“If we give you taxpayer dollars, you give us your vote. Okay?”
That seems to be the message promoted by Elizabeth Warren, the
Democratic candidate for Senate in Massachusetts.
In an effort to stuff welfare recipients into voting booths in
November, Warren’s daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi is spearheading an
effort to force the state of Massachusetts to send out voter
registration forms to state residents who are on welfare. The
mailing will cost Massachusetts about $275,000. Incumbent Senator
Scott Brown, Warren’s indignant opponent, has responded, “I want
every legal vote to count, but it’s outrageous to use taxpayer
dollars to register welfare recipients as part of a special effort
to boost one political party over another. This effort to sign up
welfare recipients is being aided by Elizabeth Warrant’s daughter
— and it’s clearly designed to benefit her mother’s political
campaign.”
Where did Ms. Warren get the idea to appeal for votes that way?
Of course, politicians throughout U.S. history have tried to use
federal programs to sway voters, but the chief role model for
Warren’s scheme may be President Franklin Roosevelt with his New
Deal programs.
When FDR was first elected president in 1932, he moved quickly
to set up government bureaucracies to dole out federal funds. And
FDR and his aides made sure that the huge bulk of such spending
went to districts that he would need to carry at election time. To
find out where he needed votes the most, FDR had his pollsters
research the following question: “What swing states (or
congressional districts) would benefit from special injections of
federal dollars?”
To make sure the right states got the most cash, FDR established
the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to fund roads and other
public works in the key battleground states and congressional
districts. The WPA hired Democrats to staff major positions and WPA
workers sometimes openly campaigned for FDR and other Democrats at
election time. For example, V. G. Copen, Democratic chairman in
Indiana, said, “What I think will help is to change the WPA
management from top to bottom. Put men in there who are… in favor
of using these Democratic projects to make votes for the Democratic
party.”
FDR also used the system of federal relief, or welfare as we
call it today, to secure votes. Elizabeth Warren is obviously
intrigued by that possibility today, but what is interesting is
that in 1932, when the first federal welfare program was adopted,
Massachusetts was one of the few states that refused to take
federal funds. Warren’s predecessors in Massachusetts took a strict
constitutional view that charity was a private concern: People help
people, not politicians helping voters with other people’s money.
Joseph Ely, who was governor of Massachusetts in the 1930s,
denounced the federalization of welfare, in part because he saw how
politicians could abuse it. “Whatever the justification for
relief,” Ely said, “the fact remains that the way in which it has
been used makes it the greatest political asset on the practical
side of party politics ever held by any administration.”
Ely, like FDR, was a Democrat, but Ely saw the need to limit
federal aid and limit politicians’ power to use that aid for
political advantage. Other Democrats agreed. Newspaper reporter
Thomas Stokes, who liked FDR, nonetheless won a Pulitzer Prize for
his first-hand accounts of the WPA. He discovered the WPA to be “a
grand political racket in which the taxpayer is the victim.” When
leading New Dealers turned on Stokes, he observed, “They sought
refuge in the seductive philosophy that the end justifies the means
and under this philosophy, they condoned the political organization
of relief workers.”
In a similar vein, Warren seems to condone the political
organization of those on relief. But back in 1939, even leading
Democrats saw the potential destruction of our political system if
politicians could so blatantly buy votes. In that year, Senator
Carl Hatch (D-N. Mex.) sponsored a successful bill to bar relief
officials from blatantly campaigning for candidates. Warren, by
trying to register those on welfare with taxpayer dollars, is
opposing a principled stand by leading Democrats of the New Deal
era, even those in her state of Massachusetts.
