Felicia Kornbluh

Who Shot FAP? The Nixon Welfare Plan and the Transformation of American Politics

This essay takes the battle over President Nixon’s proposals for welfare reform as a lens through which to understand political change at the end of the 1960s. In explaining the rise and fall of the Family Assistance Plan, it argues that scholars should take their attention away from President Nixon and place it on the times during which he governed, especially on grassroots protest, the response to it, and the complexities of the Republican coalition. It adds to the research on the 1960s an appreciation of the changing role of liberal Republicans. It adds to the study of domestic policy an understanding of how the Vietnam war shaped policy at home. It adds to political history an account of welfare politics amidst the conservative renaissance of the early 1970s.

Black Buying Power: Welfare Rights, Consumerism, and Northern Protest

The welfare rights movement and the people who joined it are paradigmatic of those who have often been left out of civil rights history.1 Studying the South and North, scholars have begun to challenge the familiar narrative of civil rights by elaborating on the class bases of activist politics, the gender dynamics within leading movement groups, and their ideological and strategic complexity.2 We have begun to reconceptualize the term “civil rights” to include economic redistribution and macroeconomic planning, among other issues that have often been written out of the boundaries of movement history.3 By widening our lens to include a greater range of political activity, we have illuminated the artificial distinctions that have shaped much writing on post-1945 social movements. These include distinctions between civil rights and economic rights, between the South and North, and between a supposedly innocent early stage of movement work (in the 1950s and early 1960s) and a disruptive and ultimately tragic later stage.4

Dissident Political History: Social Movements in North America

This essay focuses upon social movements in the United States, with comparisons to other North American countries that illuminate general themes. It considers the usefulness of distinctions between ‘old’ and ‘new’ social movements derived from other national and continental histories, finding that the language of social movement has been used in the U.S. almost exclusively in reference to movements scholars from other regions would call ‘new’. The language itself came into wide use only with the New Left or non-Left, non-trade-union-based grassroots politics of the 1960s and 1970s.