The Endless Odyssey of Patrick Henry Polk
The Wanderings of a Texas family on the road to nowhere.
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Cynthia would remember the first time she ever saw Henry Polk, her future husband. Henry had been married and divorced twice by then—he has five grown children and numerous grandchildren from his earlier marriages. Henry had drifted up around Valley Mills where Cynthia Bates was living and it was love at first sight. “I was outdoors cutting wood,” she recalled, “and I looked over and seen him lift this car motor up all by hisself. He was built like a bull back then, back before he took sick. I told my mama, who was sitting on the porch shelling peas, ‘I’m gonna marry that man there.’ And sure ’nuff I did.”
When Cynthia told her daddy she wanted to marry Henry Polk, he volunteered to drive them to the courthouse. “He said that would just be one less mouth to feed,” Cynthia continued, not concealing her rancor. “After we was married, Henry tried to help out mama and the kids. The last bottle of medicine my mama ever had, Henry bought it with his last ten dollars. When mama finally died, all eat up with cancer and the sugar diabetes, daddy took the nine kids who was still living at home and dropped ’em on the courthouse steps like you would a sack of puppies. We didn’t know ’bout what he’d done for a few days. My Uncle Joe got there in time to ’dopt six of ’em. The other three we never saw again.”
“Back then people wasn’t so bad off as they are now,” Henry Polk cut in, stubbing the butt of his Camel on the bare wood floor of the living room. There were not yet any ashtrays and hardly any dishes in the house in South Austin, though ashtrays were not a habit Henry cultivated. “Back then, we’d find us an abandoned filling station or somewhere and move in. I’d take that double-bit ax and cut me some cedar or post oak and sell ’em fifteen, twenty cents apiece. I was strong as a bull. I could cut wood all day long. When the weather was good, it weren’t nothing to make twenty dollars a day.”
Christmas passed, and so did New Year, and as the Legislature convened to consider the problems of the state the Polks still had not received their first welfare check. They didn’t know it, but the check was lost in the computer somewhere deep in the heart of the Department of Public Welfare (DPW) bureaucracy. This was partly the Polks’ fault. From the time they first applied for welfare back in Stephenville, the family had left such a tangled trail that the DPW computer couldn’t cope with their case.
THE DOLE
Patrick Henry Polk and his brood are not the typical Texas welfare family, but they are a fairly typical poor family. Only a small percentage of the poor in Texas actually receive welfare. There are approximately 500,000 poor families in the state—that’s families, not people—and only about 18 per cent of them will get any government aid this year. Contrary to prevailing myths, most poor Texans are not black or Chicano: the largest group—almost half—are like the Polks: Anglo-Saxon Protestant, nearly illiterate, and totally puzzled by the complexities of life in the 1970s. Polk is not their real name. I changed names and a few other details because that was the only way the family would agree to a series of interviews that would cover two months. But the Polks are not a composite: details of their case, their medical and social histories, their habits and lifestyle are as accurate as I could report them.
Welfare is one of those five-alarm words, like communist or rattlesnake and is customarily followed by descriptive nouns such as chiseler and bum. You have no doubt heard that welfare recipients drive Cadillacs. The hard fact is, most welfare recipients are barely surviving. Members of an Austin women’s club were asked recently to guess how much cash a mother and one child would receive from welfare each month. Guesses ranged from $200 to $500. The actual figure is $86—$24 for the child and $62 for the “caretaker.” Only 325,000 Texans, 75 per cent of them children, receive cash payments, or the dole as it is sometimes cynically described. That’s less than 3 per cent of the state’s population. The program that administers the dole is called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). The key word here is children, though this seems to confuse a lot of us taxpayers. Under the rigid standards set by the Texas Legislature, the only persons who receive welfare are children (and one caretaker) who have lost one or both parents, or (as in the Polks’ case) are deprived of basic necessities because the father is disabled. What makes the Polks so rare among welfare recipients is that both parents are living at home. The size of their family and the total amount of cash assistance ($225 a month) place the Polks in the upper 1 per cent of the AFDC rolls.
The “average” AFDC family consists of a mother and two to three children. Daddy is either dead, deserted, or disabled. These children and their caretakers receive on average $32.06 a month (the national average is $72.35). That amounts to about $1 a day for shelter, clothing, laundry, utilities, and other necessities. Twenty to 30 per cent of that $1 goes for the purchase of food stamps, which are not accepted for household items such as soap, detergents, and toilet paper—not to mention cigarettes, beer, or wine. Very few AFDC recipients live in public housing. All AFDC recipients automatically qualify for free medical care under Medicaid, which in terms of simple survival is far more important than actual cash. If the youngest child is older than five years, the mother is automatically enrolled in a work-training program and in most cases quickly returned to the labor force. The caretaker mother is allowed to deduct job-related expenses from her salary (usually about 30 per cent), but if her bottom line exceeds $86 a month, the mother and child are dropped from AFDC and, after a grace period of ninety days, from Medicaid. The myth of the dole as a permanent gravy train finally collapses when you realize that the average income of a Texas family receiving both AFDC and food stamps is barely half the official poverty level of $5500 for a nonfarm family of four. Hardly your Cadillac crowd. Old Buicks and Oldsmobiles are more like it.
The actual payment to a specific family is calculated by an AFDC caseworker using a sliding scale based on 1969 cost-of-living figures. Because of inflation, the cost of living has increased 56 per cent since 1969, but in the case of AFDC the Legislature has found it politically expedient to ignore this. Except for AFDC none of the other 28 programs administered by DPW has gone a single year without a cost-of-living increase. Once the caseworker has calculated the “needs” of the family, the next step is to cut that figure by 25 per cent. The philosophy here is that if the state pays a family less than it “needs” somebody in the family will have to go to work. Even though 75 per cent of the AFDC recipients are children, the incentive theory is championed by demagogues and embraced by lawmakers as an excuse to maintain AFDC payments below subsistence levels. “Incentive,” says Bill Clayton, Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, “is the only way we have to break the poverty cycle. Anytime you get support payments to a high level, you discourage incentive.” The major flaw in this theory is that by no stretch of the imagination can $1 a day be considered high level. More than half the adults living in poverty in Texas are already working full time: they just don’t earn enough (the Texas minimum wage is $1.40) to make ends meet. In fact, the incentive is to stay on the dole, if for no other reason than to qualify for Medicaid.
There is a technical but highly revealing factor in the Legislature’s gut reaction to the Department of Public Welfare. It’s not welfare that inspires the sanctimonious preachings in the state house, it’s the dole. Welfare in fact embraces dozens of local, state, and federal programs that touch the daily lives of two million Texans (one of six) and cost $2 billion a year—but only $125 million ($92 million of it paid by the federal government) is mailed out each year to AFDC families. When you consider who controls all that money, and where it goes, the incentive theory takes on a new light.
Roughly one-fourth of that $2 billion passes through the cash registers of the grocery stores, then filters down to distributors, processors, teamsters, farmers, and ranchers. “The food stamp program,” says a DPW executive, “is heavily supported by the food industry. In fact, it’s an industry subsidy program.” Doctors, pharmacists, hospitals, and nursing homes pocket an enormous share of welfare money. “The strongest lobby in Texas, except maybe the highway lobby, is the nursing home lobby,” an executive at DPW claims. “The last Legislature actually gave us more than we requested for nursing homes. The figure goes up every year—it’ll reach about $436 million by 1978. This doesn’t mean the patients are getting more benefits; it simply means the nursing homes are getting more money.” Welfare in fact is a gigantic public industry controlled largely by special-interest groups.
“The reason AFDC is so unpopular,” the DPW executive continued, “is that there isn’t any interest group that can control it. It’s cash, and it goes directly to the client. It’s the only program where the client makes the decision what to do with it.”
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