Molly Michelmore
APSA 2005
“T
HE
N
EW
A
MERICAN
M
AJORITY
”
AND
THE
C
HANGING
P
OLITICS
OF
W
ELFARE
IN
THE
N
IXON
E
RA
I. Introduction: The Family Assistance Plan and American Political Culture
In August 1969, President Richard Nixon unveiled a “new and drastically
different approach to the way this country cares for those in need.”
The president’s
Family Assistance Plan (FAP) would have required that the federal government take
responsibility for ensuring that every American family – including those in which both
parents worked – received at least a minimum income each year. Three years later, the
plan lay abandoned, rejected twice by the Senate Finance Committee, reviled by
conservative and liberals alike, and disowned by the Nixon administration. The politics
of a guaranteed income had been decisively rejected, replaced by a far more conservative
politics of welfare reform.
This paper examines the political history of the Family Assistance Plan to
examine broader shifts in American political culture in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The defeat of the FAP and the decisive rejection of the politics of guaranteed income at
first suggest a rejection of the welfare state and indicate a general rightward trend in
American politics. However, at the same time as it rejected the FAP as “too extensive,
expensive and expansive,” Congress voted overwhelmingly to increase benefits for
existing Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries and to create an entirely new,
federally funded “welfare” program for the adult poor. Rather than following a linear
trajectory from left to right, this paper suggests, the American political economy rather
1
Richard M. Nixon, “Welfare Reform Message,” 8/8/67, reprinted in Congressional Quarterly, 8/15/68,
1520-1523.
2
Convention