Chapter 3: Race and rumor

Hey, it's Chrissy. This is the uncertain hour. If you've been listening to our whole season, you'll know last episode was about the maze of work requirements. Tharneta Harris had to contend with to get welfare benefits. All that red tape she had to wade through that was monitoring whether or not she was doing the labor she'd been told to do in order to get government help in a time of need. Now we're asking how that work requirement system came to be. Not just for Tharneta, but for people across the country, which is why uncertain hour producer Peter Ballonon-Rosen went searching for one of America's first examples of a welfare to work system and found himself in Newberg, New York. I visited Newberg, New York on a chilly week at the end of November. It's a small post-industrial city about an hour north of New York City. You take a ferry across the Hudson River from the closest train station to get there. And just like that river, Newberg itself has ebbed, flowed, and changed. Wilbur Higgins grew up in Newberg, a quiet kid who liked math. One day, at the end of the 1950s, Wilbur was heading home from elementary school, when these people caught his eye. White men, going up and down his street, carrying clipboards, knocking on doors, and wearing suits, which was weird. The sea of men's suits. Because Newberg really was a working man's town. And I remember they came to our house. My father told me to go in the other room and listen. Don't say anything, just listen. He hid in the kitchen. Wilbur heard these men in suits say they were there to conduct official business on behalf of City Hall. And they wanted his house. So they came in and made their spiel about how they wanted to buy the house. And this is what the offer is. Today, Wilbur's in his 70s, black man with gray mustache and kind brown eyes. The house he grew up in was a few blocks up from Newberg's waterfront shopping district, an area that had once been super lively, full of shops and department stores and banks. But things had started to slow down. In the 50s, Newberg was becoming poorer. Factories had closed. Department stores shuttered and the shopping district by the river began to fade from its former glory. Like many people in Newberg, Wilbur's dad had moved there. He was from South Carolina. And he left mainly because of the, uh, the Cluclux clan being the dominant factor in South Carolina. In Newberg, Wilbur's dad worked his way up to dietician at the Veterans Hospital. He started a family and he saved up enough to buy this three story brick row house. But hiding in the kitchen, Wilbur heard these white men in suit saying the government was going to pay his family to leave. And if you don't accept the offer within a certain period of time, we will take your house through Eminent Domain. It was part of a plan to buy up properties in areas city officials declared were on their way to becoming slums. Or already were to knock down existing buildings and replace them with newer, better ones. And the cash offer to get people to go. It was a low price. And was it just you guys that this was happening to? It was a whole street. Wilbur's family took the money and moved. This was all part of a coordinated government campaign to change Newberg, to get certain people to leave. City officials picked 235 properties to demolish, which displaced 24 white families and nearly 300 black families. And when you look at government reports from this era for why they had to knock down certain areas of the city, this wasn't just about renewing bladed areas. This was also in many ways all about welfare. According to an appraisal hired by the city, taxpayers and businesses were leaving Newberg because of the presence of welfare recipients. Poor black people that elected officials said had supposedly migrated from southern states to live off welfare. So to save the city, city officials needed to destroy bladed areas and get rid of welfare recipients. Wilbur's family lived in a targeted area. They weren't welfare recipients. He didn't know any personally. But he'd heard this rumor. I heard rumors, you know, they say, put the flyers and bathrooms in the south saying code of Newberg, you can get on welfare and not have to work. How did you hear about that? It's weird, but I was weird about that. It was just like the buzz around town. When you heard about the the fire in the bathroom, what was your reaction to that? Didn't need a Newberg as a nice community, working man's community, and didn't need a welfare recipients housed in Newberg. In the late 50s, Wilbur tells me this rumor was going around about welfare. How migrants, specifically poor black people from the south were moving to Newberg to live off it. And the rumor came with this explanation. They knew they could get on welfare and make it just as much money on welfare as working. And like any good rumor. A gruel and gruel and gruel. That rumor going around town about flyers and bathrooms and how they were drawing new, poor black people from the south to Newberg for the welfare. It turned into this whole explanation for why the city was changing, why the old commercial district was crumbling, why potholes couldn't get repaired, why areas of Newberg needed to be knocked down and renewed. People in town connected all those problems back to this rumor that new black people were coming to Newberg, coming and draining the city's budget because they'd rather get a government check than work. The rumor kind of turned into gospel. A local paper did a piece about the changing city. In it, a man said quote, there's a sign in Montgomery or Atlanta Railroad Station that says go to Newberg and get paid for not working. That's what we're up against. Even today, there are still people in Newberg who say, oh yeah, I totally remember that sign in that rumor. They said that like there should be a sign down there saying come up here. People got bus tickets and were shipped to Newberg to collect welfare. Hostures that told people to move to Newberg for the welfare. People say, oh yeah, there was signs down there saying come to Newberg for free welfare. We had a beautiful town and all of a sudden it was a ghetto. Now, I've tried to find hard evidence for this sign. I've talked to historians, archivists, scholars, people around Newberg. But no one can show me a picture or any real proof of a sign existing. And the thing about a rumor is, once you say it enough, it doesn't matter whether or not it's true. It can create a city where fact and fiction blur. The rumor was just the start. Shortly after those men knocked on a well-burnt store, a new city leader would take power in Newberg and essentially declare war on welfare and the people who get it. He'd lead a harsh crackdown on welfare recipients that would catapult Newberg into the national spotlight, a chain of events known as the Battle of Newberg. That included publicly humiliating welfare recipients, instituting some of the nation's first welfare work requirements and stirring up national controversy over the idea that certain people turned to welfare simply to evade work. An idea that still sounds oddly familiar today. We challenge the right of pre-loaders to make more on relief than when working. We challenge the right of those on relief to loaf by state and federal edict. And we challenge the right of people to quit jobs at will and go on relief like spoiled children. Welcome to the uncertain hour, a show from Marketplace about obscure policies forgotten history and why America's like this. I'm Chrissy Clark and I'm Peter Ballon-On-Rosen. Over the next two episodes, we're going to tell you the story of that rumor about a sign that said go on welfare to get paid for not working and how city officials used that rumor to transform welfare in Newberg, New York. They launched an experiment to strip welfare recipients of their benefits and run them out of town, an experiment that would impact welfare laws across America. Because what happened there, it was one of the first punches thrown in this bigger fight that's still sweeping across America. This fight over who really deserves help and what they should have to do to get it. The story of Newberg helps tell the larger story of where the whole idea of the welfare to work system that we have today first came from and what those early attempts at welfare to work were designed to accomplish. Even though people often think of the 1990s and welfare reform as the moment when we first started requiring welfare recipients to work, the ideas behind work requirements go much, much further back. And their history reveals a lot. Chapter 3 Race into Rumor We'll get back to Newberg and that rumor that showed up there in the 1950s in a moment. But first, I want to zoom back in history to an even earlier time. Because going back centuries, there have been examples where a society's impulse to help people in need gets complicated by its fears about who really deserves the help and who's just being lazy. So I want to give you a very, very abridged kind of genealogy of work requirements. First up, the 15 and 1600s in Elizabethan England. Back then, there were laws that literally divided poor people into three different categories. There were the deserving poor, that is, people who were too old or young or sick to work. They deserved help. There were the idol poor, people who it was thought could work but refused. They were whipped in the streets. And then there were the able-bodied poor, people who wanted to work but couldn't find a job. They were usually required to do labor in return for aid. Fast forward a few centuries and jump a few thousand miles across the pond to the 19 teens in America. And you see some laws that divide people into who deserves help and who doesn't, falling along a different line. So this is a newspaper clipping from the Greenville News, October 2nd, 1918. That was a Wednesday. Headline quote, Need girl women to be put to work. City ordinance soon to be passed. That's Efe Finch Floyd, director of economic justice at the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute. She studied welfare policy for years. She read me this old news article from a paper in Greenville, South Carolina, published during World War I. During that war women across the country, white and black whose husbands were fighting, got small monthly allowances from the war department. The money was meant to help make ends meet while their men were risking their lives on the other side of the world. But that monthly war allowance became a point of contention in some parts of the country because as this newspaper article from the time explains, it appeared to be causing a very specific kind of labor shortage. It is exceedingly difficult for families who need cooks and laundresses to get them. The article goes on to say that members of the City Council had been getting complaints from white residents about how black women who'd been getting the war allowance were refusing employment when it was offered to them. Because according to the article, they could get along without working, thanks to this government help. In response, the City was considering this new law that would require able-bodied black women, not all women, just black women, to be employed, quote, regardless of whether they want to or have to. At its special meeting yesterday afternoon, City Council discussed the situation with regard to this class of loafers at some length. And it seemed that all members of Council were agreed that steps should be taken to compel them to engage in some useful occupation. Just a pause on that for a moment. The City was going to pass a law forcing black women to work, because some white people in town were having trouble finding people to cook their food and wash their underwear. Now, there were plenty of white women who were getting war allowances too, but this law would not require them to work. It was just for black women. And if a black woman was found not to be working, she could be fine or put in jail. The proposed ordinance will require them all to carry a labor identification card, showing that they are regularly and usefully employed, and the labor inspectors and police will be charged with the duty of rigidly enforcing the law. That is just remarkable. Yeah. EFA points out this ordinance holds in it clear echoes of slavery. What EFA calls the original work requirement. And Slavement established this inherit expectation that black people could not have their own freedom. They had to work for the economic gain of a white master. As news spread of these proposed racial work requirements in Greenville and similar ones across the South, the NAACP sent a telegram to the White House, urging President Woodrow Wilson to condemn them as insidious and un-American. He did not. But meanwhile, around the same time as those white folks in Greenville and other places in the country were fretting about the effects these government war allowances were having on the labor supply for black cooks and laundresses. There was another government benefit program that was not creating the same kind of worry. Namely, something known as Mother's Pensions. Small monthly pensions meant for poor families without male breadwinners, the precursor to the cash welfare system we have today. Back in its early incarnation, it had no work requirements. In fact, kind of the opposite. Mother's got these small monthly payments so they could stay home and raise their kids. But there were certain mothers these programs had in mind. In the words of a White House conference in 1909, they needed to be mothers of worthy character, deserving mothers. Of course, worthy and deserving, they're pretty subjective terms. And often that looks like white widows. So often that by 1931, when the US government tallied who was receiving this kind of aid anywhere in the US, about 3% of the families were black. 3% is a pretty small number. 3% is pretty small way out of whack with the number of black families living in poverty at the time. In the deep south where most black people lived, the mismatch was even worse. There, in that year, almost 3,000 white families got this help. But only 39 black families did. Not 39% just 39 families. A few years later, in the throes of the Great Depression as part of New Deal legislation, Congress turned these mothers pensions into a federal program and gave them a new name. Aid to dependent children, or EDC. Same idea, cash aid for poor families without male breadwinners. And even though ADC was supposed to be a broader, more accessible program than the one that came before it, it had a lot of the same biases, especially in the Jim Crow South. In one case, an ADC field supervisor was asked why so few black families were offered assistance. The supervisor said the agency didn't want to quote, interfere with local labor conditions and explained. Black families, quote, have always gotten along. And if made eligible for assistance, quote, all they'll do is have more children. End quote. The welfare of the nation depends upon the welfare of its children. There's this film reel the government put out in the thirties to promote ADC. To provide for children who have lost their breadwinners, the state and federal governments provide monthly cash payments so that these children may grow up at home with their own families. As the narrator speaks, a little boy drinks a glass of milk, a mother watches her kids frolic in the yard, another mother cradles an infant. Every person looks to be white. And like I said, in the early days of ADC, when it was imagined to be serving these white families, the program was pretty under the radar and pretty uncontroversial. But over the years, that started to change. The program started to get more scrutiny. And he says there were a few reasons for this. For one, the welfare roles started increasing and so did their costs, partly because ADC had expanded into more states and average payments to families went up. But the roles weren't just growing. Also, the race of who was on the roles was changing. Specifically, the percentage of ADC recipients who were black, it had more than doubled, from 16% in 1940 to 44% in 1961. Policy makers begin to raise eyebrows and say, you know, what's going on here? There were a few things going on, E-Face says. During World War II, many women, white and black had shared in a little prosperity sometimes for the first time. Rosie the riveters, earning money and good paying factory jobs while men were fighting overseas. In towns all over the United States, women are called upon to leave their homes and take jobs. They discover that factory work is usually no more difficult than housework. How do you like it? I love it! But of course, then the war ended. These are the guys who helped win it for us against the Nazis and the entire nation welcomes them home. And all those Rosie the riveters? You know, they had to make space for the returning soldiers, right? That they needed those jobs more than women. The first to be let go were the black women workers. And for the women who tried to find new jobs. Black women were because of occupational segregation. We're again thrust into the lowest paid jobs, exploitative jobs. Jobs that left those black women more economically vulnerable, more likely to need assistance at some point. And at the same time that more black women were turning to ADC, a lot of white women were leaving it. Thanks to a new law that kicked in in 1940, widows started getting access to social security survivor benefits, benefits that their late husbands had earned through their jobs. These benefits could pay double or triple what ADC paid. But most black widows couldn't access those more generous benefits at first, because social security had initially excluded workers in the two main industries where black people worked. Agriculture and domestic work. In other words, many white women had other safety nets to rely on. But ADC was one of the only safety nets that black women could access. On top of that, there were all these bigger demographic shifts happening. Many black families had migrated out of the south for the promise of higher-paying jobs. They were looking for work, not welfare. But some of those jobs that had lured people north, dried up. The rust belt was starting its decades long decline. And in the north, when a black family did hit hard times, they might have slightly better luck getting cash assistance than in the south, where case workers were most notorious for keeping black people off ADC. So that changed the color of the welfare roles too. Still, despite all these things that helped explain why the welfare roles were changing, you didn't hear a lot of politicians talking about those forces. Instead, what you started to hear just as the ADC roles were getting increasingly black. Were these alarm bells sounding about this new problem of so-called welfare dependency? This is what's wrong with welfare now. There's too many people that can do the work. They stay home and sleep. Public assistance roles are increasing because of the increase in social maladjustment. The shift, if you will, in the moral tone of the community. And I won't mention the ethnic group involved, but the theory was that the welfare load was so happy because the husband would want to. There is a collective understanding of many policy makers and stakeholders that this is not supposed to be for them, right? These are not the deserving mothers that we were talking about. This is another group and therefore they must be taking advantage of the program or they're just having kids to get on the program. It's not that dissimilar from some of the rhetoric we hear today. He says it was that kind of rhetoric that got her interested in studying welfare professionally. When she was growing up in the 90s, she remembers hearing politicians talking about the problems of welfare dependency. I didn't exactly understand what was going on. I was a 10 and 11. But I remember thinking that there was about black women. That somehow black women weren't doing what they were supposed to do or they were having too many babies. I didn't fully understand that at that age. But that stuck with me. And so when I turned to public policy, I started looking at what was going on back then. And when she started looking back through the history to see how we got here, there's this one place that kept popping up. You see this city in New York State kind of catching my attention in the research. That city was Newberg. Really putting the blame of larger economic change on black families who are really just trying to do what a lot of American families are doing to provide better opportunities for themselves and for their children. How a fight over welfare in Newberg that would change America forever got started. That's after a break. Before the break, we learned how welfare started off as a little noticed mostly white program. But as the number of black people on the roles grew, the program became more controversial. And one of the places that really started scrutinizing welfare was Newberg, New York. Because as producer Peter Bellon on Rosen told us, there was that rumor swirling around. That people were moving to the city because they'd rather live on a welfare than work. Here's Peter again. Before things really popped off in Newberg, before it got a national reputation for being cruel to welfare recipients, before any of that, Newberg was already changing. New highways opened up, pulling people and businesses away from the city. Local factories closed, taking jobs and people with them. And the city started to look different. This is second straight. Okay. That's Unmunked Dumbry Street. Eleanor McKay, white lady, 94 when we talked, pink sweater, she was there. And she showed me an oil painting in her dining room of what Newberg had looked like in her childhood. Reminds me of when I was young. A painting of a city street with three and four story buildings. The street goes down a hill, ends at a ferry station on the banks of a river. When I was small, I would get ten cents and you could go in the five and ten and you'd be surprised what you could buy with ten cents. Can't in ice cream and stuff. And we'd hang out on this corner. That was the Chamber of Commerce. Oh wow. On the corner. But they all closed. Eleanor was in her 30s, a housewife, when she heard the rumor. Those whispers going around that explained why Newberg was changing. They claimed that in the south, they had posters that told people to move to Newberg. For the welfare. You heard about that. I heard about that. Eleanor had heard the story about signs and posters telling people move to Newberg for the welfare. And how poor black people had answered that call. And in the late 50s, that story spilled out of the rumor mill and took hold across the city. I couldn't tell you how I knew about it. Just that was a rumor, you know. The Newberg City Council took that rumor and ran with it. They began to ask why? Why had stores like Eleanor's local five and ten closed? Why was Newberg's waterfront shopping district on the decline? And rather than point to new highways pulling people and shops out of town, they pointed to that rumor in Newberg's changing demographics. It wasn't something you could say. Well, yeah, now, you know, they're hearing. It just was a gradual thing, but it did change. In the 50s, waves of black people had moved to Newberg from the south, but not for welfare. They were following family members like many who worked in local brick yards. Over the decade, Newberg went from one in 16 Newbergers being black to one in six. It was part of the great migration. Black people fleeing Jim Crow laws and looking for work in the more industrial north. Right as the demographics changed to Newberg, city officials started to officially warn of this threat that so-called migrants were moving to Newberg to get welfare when they could be working instead. Well, fair payments were higher in New York state than other states they said that had to explain it. And new faces moving into places like Eleanor's neighborhood were the proof. Down near the river, you know, all black people started coming in there. And what was the reaction to that? We moved. We moved. That's what everybody did. I didn't think that much about it, you know, just, what you did, you just moved and got along. What were people saying? I thought it was the start of when things changed because they just weren't used to living the way we do. When you say that they didn't live like you did, what do you mean by that? Well, I don't know. They just, they were, of course, poor. So what the city is claiming is that property values are going down in Newberg and especially this neighborhood because of the presence of African Americans who allegedly came to the city to get welfare. This is Tamara Boussac, who yes, sounds French because she is French. What would happen in Newberg with welfare would be such a big deal that people like Tamara all the way in France still study it today. She teaches American studies at the Serbonne in Paris and is currently writing a book about Newberg. She says at the time, welfare recipients became an easy scapegoat for any of the city's problems. That this is why the the area is becoming so deteriorated and that of course, no business wants to settle or to stay in the city where this is happening. So city councillors in Newberg turned to outside help to deal with their so-called welfare crisis. They hired a new city manager for Newberg, a man who turned their welfare problem into much more than they bargained for, who'd crack down on supposed welfare cheats in a way that would alarm much of America and change the national conversation around welfare. A bald-ing middle-aged white man often dressed in a pressed suit and tie. City manager Joseph Mitchell was prone to fiery speeches that riled people up. He vowed to put an end to people using welfare instead of working. Reporters described this new city manager as charming and ambitious. He was a compulsive smoker who drove a flashy salmon-colored Chrysler convertible. I like hot cars he once told reporters. One of his first moves as city manager was to offset a city budget deficit by cutting 30 families off from cash welfare assistance. When news reached data officials, they intervened and stopped the change. City manager Joseph Mitchell was clear he felt welfare was wrecking Newberg. The wreckage of an entire business in residential district emptying the city of responsible tax-paying citizens and filling it with those who create and contribute to crime and violence. Basically, welfare is not just costing the city, but as he put it, it brings quote parasitic migrants from southern states. And welfare is a positive factor in slum growth as it attracts the poor rather than repelling them. So to repel welfare recipients, the city manager hatched a plan, a new requirement to get welfare. That anyone new to the city who wanted welfare should have to prove they moved to Newberg not for welfare, but for work. A way to stem the flow of the so-called black migrants that Newberg City Council was up in arms about. In front of a gathering of Newbergers, the city manager stands behind a podium dressed in black suit and neat tie. He makes a declaration. But he tells the group lots of people on the roles are not actually needy. He raises eyebrows to the crowd like challenge me. I wish you would. But Tamara says, actually, if you zoom out like way out, there was something else going on that had nothing to do with people migrating, nothing to do with welfare cheats. It's a period of rising actually unemployment in the US at the time because the US is just coming out of a national recession. People are not unemployed because of the recession or they are not unemployed because they are no jobs available. They are unemployed because they don't want to work. If they want to get some sort of a system from the government, then there is no reason why you should be allowed to get welfare without working. And so, in the name of cracking down on welfare cheats, city manager Joseph Mitchell decided to take a hard line approach to step hard on a problem hoping it go away. He decided to launch a sneak attack on the city's welfare recipients. This police led ambush to make people prove they actually deserved welfare, a trap for welfare recipients that would rile up people across Newberg, that would alarm state and federal authorities, and would transform how many people across America think about people who get welfare. And for those people getting welfare, things were about to change. What the welfare give gives me and the kids every angle that I can make this more than strict as what I do. They try to save pennies which is completely impossible because you just can't stretch the money that far. Then the system turns around and says, yeah, but they did it to themselves. A solid tissue can figure out your vulnerabilities and your fears. He's got you hooked. That's next time on the uncertain hour. This episode was written and reported by me, Chris E. Clark, and Peter Ballon on Rosen. Grace Rubin, Peter Ballon on Rosen, and I produced it, editing from Michael May and Catherine Winter. In researching this episode, the book The Dispised Poor by Joseph Ritz was crucial to our understanding of Newberg's 1961 War on Welfare. Check that out if you'd like to learn more. Research and production assistance from Marquet Green, Tiffany Bowie, Muna Danish, and Danielle Martinez. Betsy Towner Levine provided Fact Check support, scoring and sound design by Chris Juleen, Jake Cherry, mixed our episode. Kate Linneche is our senior producer. Bridget Bodner is director of podcasts at Marketplace. Francesca Levy is executive director of Digital. Neil Scarborough is Marketplaces VP and General Manager. Special thanks to Nancy Fargali, Donna Tam, Molly Schwartz, and Daisy Palacios.