Human Needs and Legal Rights: Social Workers and Lawyers in New Deal Welfare Administration

From the late 1930s through the 1940s -- years before the welfare rights movement -- liberals working within the federal social welfare bureaucracy launched their own “welfare rights” campaign.  Using their power over the grants-in-aid that the Social Security Act provided to cash-strapped states, these liberal bureaucrats urged state and local welfare officials to administer public assistance benefits as “rights.” They pressed states to provide “due process” to dissatisfied recipients, to respect recipients’ spending choices, and, in general, to eliminate all vestiges of the “old poor law” mindset, under which the poor individual forfeited civil and political rights in return for assistance.  This policy furthered the New Deal agenda, federal administrators agreed, by giving needy Americans both security in their livelihoods and freedom in their personal choices.  Yet not all administrators agreed about the meaning of “rights.”  Those trained in social work, such as Bureau of Public Assistance Director Jane Hoey, urged an understanding of rights that was sensitive to social context and grounded in human needs.  Social workers were suspicious of “legalism” and courts.  The lawyers staffing the agency shared the wariness of courts, but celebrated the “legal” attributes of public assistance rights, such as their vindication by legal process.  The lawyers used rights language not to make benefits more adequate, but to bring “rule of law” to a realm that appeared dangerously lawless.  This paper describes how these different proponents of the “right” to public assistance – all New Deal liberals, all working from positions of strength within the government social welfare bureaucracy – conversed, cooperated, and competed.  By the 1950s neither side had gained much traction with local welfare administrators, but the lawyers’ viewpoint won out inside the agency. The paper concludes by considering the implications for the welfare rights campaigns just over the horizon.