delinquency involves real juveniles or welfare rights
involves real mothers being urged to spurn wedlock and marry the
state. These are just Marxist abstractions — “the masses” —
waiting to be moved around the chessboard by academic strategists
intent on creating a perfect world.
Still it’s nice to know that Piven finally realizes there
are actual flesh-and-blood people out there reading what she has to
say.
Welcome to the real world, Frances.
