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According to Brookings Institution's Gilbert Steiner, a leading student of welfare policies: "If a great miracle could take place, and all actual and potential AFDC recipients were to disappear from the ranks of the needy, the remaining categories would not constitute a public problem of major magnitude."
Miracle is not too extreme a hypothesis. In the ten years from 1960 to 1970, the number of people AFDC covers has risen from 3,023,000 to 9,500,000; the cost has gone from $1,056,000,000 to $4,800,000,000.
The burgeoning of AFDC cases over a decade has a variety of explanations. Federal and state eligibility rules have been liberalized. One Supreme Court ruling has ended residency requirements for applicants. Another—recently modified—forbade unannounced "raids" to see if a man in the home of an AFDC mother made her ineligible for aid. Before the ruling, such raids, particularly in the South in the homes of black mothers, were common. Investigations are still conducted, but less harshly. The change has allowed at least 100,000 families to get assistance—people who previously would not have applied for aid or would have been dropped.
A change in mores has added more. Says Mitchell I. Ginsberg, dean of the Columbia University School of Social Work and former head of the New York City human-resources administration: "There are more divorces now among all classes. Many values are breaking down—not just the family but religion, sex, illegitimacy. To blame this on welfare is nonsense."
A major new cause for the increase in AFDC applicants is the effective campaign to get more people on the rolls who have a right to be there. Chief organizer of that movement is George Wiley, 40, executive secretary of the National Welfare Rights Organization. A former leader of the Congress of Racial Equality and a Ph.D. in chemistry who still publishes in scholarly journals, Wiley now wears dashikis more often than business suits. In the four years since N.W.R.O. has been in operation, it has organized an estimated 100,000 welfare clients, almost all of them women, into a national force to raise benefits. Normally they use peaceful tactics, but there have been acts of violence. An N.W.R.O. invasion party once took over the office of the HEW Secretary Robert Finch. Says one HEW official: "I tell you, they've educated a lot of people. They've brought the problem right into this building, and believe me, it's had an impact."
The N.W.R.O. has absorbed much of the seemingly dissipated energy of the civil rights movement and has adopted the movement's militancy and some of its tactics. N.W.R.O. has had a significant effect upon the attitudes of the poor. Many now consider welfare aid a proper and legal claim and demand that it be satisfied. Says Mrs. Tillmon, N.W.R.O. president and a Watts mother of six: "We would like to see everybody get what's coming to them. Everybody is entitled to live in this country, regardless of race, creed, religion or sex. Do you expect people who can't make a living to go out and get hit by a car? It would cost a lot just to bury them."