ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, October 20, 1996 TAG: 9610220114
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: ELIZABETH STROTHER
SOURCE: ELIZABETH STROTHER EDITORIAL WRITER<
IT IS 1935.
The U.S. Congress has just passed the Social Security Act. It provides, for the first time, for federal grants to states that offer public aid to the old, to the blind and to families with dependent children.
Roanoke's Junior League joins with clubs in Richmond, Norfolk and Lynchburg to study child welfare in the state. "A Study of Mothers' Aid in Virginia" notes that 42 families receive aid in the four cities and 10 adjacent counties that the Junior League examined. The state depends "almost exclusively upon the private agencies and institutions for care for dependent children away from their homes. ...
"Because of the serious financial conditions, private charities are hardly able to provide even a minimum service for their children and totally unable to accept responsibility for the additional children crying for aid."
Drawing on information gathered at a 1933 governor's conference, the report notes: "The needs of homeless, neglected children are widespread, distressing and not denied. ... Provisions made by city and county governments are inadequate.
"The state ... accepted responsibility for its dependent children, but except in the case of feebleminded children over ten years of age, it has made no provision for their care ... ''
It is 1996.
In Roanoke alone, some 1,700 families receive Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Congress has just passed, and President Clinton has just signed, welfare "reform" that ends the AFDC program. The states are free to experiment with programs to get mothers off welfare - not out of poverty, mind you, but off the public-assistance rolls - and the bottom line is, recipients will go to work within two years, and draw benefits for no more than five.
Corinne Gott, superintendent of the Roanoke Department of Social Services, comes across the 1935 Junior League study in her office. The slim booklet's soft, gray cover is cut out to show a photograph of a family - a mother, three young sons and a young daughter - clustered on and around an overstuffed chair in what looks to be their living room. They are neatly groomed, a proud-looking family short one person: a father. A breadwinner.
Inside, stuck to the page listing the failings of Virginia's Mothers' Aid law, I find a Post-It note in Gott's small, precise hand: "Can we make a case for block grant awards to states for care of its dependent children? Can the responsibility of charity be left with private agencies? We did not think so in 1933, prior to the passing of the Social Security Act."
Clearly, she thinks the answer today is no.
After 46 1/2 years in her field, she may be discredited among politicians as one of those bureaucrats who make their living serving the poor, and who thus - according to this peculiar line of reasoning - want to perpetuate poverty programs that don't work. Or she may be regarded as someone who has seen the problems and borne the frustrations of administering programs created by politicians - and who remembers well how much worse off children were without them.
"I grew up during the Depression. You expected not to have. But I also know we saw children who suffered from malnutrition. People who died from tuberculosis at an early age. People with untreated physical defects ... Deprivation kinds of birth defects. ... The results of people being undernourished in the womb.
"The graveyards were full of young mothers and babies. That was one way of birth control, I suppose. ... You wanna go back to that?"
Gott acknowledges, "We have to have welfare reform, but I didn't say deform." She concedes that many women on AFDC "are the people having children out of wedlock." But "if we think we can do away with AFDC and solve our social ills," she says, "we are sadly mistaken." Mainly, the number of people on public assistance depends on the availability of jobs. The problem is economic, not moral.
You can divide the AFDC caseload roughly into thirds, Gott says. The top third will manage on their own to get off welfare, never to return. The middle third face barriers that keep them trapped, but they will get off if they have help getting over the hurdles.
"The bottom third is what I call human erosion. There is no real ability to be totally self-sufficient. Either they will have to have their kids taken away, or some help [to care for them]. ... There's gonna be a third of these people in the country who are not going to be competitive in the job market when their two years run out."
Of course, committed "reformers" don't blanche at taking mothers' children away, even if they are deemed unfit only because they are poor. Unwed motherhood must exact "terrible penalties," sociologist Charles Murray preaches. "That means ending welfare in all its forms ... . And I have used the O-word, `orphanage,' as a symbol for the kind of thing we must think about as an alternative."
While we're thinking about it, let's think about the M-word, too: money. Because the nation has been there and done that, and the women of the Junior League concluded, in 1935: "When we consider that it costs approximately one-half as much to maintain a child in his own home as it does in a foster family home or institution it is clear that it would be economical to have the number of children cared for away from home reduced as far as possible."
LENGTH: Medium: 94 linesby CNB