CHAPTER 9
“The reactions in Maryland are predictable: Reagan’s crushing defeat of Carter draws cheers in the suburbs and moans in the city,” read a headline in a Baltimore newspaper following the presidential election in 1980.1 “Reagan’s Victory: Are We Doomed?” the Afro-American asked more pointedly. For Baltimore City Council member Kweisi Mfume, the future definitely did not look bright for African Americans. Just as whites had rescinded on promises made to Black people following the end of slavery and the Reconstruction era, so too did they seemed intent on rolling back recent civil rights gains. Both Mfume and Maryland congressional representative Parren Mitchell pointed to Ronald Reagan’s invocation of states’ rights on the campaign trail and worried that it had served as a rallying cry for reactionary white voters.2 And it hardly required elected office to appreciate the implications of Reagan’s economic agenda for Black Baltimoreans, who by 1980 made up 55 percent of the city’s population.3 “I think Reagan is going to be against Black people,” predicted Phyllis Allen, a resident of east Baltimore. “He’s going to cut out a lot of funding for social welfare programs. He was talking about taking away medical assistance from poor people. And when people get sick, how are they going to pay the bills?”4 Many of the city’s antipoverty and human-services providers shared Allen’s fears. Reagan’s frequent characterization of the poorest Americans as drains on the national economy communicated clearly that these public agencies and the critical services they provided would not soon be better funded.
Meanwhile, although Baltimore’s mayor William Donald Schaefer noted with circumspection only that he was “very disappointed” following the election, he too had significant cause for concern; federal aid for commercial revitalization was also on the line.5 The new president had given all urban dwellers reason to worry. “I think one of the problems today with the cities is federal aid,” Reagan had charged during a presidential debate, invoking the logic about the detrimental consequences of “handouts” that he also applied to welfare.6 The sentiment implicated distressed cities in their entirety in the narrative of criminality that conservatives also used to describe Black protest, urban African Americans more generally, public-sector unions, and government workers, especially welfare providers. In Baltimore, where many believed that one of the biggest problems the city faced was insufficient federal aid to relieve poverty and decline, Reagan’s views were not widely shared. Maryland was one of the six states that Jimmy Carter won in the 1980 election, and Baltimore voters were critical to that outcome; nearly three-quarters of them supported the incumbent despite their frustrations with him.7 Carter’s defeat presaged an era of even greater cuts to redistributive antipoverty efforts and urban aid than the rightward-swinging Democrat himself had introduced. Reagan’s election also made strange bedfellows out of elected officials in Baltimore, African American leaders, and public service providers and their unions, who found their interests aligned when fighting Reaganomics even as they continued to disagree on policy matters at home.
Although largely unpopular among Baltimore’s residents, Reagan’s agenda held considerable appeal for many outside of the city. His calls for smaller government excited corporate and business interests hungry for regulatory and tax relief. It also heartened a growing number of white middle- and working-class Americans who felt that the federal government had done little for them in recent years while their tax dollars subsidized a bloated bureaucracy and welfare programs for those they believed were too lazy to get a job—and often imagined to be people of color. As Baltimore’s Black leaders noted, Reagan stoked the hostility. He also used coded references to welfare fraud and called for tougher crime policies as he sought votes. Although not the only source of his popularity, Reagan’s use of dog-whistle politics helped him attract disenchanted white Democrats to his ticket and win the White House. So too did his repeated assertions about government inefficiency and waste, which also had echoes of racial bias. Once in office, the president got to work implementing his neoliberal agenda both at home and abroad. Both efforts had dire implications for the predominantly African American and female antipoverty and human-services providers in Baltimore, the predominantly African American and female clients they served, and the direction of the city’s economy.
But municipal service providers—and their counterparts in the private sector—did not surrender to Reaganomics without a fight. Mere opposition, they knew, would not be enough. They also had to work together to mitigate the effects on vulnerable residents of impending budget cuts. Meanwhile, Schaefer did Baltimore proud during repeated trips to Washington, DC, where he implored Congress to preserve targeted federal aid for struggling cities. At the same time, leaders of national civil rights and feminist organizations launched a fierce defense of the welfare state, even as they remained mindful of the ways the nation’s supposedly universal welfare programs had often poorly served their constituents. And public-sector unions adamantly advocated on behalf of both government services and the workers who provided them. On the ground in Baltimore, as service providers moved forward with their plans, some also attempted to rekindle the solidarity activist municipal employees had once shared with low-income residents. For public service providers and recipients, however, Reagan proved a grave threat. Government jobs and critical services were on the line, and the only part of the government Reagan seemed enthusiastic about growing was the criminal justice system.
“Government Is the Problem”: Reaganomics at Home and Abroad
Following Reagan’s election, antipoverty and human-services workers in Baltimore—both independently and under the aegis of their unions—began planning their resistance. They called for a strong, unified response from public and private service providers, the board members of their multiple agencies, low-income residents, and members of grassroots civic and religious organizations. USA staffers charged that “[spending] reductions in many program levels and [the] elimination of others will impact the heaviest on the poor, the elderly and minorities, those already suffering the most from inflation and unemployment” and urged members of those groups to join forces in protesting.8 Likewise, Samuel Banks, the coordinator of social studies instruction in the Baltimore City Public Schools, argued, “Each day, it becomes painfully evident that Baltimore’s Black majority and the poor will have to coalesce for their mutual survival. No salvation or relief is to be found in President Reagan’s supply-side economics.”9
The Baltimore workers had just cause for concern. Although Carter’s economic and domestic policies paved the way for the Reagan revolution, the incoming president did not struggle as Carter had while weighing the interests of the needy against the needs of the wealthy; the Republican’s allegiance to the wealthy was never in doubt. It was their ingenuity and business acumen that Reagan believed could be mobilized to revitalize the American economy and restore the United States to the position of strength and prestige in the global economy it once commanded. He wanted federal lawmakers to facilitate the process by maximizing the business community’s access to capital, eliminating regulation, and reducing obstacles to free trade. Reagan was also fiercely anti-communist, and he intended to use his time in office to best the Soviet Union in the Cold War and prove capitalism the superior economic system.
To achieve his goals, Reagan pledged to spend liberally on the military but also to cut taxes. He planned to make up the difference in the federal budget by reducing the roles performed by and cost of the government. As he argued in his first inaugural speech, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”10 He favored fiscal austerity on nonmilitary matters, transferred to the private sector functions previously performed by the government, and decreased union strength and influence. And he was a particularly staunch opponent of many social welfare programs. His administration justified service and entitlement cuts by arguing that wealth redistribution disincentivized work and had engendered a culture of poverty and dependency among the poor. Inflation remained high when Reagan entered office, and the president sanctioned the continuation of the Federal Reserve’s tight monetary policy, an approach consistent with conservative economic doctrine popular at the time even if it was also the cause of recession and high rates of unemployment.11
Although conservatism had a long history in the United States, Reagan’s strident free-market antistatism had not been evident in the White House for a long time. The Republican was able to move the center of American politics to the political right by using a host of strategies. As he campaigned, he courted evangelical Christians, whose numbers had grown in recent years; espoused “family values”; boldly denounced communism; and adapted his messaging to correspond with specifically regional politics and concerns. To win supporters and erode confidence in the welfare state, he also employed the logic of Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” using racism to court white voters.
The two issues Reagan most frequently invoked to stoke racial animus were welfare and crime. He referenced both without specifically mentioning race but nonetheless communicated the belief that low-income African Americans were a major source of the nation’s and their own problems. His use of the tactic was not new. During his campaign for the presidency in 1976, Reagan repeatedly told the story of a woman in Illinois who was supposedly milking the system to the tune of $150,000. “She used 80 names, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare,” Reagan claimed.12 Although the candidate never directly said that the woman he was referring to was African American, he relied on his audience members to use popular stereotypes to fill in that detail. And he continued to invoke racialized welfare-queen rhetoric during his subsequent presidential bids as well. By intentionally associating Aid to Families with Dependent Children and other entitlement programs with Black women and exaggerating the generosity of the benefits, the length of time recipients generally received them, and the level of fraud associated with the programs, Reagan endeavored to undermine faith in the concept of wealth redistribution and grow his base among white voters.13
Reagan also had a history of manipulating fears of crime and supposed Black male criminality. In one instance in which he was discussing crime as a gubernatorial candidate in California in 1966, he contended that “every day the jungle comes a little closer.”14 And he also invoked the specter of the mythical Black male rapist, a trope that gained currency in the popular discourse to justify lynching and the resurgence of white supremacy after the Civil War. Reagan warned that the nation’s streets were becoming unsafe for “our women,” suggesting that white women were increasingly vulnerable to assaults by Black men.15 Although he largely transitioned to law-and-order and tough-on-crime rhetoric while on the campaign trail in 1980, the racial implications of his anticrime messages were clear. And even more aggressively than Nixon, he proposed solving the supposed problems by reducing funding for social welfare programs and bolstering the power of the criminal justice system.16
While the president’s positions on the welfare state and criminal justice alarmed many service providers and recipients in Baltimore, his critical stance on federal aid to cities was of particular concern to Schaefer. Reagan argued that assistance to economically distressed cities distorted market forces. Shortly after the new president assumed office, the Evening Sun noted, “It is clear that the way in which the Reagan administration will address [urban problems is] … not with direct federal grants for urban renewal, model cities, neighborhood grants and all the Great Society programs, but with maximum utilization of the private sector.”17 His laissez-faire approach to urban affairs seemed likely to make even Carter’s public-private partnership programs appear progressive by comparison. Although Carter had advocated trickle-down approaches to poverty alleviation, his administration at least targeted aid at distressed cities. In contrast, in The President’s National Urban Policy Report, the Reagan administration argued that programs such as Carter’s—and those of Nixon as well—“had the unintended effect of channeling credit to less competitive firms. The private market is more efficient than Federal program administrators in allocating dollars among alternative uses.”18 In other words, the administration proposed that distressed cities go it alone in their redevelopment efforts. “While the Federal Government concentrates on establishing the conditions for increasing rates of growth in the gross national product, State and local governments will find it is in their interests to concentrate on increasing their attractiveness to potential investors, residents and visitors,” Reagan’s urban policy report concluded.19 Accordingly, the president’s budget director David Stockman aimed to eliminate Nixon’s general revenue sharing and Community Development Block Grants and also Carter’s Urban Development Action Grants.20 Many policy makers assumed that UDAGs would be safe from Reagan budget cuts because, as one federal administrator commented, “It’s such a Republican-type program.”21 But Schaefer and other elected officials felt nervous. Ultimately, the threatened and then eventual loss of redistributed wealth from the federal government compelled elected officials in cities such as Baltimore to intensify austerity efforts and increase their reliance on race-to-the-bottom strategies such as the issuance of tax abatements, which further cost municipalities revenue needed to fund services.
As Reagan worked to cut or eliminate programs that gave cities like Baltimore a slight edge in national and international competitions for investors and credit, he also promoted global free trade. The combination did not bode well for the city. Although his administration occasionally supported protectionist measures intended to shield specific U.S. industries from foreign competition, Reagan officials more typically strove to open markets. Administration officials also used the United States’ influence in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to compel leaders in other nations to conform their economies to the emerging neoliberal world order.22 Most notably, officials in the international lending agencies began compelling compliance with a host of neoliberal policy prescriptions that became known as the Washington Consensus in negotiations with leaders from the Global South whose countries had high debt burdens. The resulting agreements, called structural adjustment programs, required nations to undertake many of the austerity measures elected officials in struggling American cities had begun adopting a decade earlier. Just as fiscal crises and debt served as the leverage banks and elected officials used to compel structural adjustment at home, so they powered efforts to reorient the global economy.
The global macroeconomic regime that Nixon, Carter, and Reagan did much to create did not bode well for job seekers in Baltimore. Deindustrialization was well under way in the city by the 1980s, but as historian Judith Stein argues, American presidents’ failure to pursue an industrial policy to protect the nation’s manufacturing interests followed by pursuit of a renewed American hegemony via financialization led them to promote wealth production over capital production.23 But while wealth production could create big profits, it was not a source of the solid, working-class jobs that capital production could create and that Baltimore needed to relieve unemployment. Macroeconomic decisions made by U.S. presidents hamstrung the nation’s industrial sector and made a manufacturing comeback in such cities as Baltimore nearly impossible. Simultaneously, the decisions began to cost the nation its welfare state and proved a dire threat to the public service providers who staffed it and the many low- income Americans who needed it. In deindustrializing Baltimore, where Black men already suffered high jobless rates due in large part to the decline in manufacturing jobs, the city’s predominantly African American and female public service providers and their clients were also about to take a big hit.
“Would You Come to Baltimore?” Schaefer Defends the Cities
Reagan’s policy achievements did not come without a fight, and Baltimore’s Mayor Schaefer helped lead the charge. Unwilling to stand idly by while the new president eliminated government programs that he considered critical to his city, Schaefer distinguished himself among urban elected officials in the nation by very publicly and repeatedly calling attention to the implications of Reaganomics for the nation’s struggling cities. In 1981, the Washington Post described Schaefer as “stalk[ing] the halls of the U.S. Capitol, pleading with one congressional committee after another to reject proposed federal cuts in a wide range of urban programs.”24 During his visits to the Capitol, Schaefer vociferously championed those Carter initiatives that had funded Baltimore’s renaissance. But he also attempted to portray the human face of urban life and the toll that cuts in social welfare spending would have on people in his city.
Distressed cities simply could not go it alone in a global, free-market economy, the mayor argued to whatever congressional committee would listen. They were home to a disproportionate share of the nation’s poor citizens and could not independently generate the revenue needed to meet local needs. He offered his own city as a case in point. During the early 1980s, Baltimore residents made up 17 percent of Maryland’s population yet housed 60 percent of the state’s residents with low incomes. By comparison, 15 percent of the state’s population—but only 5 percent of Maryland’s poor residents—lived in neighboring Baltimore County. The concentration of poor people in Baltimore meant that the city yielded little in comparison to nearby suburbs on the piggyback income tax Maryland law permitted county-level or equivalent governments to assess. During the early 1980s, Baltimore collected $99 per person from its income tax revenue while Baltimore County’s coffers grew by $179 per person. Minimal changes to property tax rates also produced significantly different revenue streams. A one-cent property-tax hike in Baltimore earned the city 68 cents per person, while the same rate increase in Baltimore County produced double the city’s return.25
Yet Baltimore had serious need for tax dollars. The city’s shrinking population and industrial base had not diminished the need for costly municipal services. Although the total number of residents had declined since the end of World War II, Baltimore’s acreage and infrastructure had not. As an older city, many of Baltimore’s houses were coated in lead paint, which was costly to remove. Lead poisoning caused learning difficulties that the city’s public school system had to address. Suburban commuters also drove up the bills for road maintenance and traffic planning. High numbers of residents living in poverty created the need for expensive municipal services as well. Homelessness, hunger, and the problem of drug addiction—which had not yet been acknowledged but was about to explode in the city following the popularization of crack cocaine, for example—gave rise to the need for public programs in less demand in wealthier jurisdictions. In other words, the city’s costly urban problems persisted, and in some cases worsened, even as its population and tax base declined.26
During his trips to Washington, Schaefer tried to describe conditions in his city to compel sympathy and federal support. It was not an easy job, and the mayor rued his need to appear hat in hand in front of multiple congressional committees. “It is not very nice for me to come over to tell you about the problems of Baltimore,” Schaefer confessed to the Joint Economic Committee. “We are, in a way, a very proud city. We’re proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish with federal help, with state help, and with our own initiative. So now I continually come over in a way on the defensive to tell you the difficulties that we’re having.”27 In keeping with his faith in commercial revitalization strategies, Schaefer was particularly concerned about the fate of UDAGs. He anticipated that Reagan would view the grants with suspicion and consider Baltimore a UDAG queen. And he was right; some in Reagan’s administration did view Baltimore as an example of liberal, federal, urban “giveaways” run amok. Richard Williamson, the assistant to the president for intergovernmental affairs, revealed an imprecise knowledge of geography but a firm commitment to Reaganomics when he complained that Schaefer had received so much money from the Carter administration that “Baltimore is about to sink into the [Chesapeake] bay.”28
Schaefer desperately feared the loss of the UDAGs because other cuts in federal spending would lead cities to rely even more heavily than they already did on private-sector growth. Clearly not a radical, Schaefer nonetheless acknowledged that Baltimore’s business community could not possibly compensate for reduced federal aid. And without UDAGs, the city’s ability to attract investment would further dim. As it was, the governments of Baltimore and Maryland already offered many potential investors considerable tax relief for setting up shop in the city. It was hard to imagine what additional incentives could be granted. Baltimore needed UDAGs to give it an edge over other jurisdictions—both domestically and globally. As the mayor asked of the members of the Joint Economic Committee, “If you were going to locate an industry, would you come to Baltimore where all the problems are or would you go to an area where there are very few problems? And that’s something that really concerns me. Where would you locate?”29
Schaefer was also alarmed that Reagan was proposing a new iteration of New Federalism. Nixon’s New Federalism had disarmed antipoverty warriors by sending federal aid to elected city officials. Reagan, however, intended to send intergovernmental resources to states rather than local governments. The mayor anticipated that his city would not do well fighting for resources in Maryland’s State House. Baltimore could effectively solve its problems if assisted with federal resources and provided them directly, he told the Joint Economic Committee. “But when the money is pulled away and when the state really doesn’t understand the plight of a city like ours and where I go down [to Annapolis] and I tell them ‘the poor,’ and the answer is, ‘They’re your poor.’ Well, they’re not my poor. I think they are everyone’s poor, and I think we must take some cognizance of the fact that the city where the poor are located need special consideration. I don’t want to preach but I get just a little concerned about what is happening in our cities.”30 Local- rather than state-level elected officials needed the authority to distribute federal funds to combat urban problems, Schaefer told the nation’s lawmakers.31
Although Schaefer most frequently defended federal funding for commercial revitalization during his D.C. trips, he also called attention to the implications for those in his city of the administration’s plan to consolidate categorical grants for social welfare concerns into block grants and cut overall spending. One plan, he explained as an example, involved merging twenty-six health-related grants into two block grants. Policy makers contended that the reconfiguration would lower administrative costs and justify a funding cut of 25 percent. Schaefer adamantly disagreed and translated the funding reductions into their human costs. Displaying charts painstakingly created by hand by his staffers, the mayor explained that in Baltimore, a 25 percent reduction in funding would result in “1,100 fewer youth, 2,900 adults and 500 drinking drivers losing access to alcohol programs; 2,500 people not being served by mental health programs; 600 pregnant adults and 600 pregnant teenagers not receiving maternal and infant care (increasing infant mortality); … fewer code enforcers for rat eradication programs; 3,600 students who won’t be immunized; and 6,000 fewer children than in the past tested for lead poisoning.”32 In other words, the mayor argued, “The assurance that a 25% reduction of federal expenditures will not hurt local delivery units is simplistic and uncritical.”33
Although his impact on federal policy remained to be seen, back in Baltimore, Schaefer’s battles against Reagan’s budget axe won him tremendous accolades. Even those who regarded the mayor’s local policy priorities with suspicion and considered him an unreliable ally in the fight for racial justice lent their praise. John B. Ferron, the African American director of the city’s Community Relations Commission, who had long been critical of the mayor’s tepid commitment to affirmative action, was among those who penned cards or letters of thanks. “Though we have occasionally disagreed on some matters in the past … my primary purpose for writing, Mr. Mayor, is to share with you my intensified respect and admiration for you as the top executive in the City of Baltimore … especially in view of the fact that you appear to be the one person on the national level who has the courage to challenge the new order of priorities set by the National Administration.”34 Additional fan mail piled up at city hall from grateful residents proud that their quirky mayor had gone to bat for Baltimore and the nation’s other struggling cities.35
“A Revolving Door for Impoverished People”: The Liberal Response to Reaganomics
While Schaefer distinguished himself among mayors with his public opposition to the administration’s proposals, seasoned activists also protested the new president’s agenda. Many of the organizations that took the lead in combating Reaganomics had also protested Nixon’s New Federalism and pressed Carter to prioritize the battle against unemployment over concerns with inflation. The leadership of the National Urban League was especially vocal among the civil rights advocates who challenged the new president. Organized labor mounted a resistance, in which those at the helm of AFSCME played a major role. Reagan’s effort to redefine the role of government threatened both the union’s members and the vital public services they provided. And representatives from feminist and women’s organizations also protested much of the president’s agenda and warned of its many dire implications for women.
Vernon Jordan, the president of the NUL, and other officials from his organization combated Reaganomics in both congressional testimony and appeals to the general public. Decades of federal policies had contributed significantly to undermining the economic viability of the nation’s older cities, Jordan repeatedly argued. Most significantly, postwar government housing programs and incentive policies that enhanced the commercial viability and competitiveness of suburban and Sunbelt regions had promoted the outmigration of people and jobs from cities. Fiercely policed residential segregation in combination with employment discrimination prevented African Americans from following the jobs. Given the federal government’s role in subsidizing economic development in the Sunbelt, Reagan’s hands-off approach to the rust belt struck NUL leaders as particularly duplicitous.36 Moreover, a bipartisan report by the Joint Economic Committee predicted that the president’s first budget request was likely to stimulate business activity in areas already experiencing growth. The report’s authors explained, “Tax proposals to promote investment will generally reinforce current regional and urban growth trends, since they, on balance, favor new investment over investment in older structures.”37 Despite his free-market rhetoric, in other words, the president’s economic policies were inherently geographically biased and detrimental to the areas in which many African Americans were concentrated, NUL officials protested.38
Making matters worse, according to leaders of the NUL, the Reagan administration proposed cutting social welfare programs and entitlements that helped to alleviate the urban poverty that the federal government’s Sunbelt bias had played a role in creating. During the 1960s, Great Society initiatives had relieved poverty in American cities. As a result, even as the weight of federal largesse had benefited the Sunbelt, the government had at least sent struggling cities antipoverty funds—and the results had been impressive, according to Maudine Cooper, the vice president of the NUL. “Two-thirds of the Black underclass were lifted from poverty between 1967 and 1975, primarily as a result of government programs,” she argued.39 Reductions in federal spending on the programs, in combination with federal policies that continued to disadvantage the rust belt, spelled disaster for African Americans in the nation’s distressed cities, NUL officials warned. “Present federal efforts may construct a revolving door for impoverished people seeking access to this nation’s economic mainstream,” Cooper cautioned.40
The new president’s method for achieving reductions in federal funding for social welfare programs also alarmed the NUL leadership. As Schaefer also mentioned in his testimony, Reagan’s New Federalism differed from Nixon’s in two important ways. First, the new president argued that consolidating categorical grants into block grants justified significant spending reductions because administrative costs would be reduced. Second, while Congress and other pressure groups had compelled Nixon to send the bulk of his repackaged intergovernmental aid to localities, Reagan intended to direct federal resources to state governments. The NUL condemned the revival of states’ rights and protested funding formulas that transferred federal revenue to the state rather than the local level.41 As an alternative to Reagan’s agenda, NUL leaders reprised their demands from the Carter years. “The only way, and it cannot be stressed too strongly—the only way—to limit federal social programs is to implement full employment with jobs for all who want to work,” Jordan urged. “To suppose that simply unshackling the private sector is going to create jobs for all is a myth. The federal government will still have to shape its tax and regulatory policies in a way that encourages job creation where it is most needed, and not, as at present, in a way that drains jobs from our industrial heartlands to other regions or other countries.”42
AFSCME leaders offered an equally biting critique of the president’s agenda. They denounced Reaganomics as a sham predicated on demeaning stereotypes of public service providers and recipients that was intended to shift money and power up the economic ladder. Following the 1980 election, they announced “a multi-pronged campaign to save public services and jobs from President Reagan’s budgetary butcher knife.”43 The union was an important organizer of Solidarity Day, a march on Washington, DC, in September 1981 to oppose Reagan’s agenda and to protest his recent decision to fire striking unionized federal employees. The march attracted at least two hundred thousand and possibly as many as half a million protesters. The AFL-CIO, of which AFSCME was a member, was the major force behind the march, which attracted the endorsement and participation of civil rights, feminist, and multiple other groups.44 AFSCME also sent lobbyists to visit Congress members, participated in coalitions fighting Reagan’s agenda, and rallied members to vigorously protest the new president’s policies. In addition, AFSCME leaders voiced their concerns about the perils of Reaganomics in congressional testimony, speeches, television interviews, and union-produced films. Rather than an entity that served the people, AFSCME secretary-treasurer William Lucy warned, the president’s backers would turn the government into a power protecting the privileges of elites. Jerry Wurf, the union’s president until his untimely death in December 1981, argued that “corporate America, the new masters of the federal government,” was demanding reductions in spending on social programs to reduce its tax burden.45 Wurf also warned, however, that “tax breaks for the rich do little to create jobs. The money just ends up in the pockets of the wealthy like it always has in the past.”46
Public-sector workers and low-income service recipients were among the groups that would pay the highest price for the reassertion of corporate power, AFSCME leaders asserted. “You don’t need a calculator to figure out why the federal budget is so important to AFSCME members. A federal budget that cuts aid to state and local governments spells disaster for us and public services everywhere,” AFSCME’s assistant public policy director Marcia Caprio explained.47 Since the 1970s, AFSCME officials had been attempting to make the case that the cause of its members and the well-being of service recipients were inextricable. They pressed the point during the 1980s and also joined feminist leaders in identifying the gendered implications for women of Reaganomics. As Lucy explained, “Many [women] would lose their jobs and others on unemployment and welfare programs would see their already meager benefits slashed or wiped out.”48 Lucy was also concerned about the prospects of low-income women who depended on government services and worked government-subsidized jobs. Proposed cuts to spending on CETA, which provided federal funds for jobs and job training, would disproportionately impact women, many of whom were heads of households. AFSCME certainly had been a reluctant supporter of CETA. Nevertheless, union officials could empathize that CETA cuts, along with reductions of spending on day-care programs, “[spelled] disaster for thousands of women who for a brief time could see a glimmer of hope.”49
Union officials also worried that the public-sector workers most likely to lose their jobs were often staunch advocates for the poor. In an article in the Public Employee, AFSCME’s monthly newspaper, the union’s staff challenged Reagan’s assertion that he championed “family values.” “In our opinion, the people really supporting the family have been the workers—especially AFSMCE members—who see the family firsthand: AFSCME workers who process unemployment forms, who provide day care, who counsel the distressed and nurse the ill. AFSMCE members who, on their own, collect food for the hungry, contribute money for heating bills, make a home for neglected and abused children, give of their time without making cruel judgments,” the paper’s staff countered.50 In 1982, the union recommended Congress adopt a stimulus plan to jump-start the economy. The union advocated increased government spending on public health, transportation, and employment and training to create jobs and combat poverty. And they remained insistent that wealthy Americans should be taxed to foot the cost of the programs they proposed.51
The leaders of feminist organizations were also among those who staunchly challenged Reagan’s proposed policies. The National Organization for Women was one of the sponsoring organizations of Solidarity Day, and the organization’s president, Eleanor Smeal, joined nationally prominent leaders from the labor and civil rights movements in leading the historic march and addressing participants from the platform at the event’s concluding rally. Smeal’s inclusion among Solidarity Day’s top leaders shows the gains feminists had made in integrating some women’s issues into the national liberal agenda. That success did not necessarily translate into winning policy outcomes to their liking during the Reagan years, however.
The increasing feminization of poverty was an issue of considerable concern to many leaders of women’s organizations during the 1980s, and they repeatedly called attention to the role Reaganomics played in exacerbating women’s economic insecurity. In 1981, representatives from a broad range of organizations formed the Coalition on Women and the Budget to assess the implications for women of Reagan’s proposals. In their 1984 report, which was endorsed by close to eighty organizations, they argued the president had compelled “inequality of sacrifice” from the American people.52 Women suffered disproportionately as a result of the president’s budget cuts, they charged. Reductions in federal spending on AFDC; Food Stamps; the Women, Infants and Children program; legal services; child nutrition; and housing were particularly devastating, and the coalition members raised the alarm that additional proposed cuts would again fall disproportionately on women. In general, national feminist leaders were less consistent than those at the helm of public-sector labor unions at identifying federal spending cuts as a source of job insecurity for women, who were overrepresented in government employment. The Coalition on Women and the Budget, which included both AFSCME and the advocacy group Federally Employed Women, did note, however, the toll Reaganomics had taken on women in the federal workforce and warned that additional budget cuts imperiled the jobs and security of many others.53
In opposition to Reaganomics, feminist leaders expressed a deep commitment to an activist and interventionist federal government, which they felt was indispensable in the quest for gender equality. Ultimately, however, many continued to insist that access to fairly remunerated paid employment was women’s best option for economic independence, and a defense of the critical economic importance of women’s unpaid caretaking work did not figure prominently on their agenda. Thus, during the Reagan years, as feminists firmly advocated on behalf of the social safety net and the increased provision of social services, they pressed even more forcefully for measures that would improve women’s status in the labor market. They called for efforts to reduce the wage gap between men and women, demanded job-training programs, argued in favor of affirmative action and equal opportunity, advocated for increased access to child care, and supported additional programs that accommodated working women’s child-rearing roles. Feminist leaders also denounced the stereotyping of poor women as “welfare queens” and advocated for improvement of the AFDC program.54
“We Are Going to Hurt and Hurt Badly”: Workers in Baltimore Protest Government Cuts
As national civil rights, labor, and feminist leaders protested Reaganomics in Washington, government service providers and their unions in Baltimore mounted their own resistance. Some in municipal agencies tried to revive the solidarity with city residents with low incomes that had existed in the 1960s and early 1970s but that had weakened considerably during a long decade of austerity, budget cuts, and dashed expectations. City workers also joined forces with civic and religious organizations and attempted to partner as well with those in the local nonprofit social services sector, which was also often dependent on government funds. Public-sector workers protested Reaganomics to defend their own jobs and protect the economic security of their families. In Baltimore’s troubled labor market, the government workforce remained a critically important source of stable employment and had become a vital niche for African Americans and Black women in particular. But the workers’ fight was not only self-serving. Their defenses of their agencies and the services they provided reflected a deep commitment to a set of principles about fairness, racial and economic justice, and women’s rights that had been evident in various forms since the 1960s.
Protests during the Reagan years were not as well choreographed, ambitious, or optimistic as the spirited battles of the 1960s and early 1970s had been; the reassertion of corporate power over public policy, the shift of the nation’s political discourse to the right, and Schaefer’s strategic appointment of accommodating allies to key leadership positions had taken their toll. Nevertheless, in response to Reaganomics, service workers in many city agencies pulled out tattered playbooks that had provided many of the protest strategies used earlier, and public-sector unions used their institutional power to support their members and defend the social safety net. The fights over Reaganomics in Baltimore, although grounded in local and national issues, were iterations of the larger fights emerging globally over the legitimacy of neoliberalism and the toll it was taking on the poor. And women, among them many public services providers and recipients, were prominent in the battles.
To rally service recipients and others to the cause of protecting the welfare state, service providers decoded the language the Reagan administration used to describe its agenda. The workers worried that Reagan’s talk of New Federalism and bureaucratic waste obscured in jargon the president’s actual intention to cut programs that helped poor people. The Reagan administration was attempting to gut the welfare state, officials from local- and state-level human-services departments explained. Staffers at the Urban Services Agency, the city’s antipoverty agency, created a fact sheet that they distributed to residents that spelled out the implications of New Federalism for familiar War on Poverty programs: “[The] Reagan administration will end 40 programs, including the Community Services Administration which funds CAA, the Legal Services Corporation which funds Legal Aid, and low-Income Energy assistance which provides fuel assistance. They will take funds proposed for these and reduce the total by 20–25% and send this amount to the states in the form of block grants,” the staffers warned.55 Meanwhile, Ruth Massinga, the African American director of the city’s Department of Social Services, which was being renamed the Department of Human Resources, protested as false the administration’s assertion that budget reductions would not lead to service losses. “It is Reagan mythology that 25 percent [of costs] is due to administrative overhead. None of us have administrative fat. It makes a pretty speech, but in reality, we are going to hurt and hurt badly,” she argued.56
State-level officials in human-services agencies also joined the battle. “This is not only an economic but an ideological assault on every social welfare program in the state,” argued Kalman R. Hettleman, Maryland’s secretary of human resources.57 Dr. Charles R. Buck Jr., Maryland’s secretary of the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, agreed. He described the contention that block grants would increase state-level control over programming and resources as “in many ways … a sham.”58 Instead, he asserted, “Under the guise of flexibility, they are cutting services to people who really need them giving us [on the state level] the responsibility of saying no to these people.” Hettleman concurred, adding that Reagan’s “so-called block grants” were “illdisguised reductions in funding.”59
Local- and state-level public-sector union officials, especially those affiliated with AFSCME, also vociferously critiqued the president’s agenda. Not surprisingly, AFSCME officials repeated for local audiences and media outlets many of the same talking points asserted by national-level leaders. Ernie Crofoot, the executive director of AFSCME Council 67, asserted his union’s concern that the nation’s wealthiest were not paying their fair share in taxes. “Reagan makes certain that his actions benefit business and industry while pulling ever more from the pockets and purses of the taxpayers. Pass the buck back to business … where it belongs,” he argued.60 Meanwhile, Raymond Clarke, the president of AFSCME Local 44, was stoically unapologetic in his defense of gains his union had won for low-wage workers.61 Laura Moseley, an African American eligibility supervisor in the income maintenance program of the Department of Human Resources and an elected official in AFSCME, reiterated the point that social service providers were some of the nation’s fiercest defenders of the welfare state because they saw firsthand the devastating consequences of economic injustice. “These people need money to keep a roof over their heads, food in their stomachs, and clothes on their backs—just the bare necessities to keep body and soul together,” she worried.62 In response to Reaganomics, public-sector workers in the city mounted a fierce defense of their members, their members’ clients, and the vital public services the government provided.
Meanwhile, public service providers and their allies took action independently of their unions. Replicating a strategy often used during the heyday of the civil rights movement, they held a mass meeting to plan a course of action. Ultimately, the group adopted a two-pronged strategy. They agreed to engage in direct protest to oppose funding reductions. Simultaneously, they pledged to work together to coordinate service delivery in order to mitigate the effects of the president’s imminent budget cuts on those most in need. If they planned carefully, they hoped, they could attempt to ensure that services cut in one agency remained available at others.63
As part of their direct-action campaigns, public-sector workers attempted to build coalitions. Some, including Rachel Wohl of USA and AFSCME member Linda Thompson, participated in the local planning committee for Solidarity Day. The organizers wanted to send the president a clear message. “The key point of this march is to show Reagan that he does not have a mandate to cut social programs,” Thompson explained.64 Members of the committee held dozens of meetings with community groups and won endorsements of the march from many area churches and organizations, including the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance and the Baltimore NAACP.65 African Americans often did not need much convincing to protest the president’s agenda. As local NAACP official George Bunton explained, “Black people were against Reagan from the beginning, but now whites are waking up.”66 AFSCME officials in and around the city as well as other representatives of organized labor also played important roles in local planning efforts for the national march. And many city workers and their allies were among the thousands from the Baltimore area who helped to fill the hundreds of buses hired to transport protesters to the demonstration. Moreover, following the Washington, DC, event, AFSCME leaders in Maryland sponsored a second Solidarity Day—this time in Annapolis—to pressure state-level officials to do what they could to mitigate federal budget cuts.67 In addition to planning and participating in demonstrations, public service providers and their allies also met with their congressional representatives to express their concerns, wrote angry letters to state and federal lawmakers, testified in defense of federal welfare spending, implored state officials for relief, continued to politicize and work in conjunction with service recipients, and joined local, state, and national campaigns against Reagan’s policies.68
At the same time, service providers took steps to help soften the blow budget cuts would have on the residents they served. Following changes in the eligibility requirements for federal entitlement programs, staff members at the Department of Human Resources created a checklist for AFDC recipients to use to determine if they would be impacted by cuts and worked with them to develop survival strategies. Meanwhile, as the author of an article in the newsletter of the Department of Human Resources explained in 1981, “Cuts of this magnitude will require radical changes in the service delivery system.”69 As some had earlier pledged, public and private service providers worked cooperatively. By considering the state’s entire landscape of social services, public service providers attempted to limit service reductions in their agencies to those programs that might be available elsewhere from charities and other nonprofit organizations.70 Ultimately, however, they could not fully compensate for the effects of the cuts, and service elimination proved inevitable. In 1981, for example, Department of Human Resources administrators realized that their commitment to maintaining programming for teenage mothers meant that services for the elderly would take a big hit. They hoped that volunteer organizations and the Office on the Aging would be able to compensate, but they could not be sure. At the same time, to make the best use of remaining resources, Massinga, the director of Baltimore’s welfare services, recycled a strategy from the community-participation days. She brought her agency’s clients into decision-making conversations. Unlike during the 1960s, however, in the Reagan era, discussions involved not what antipoverty efforts to pursue but instead which to eliminate.71
National- and local-level protest against Reaganomics met with some success. Opposition to Reagan’s agenda emboldened congressional Democrats to act as a restraint against the president’s budget axe when they could. And the president himself proved willing to sacrifice ideology for pragmatism in some instances. Nevertheless, Reagan successfully reoriented the federal government away from midcentury liberal priorities. Tax cuts in 1981 and 1986 collectively reduced the highest U.S. income tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent, and the president also reduced the level of funds the government redistributed to poor individuals and the distressed cities where many of them lived, thereby shifting wealth up the economic ladder. The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981 eliminated four hundred thousand from the AFDC rolls and reduced the benefits of hundreds of thousands of other recipients largely by changing eligibility requirements. Ultimately, spending on AFDC was cut by $1 billion, or 12 percent. Federal spending on the Food Stamp Program dropped by 13 percent, and administration officials cut child-care services even as they attempted to compel low-income women to seek paid employment. Ultimately, few social welfare programs were spared.72
Struggling cities fared poorly as well. During the Reagan years, intergovernmental aid fell by 38 percent. In 1982, Reagan eliminated more than a hundred categorical grants by combining close to sixty programs into nine block grants and cutting others entirely. The administration also reduced federal oversight over the use of the funds and sent intergovernmental aid to state-level rather than municipal-level officials. Reagan reduced targeted aid to cities as well, and programs on which Baltimore had come to depend took a particular hit. The administration cut funding for CDBGs by 20 percent; in 1986, it discontinued GRS; and in 1988, the administration eliminated the UDAG program. Overall, just between 1981 and 1984, federal aid to cities fell by almost 20 percent, and by 1989, it had dropped by an additional 14 percent.73 During the 1980s, the federal government largely abandoned struggling cities in the increasingly competitive global economy.
As had been the case during the Nixon and Carter years, one group of government workers did see the economic fortunes of their agencies brighten. Federal spending on anticrime measures, and specifically on drug-related crime enforcement, increased significantly, a boon to those in the fields of law enforcement and criminal justice, although not necessarily always for public-sector workers given the increasingly popular practice of outsourcing. In 1982, Reagan announced that he was launching a War on Drugs. Funding for antidrug initiatives carried out by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Defense, and the Drug Enforcement Agency mushroomed during the years that followed. At the same time, funding for drug-use prevention and rehabilitation plummeted. Between 1981 and 1984, the administration reduced the budget of the National Institute on Drug Abuse from $274 million to $57 million, and the Department of Education lost $11 million in antidrug funds.74 The War on Drugs was to be fought by the staffs of criminal-justice rather than human-services agencies. The president launched his war on drugs at a time when public concern about drug use was actually quite low and a few years before the use of crack cocaine became an urgent crisis in many of the nation’s cities, including Baltimore. Reagan officials soon seized on the rising use of crack, however, to justify the War on Drugs and to press for additional punitive legislation, such as the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. The law included mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines, which restricted the ability of judges to consider extenuating circumstances in drug cases. It also penalized crack cocaine–related offenses far more harshly than those involving powder cocaine, the form of the narcotic typically favored by whites.75
Reagan contracted spending on welfare, rehabilitation, and other human services and simultaneously eliminated or reduced federal grants for urban programs that distressed cities used to attract investors and potential taxpayers. He thus pulled the rug out from under the feet of Baltimore residents with low incomes and made it more difficult for the city to lure new businesses and jobs. Meanwhile, he dramatically increased federal support for law enforcement and instituted racially biased antidrug policies. Not surprisingly, in Baltimore, the results were devastating job losses in the public sector, worsening poverty rates in the city’s already poor neighborhoods, and the tragedy of the crisis of mass incarceration. As Baltimore’s army of predominantly Black and female social service providers had been arguing since Reagan won the election, the implications of his policies for their city were catastrophic.