American Dream Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Copyright Page

  PART I - Welfare

  ONE - The Pledge: Washington and Milwaukee, 1991

  TWO - The Plantation: Mississippi, 1840-1960

  THREE - The Crossroads: Chicago, 1966-1991

  FOUR - The Survivors: Milwaukee, 1991-1995

  PART II - Ending Welfare

  FIVE - The Accidental Program: Washington, 1935-1991

  SIX - The Establishment Fails: Washington, 1992-1994

  SEVEN - Redefining Compassion: Washington, 1994-1995

  EIGHT - The Elusive President: Washington, 1995-1996

  NINE - The Radical Cuts the Rolls: Milwaukee, 1995-1996

  PART III - After Welfare

  TEN - Angie and Jewell Go to Work: Milwaukee, 1996-1998

  ELEVEN - Opal’s Hidden Addiction: Milwaukee, 1996-1998

  TWELVE - Half a Safety Net: The United States, 1997-2003

  THIRTEEN - W-2 Buys the Crack: Milwaukee, 1998

  FOURTEEN - Golf Balls and Corporate Dreams: Milwaukee, 1997-1999

  FIFTEEN - Caseworker XMI28W: Milwaukee, 1998-2000

  SIXTEEN - Boyfriends: Milwaukee, Spring 1999

  SEVENTEEN - Money: Milwaukee, Summer 1999

  EIGHTEEN - A Shot at the American Dream: Milwaukee, Fall 1999

  Epilogue:

  TIMELINE

  NOTES

  Acknowledgements

  INDEX

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  AMERICAN DREAM

  Jason DeParle is a senior writer for The New York Times and a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine. A graduate of Duke University, DeParle won a George Polk Award and was a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the welfare system. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Nancy-Ann, and their two sons.

  Praise for American Dream

  New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Award Winner

  Sidney Hillman Award Winner

  Washington Monthly Political Book Award Winner

  “Masterful . . . every bit the exhaustive and authoritative account we might expect from a New York Times reporter whose welfare coverage during the Clinton years twice made him a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. What’s startling is the gripping read DeParle provides along the way—an alchemy wrought by the fusion of his encyclopedic knowledge with his mischievous prose. The story of welfare reform turns out to be suspenseful, emotionally rich, rife with dramatic reversals and packed with enough ironies to keep Don DeLillo busy for several years. Who knew?”

  —The Nation

  “Fascinating . . . one of the best books on the American underclass ever written, a compelling account that is disturbing, yet hopeful.”—National Review

  “Journalism doesn’t get any better than this.”

  —Ellen Goodman, The Boston Globe

  “DeParle connects the personal and the political . . . with a keen eye and an even more remarkable pen.”—American Prospect

  “Jason DeParle’s American Dream is a singular achievement. He interweaves a fascinating discussion of the politics of the welfare reform movement with a poignant portrayal of the lives of three women in one extended family who move on and off the welfare rolls in a struggle to survive. This is must reading for anyone concerned about the limitations of American social policy in addressing the problems of the urban poor.”

  —William Julius Wilson, author of The Truly Disadvantaged,

  Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor,

  Harvard University

  “Beautifully written . . . important . . . the narrative really crackles.”—The New Republic

  “A significant book—clear-headed, deeply sensitive, and richly informative.”—San Jose Mercury News

  “DeParle . . . opens up the lives of his subjects in a way that . . . challenges easy left and right assumptions about them. . . . It’s DeParle’s achievement to detail all these impolite truths while catching you up in these women’s lives and revealing their underlying strength. It helps that he’s picked an appealing central character in Angie, the nurse’s aide, who has a hilarious, no-B.S. mouth on her. . . . DeParle does a brilliant job.”

  —Mickey Kaus, Slate

  “A panoramic view . . . starkly honest . . . a humorous, emotional story that is exhaustive in detail and scope.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “A powerful bracing antidote . . . masterful detail.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “DeParle . . . shuns sentimentality and middle-class moralizing. His women are tough, profane and sad. They make wrong decisions, and you cringe. They hustle the system, and you shake your head. Then they surprise you by climbing out of bed in the middle of a frigid Wisconsin night to catch the van to suburban nursing homes in order to work double shifts. . . . It might even become an instant classic along the lines of Anthony Lukas’ Common Ground.”—The Times-Picayune

  “Reads like an epic novel.”—New York Post

  “With equal measure of compassion and dispassion, Jason DeParle confronts us inescapably with the reality of poverty in America. You cannot read this book and remain indifferent to those who are being left behind. This is one of the great works on social policy of this generation.”

  —Daniel Schorr, NPR senior news analyst

  “A brilliant exercise that combines an honest but sensitive portrait of the women and their families with a larger look at the policy and the politics of welfare reform.”—The Economist

  “Superb and affecting . . . debunks many myths surrounding the old system.”—BusinessWeek

  “In this beautifully written, heartfelt book, Jason DeParle has pulled off a stunning feat of journalistic storytelling. Equally at home in the West Wing as he is on the inner-city streets of Milwaukee, DeParle chronicles the story behind the most important piece of social policy to come along in decades, and its impact on real lives. With a novelist’s eye for irony and detail, he is unflinching in his reporting. What he finds will surprise you. It did me.”—Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here

  “Richly researched, beautifully written.”—Mother Jones

  “A superb book—honest, richly observed, and artfully written.”

  —Commentary

  “A superb piece of reporting and narrative . . . his stories simmer on the page.”—Dissent

  “A dramatic and moving journey . . . told through three amazing women.”—Townhall.com

  “Convictions and prejudices of the left and the right all fall before this meticulously researched book; it will become a classic account of the lives of the American poor.”

  —Nathan Glazer, professor of sociology, Harvard University

  “This is a book that will break your heart and open your mind. In the vividness of its characters and the sweep of its ambition, American Dream is the Les Miserables of our day. This book teems with humor, surprise, paradox, and redemption.”

  —Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking

  To Nancy-Ann, Nicholas, and Zachary

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  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2004

  Published in Penguin Books 2005

  Copyright © Jason DeParle, 2004

  All rights reserved

  Excerpt from “What Does the Political Scientist Know” by Artur Miedzyrzecki from Spoiling Cannibals’ Fun: Polish Poetry from the Last Two Decades of Communist Rule, edited and translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh (Northwestern University Press). Used by permission.

  eISBN : 978-1-440-64917-2

  1. Public welfare—United States—Case studies. 2. Welfare recipients—Employment—United

  States—Case studies. 3. Public welfare administration—United States—Case studies. I. Title.

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  I think all of us know in our heart of hearts America’s biggest problem today is that too many of our people never got a shot at the American Dream.

  —BILL CLINTON

  FEBRUARY 2, 1993

  I am born of black color

  Descendant of slaves,

  Who worked and cried so I can see better days

  Who fought and ran

  So I can be free to see better days.

  Better days are here, so they say

  So why am I still working, running, fighting and crying?

  For my better days?

  Or is it so my descendants can know of the work I’m putting in

  For their better days?

  —ANGELA JOBE

  2003

  PART I

  Welfare

  ONE

  The Pledge: Washington and Milwaukee, 1991

  Bruce Reed needed a better line.

  A little-known speechwriter in a long-shot campaign, he was trapped in the office on a Saturday afternoon, staring at a flat phrase. A few weeks earlier, his boss, Bill Clinton, had stood on the steps of the Arkansas Capitol to announce he was running for president. One of the things Clinton had criticized that day was welfare. “We should insist that people move off the welfare rolls and onto the work rolls,” he said. It wasn’t the kind of thing most Democrats said, which was one reason Reed liked it; he thought the party carried too much liberal baggage, especially in its defense of the dole. But the phrase wasn’t particularly memorable, either. With Clinton planning a big speech at Georgetown University, Reed tried again.

  “If you can work, you’ll have to do so,” he wrote.

  Mmmmm . . . still not right.

  At thirty-one, Reed had a quick grin and an unlined face, but he was less of an innocent than he seemed. Five months earlier, when Clinton was still weighing the race, Reed had struck a hard-boiled pose. “A message has to fit on a bumpersticker,” he wrote. “Sharpen those lines and you’ll get noticed. Fuzz them and you’ll disappear.” Now the welfare rolls hit new highs with every passing month. And Reed lacked bumper-sticker stuff. At 5:00 p.m. he joined a conference call with a half-dozen other operatives in the fledgling campaign. Clinton wasn’t on the line. He was in such a bad mood he wanted to cancel the speech. His voice was weak; he didn’t feel ready. He wanted Mario Cuomo, the rival he most feared, to define his vision first. He was angry to hear that invitations had gone out and it was too late to turn back.

  The group reviewed the latest draft, which outlined Clinton’s domestic plans, and agreed the welfare section needed work. How about calling for an “end to permanent welfare”? Reed asked. That was better. Not quite right, but better. They swapped a few more lines, and the following morning Reed sent out a draft with a catchy new phrase. If Clinton spotted the change, he didn’t say. On October 23, 1991, he delivered the words as drafted: “In a Clinton administration we’re going to put an end to welfare as we know it.” By the time it was clear the slogan mattered, no one could say who had coined it.

  At first, no one noticed. The New York Times didn’t cover the speech, and The Washington Post highlighted Clinton’s promise to create a “New Covenant.” But soon the power of the phrase made itself known. End welfare as we know it. “Pure heroin,” one of the pollsters called it. When Reed reached the White House, he taped the words to his wall and called them his “guiding star.” In time, they would send 9 million women and children streaming from the rolls.

  One of those women was Angela Jobe. The month Bill Clinton announced that he was running for president, she stepped off a Greyhound bus in Milwaukee to start a new life. She was twenty-five years old and arrived from Chicago towing two large duffel bags and three young kids. Angie had a pretty milk-chocolate face and a fireplug build—her four-foot-eleven-inch frame carried 150 pounds—and the combination could make her look tender or tough, depending on her mood. She had never seen Milwaukee before and pronounced herself unimpressed. “Why they got all these old-ass houses!” she groused. “Where the brick at?” Irreverence was Angie’s religion. She arrived in Milwaukee as she moved through the world, a short, stout fountain of exclamation points, half of them capping sentences that would peel paint from the bus station walls. Absent her animating humor, the transcript may sound off-putting. But up close her habit of excitable swearing, about her “cheap-ass jobs” and “crazy-ass friends” and her “too-cool, too-slick motherfucker” men, came off as something akin to charm. “I just express myself so accurately!” she laughed.

  The cascade of off-color commentary, flowing alongside the late-night cans of Colt 45, could make Angie seem like a jaded veteran of ghetto life. Certainly she had plenty to feel jaded about. She grew up on the borders of Chicago’s gangland. Her father was a drunk. She had her first baby at seventeen, dropped out of high school, and had two more in quick succession. She didn’t have a diploma or a job, and the man she loved was in jail. By the time she arrived in Milwaukee, she had been on welfare for nearly eight years, the sum of her adult life. The hard face was real but also a mask. Her mother had worked two jobs to send her to parochial school, and though Angie tried to hide it, she still bore traces of the English student from Aquinas High. Lots of women came to Milwaukee looking for welfare checks. Not many then felt the need to start a poem about their efforts to discern God’s will:

  I’m tired

  Of trying to understand

  What God wants of me

  Worried that was too irreverent, Angie substituted “the world” for “God” and stored the unfinished page in a bag so high in her closet she couldn’t reach it with a chair. The old red nylon bag was filled with her yellowing treasures: love letters, journals, poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, the hospital bracelets that each of her kids had worn in the nursery. Stories of street fights Angie was happy to share, but the bag was so private that hardly anyone knew it existed. “Don’t you know I like looking mean?” she said one day. While it sounded like one of her self-mocking jokes, Angie segued into a quiet confession. “If people think you’re nice, they’ll take your kindness for weakness. That’s a side of me I don’t want anybody to see. That way I don’t have to worry about nobody hurting me.” In welfare terms, Angie could pass as a paragon of “dependency”: unmarried, uneducated, and unemployed. But Angie never thought of herself as depending on anything. She saw herself as a strong, self-reliant woman who did wh
at it took to get by. She saw herself as a survivor.

  No one survived on welfare alone, especially in Chicago, where benefits were modest but rents were not. Sometimes Angie worked, without telling welfare, at fast-food restaurants. Stints at Popeye’s, Church’s, and KFC had marked her as a chicken-joint triathlete, a minimum-wage workhorse steeped in grease. She also relied on her children’s father, Greg, a tall, soft-spoken man in braids who looked out at the world with seductive eyes. Greg, not welfare, marked the major border in Angie’s life. Before Greg, she wore a plaid jumper and went to parochial school. After Greg, right after Greg, Angie was a teenage mother. Their relationship hadn’t completely passed as a portrait of harmony. Once, when he went without feeding the kids, she tried to shoot him. But unlike most teen parents, they stayed together, and by the time their oldest child was entering school, Greg was making “beaucoup money” in the industry employing most men Angie knew. Greg was selling cocaine. His arrest, in the summer of 1991, hit her with the force of a sudden death. She had never even lived alone, never mind raised kids by herself. Without Greg, she - couldn’t pay the bills: rent was more than her entire welfare check. Ninety miles away, the economics were reversed. You could sign up for welfare, get an apartment, and have money left over. So many poor families were fleeing Chicago that taxpayers in southern Wisconsin griped about “Greyhound therapy.” Higher welfare, lower rent—that’s all Angie knew about Milwaukee when she stepped off the bus.