Much of contemporary discourse surrounding family support obligations has long centered on parents’ financial contributions to their minor children. “Deadbeat Dads” who failed to meet parental support obligations, and whose children required public assistance, were central targets in the 1996 welfare reforms, the culmination of years of policies directed at non-supporting parents. Largely absent in these debates was the responsibility of other family members – adult children, grandparents, siblings, and grandchildren – to support family members in need. Known as responsible relative or filial responsibility laws, such requirements have a long history in American social policy dating to colonial America. In 2016, twenty-nine states still had laws requiring adult children to support needy parents, although enforcement of such obligations had waned a generation earlier.Footnote ¹

In the face of rising health-care costs, third-party providers, such as nursing homes, are using laws requiring relative support to recover unpaid bills. In 2017, Elnora Thomas of Florida and her sister were sued by her mother’s nursing home for unpaid bills totaling $50,000. The suit threatened to place a lien on Thomas’ home, her only major asset. Attorneys helped her mother qualify for Medicaid to pay for the nursing home, and the suit was dropped.Footnote ² Two years later, fifty lawsuits were filed by long-term care facilities in Pennsylvania seeking payment from adult children for parents’ medical bills. John Pittas was the target of one such lawsuit. In 2007, Pittas’ mother was seriously injured in a car accident and received nursing home care for six months while she recovered. When able, she returned to Greece, and the nursing home sued her son for the $92,000 she owed for care. The Pennsylvania Superior Court ruled in 2012 that, under the state’s filial responsibility laws, Pittas was legally responsible for the unpaid balance. He had an annual net income of $85,000, according to the court decision.Footnote ³ Three siblings in North Dakota were sued by their father’s nursing home for $45,000 in unpaid bills after his death. Their experience prompted the North Dakota legislature to pass a law changing the filial responsibility law to prevent such cases.Footnote ⁴

Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and California are among the states turning to filial responsible laws to address the high medical costs the elderly often face in their later years. Escalating costs of nursing home care are prompting providers to use the laws to enforce the legal obligation of adult children to contribute to their parents’ medical care. The Pennsylvania legislature revitalized its law in 2005 to enable nursing homes to sue family members for unpaid bills under filial responsibility statutes.Footnote ⁵ One legal scholar calls these laws “America’s best kept secret,” and some argue that enforcing such responsibility will lessen the burden of medical costs on Medicaid and encourage individuals to better plan for health-care costs with long-term care insurance.Footnote ⁶

Demographic changes are fueling the problem of rising health-care costs for older Americans – and who will pay for that care. Elderly Americans’ share of the nation’s population increased from 35 million in 2000 to 52 million in 2018. Senior citizens – those aged sixty-five or older – were 12.4 percent of the nation’s population in 2000, rising to 16 percent in 2020.Footnote ⁷ Health-care spending continues to increase, accounting for 19.7 percent of the Gross Domestic Product in 2020 at $4.1 trillion. Medicare spending that year totaled $829.5 billion, 20 percent of all health-care expenditures. Medicaid spending, up 9.2 percent, totaled $671.2 billion, 16 percent of total health-care expenditures. Prescription drug costs were $384.4 billion. Spending for Medicare and Medicaid accounts for 36 percent of the nation’s health-care costs, and the aged are central to both programs.Footnote ⁸ A growing elderly population indicates that these trends will continue.

Social security, including Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI), are critical sources of income for aged Americans, and scholars agree that these programs have provided some measure of economic security and reduced poverty among the aged.Footnote ⁹ Poverty rates among senior citizens were 35.2 percent in 1959, higher than the rates for both children (27.3 percent) and adults younger than sixty-five (17 percent). In 2021, 5.8 million senior citizens (10.3 percent) lived in poverty using the official poverty measure, while 6 million (10.7 percent) were categorized in poverty under the supplemental poverty measure, which includes consideration of both cash and noncash government benefits.Footnote ¹⁰ Incomes remain low for many senior citizens: nearly 15 million Americans over sixty-five (30.4 percent) lived on incomes less than 200 percent of the official poverty measure in 2016. Poverty rates among the elderly were even higher for women and people of color; under the supplemental poverty measure 16.2 percent of women versus 12.5 percent of men and nearly a quarter of all people of color over sixty-five compared to about 10 percent of all elderly white adults lived in poverty.Footnote ¹¹ These statistics all point to gaps in financial resources for aging Americans. The questions raised include where additional resources for aging Americans might be found, and who should shoulder the responsibility to ensure that older Americans have the economic security they need.

Historically parent dependency policies were one answer to these questions. Parent dependency policies date to the colonial era and expanded across the policy spectrum in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These policies sought either to require or encourage the support of aging parents by adult children; they were designed to alleviate poverty among the aged while minimizing dependence on public funds. I define dependent parents as aged Americans who had too few financial resources to meet their needs and thus relied not only on public benefits but also on the willingness of family, often adult children, to contribute to their support. Adult children were defined as individuals over the age of eighteen who had the financial means to provide support. Parent dependency policies, as I term them, prioritized support by family members via responsible relative laws before needy parents turned to public assistance; by the mid-twentieth century, the scope of these policies expanded to include survivor benefits and federal tax incentives. Parent dependency policies transcended the different tracks of the American welfare state – means-tested, contributory, and tax expenditures – and at times included features of both means-tested and contributory programs.

This book analyzes the history of parent dependency policies across the spectrum of American social policy throughout the twentieth century, particularly after the Social Security Act of 1935: responsible relative laws in Old Age Assistance (OAA); survivor benefits in the Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) program and the US military provided to parents as a result of adult children’s payroll contributions or military service; and federal tax expenditures available to adult children providing a specific level of support to aging parents. Parent dependency policies varied in their definition of dependency and how dependency was measured. The programs available to the elderly were shaped by race, gender, and citizenship, replicating exclusions found in these programs more widely. I argue that consideration of parent dependency policies prompts a reevaluation of the effects the Social Security Act’s provisions on family obligations and the relationship of the family to state and federal governments. Instead of entirely replacing family support, some policies either required or encouraged family members to provide support. Measures of dependency often inhibited aging Americans’ access to benefits they sorely needed, focusing instead on ensuring that they were, in fact, dependent and that other family resources were not available.

Parent Dependency Policies

Parent dependency policies are found in numerous areas of America’s “divided welfare state” or what Jacob Hacker terms “America’s unique ‘welfare regime’.”Footnote ¹² My focus is on public benefits, or those available via government-enacted programs, rather than benefits earned from private employment. This book addresses those parents who did not have private retirement benefits earned through employment or a family member’s employment, or did not have enough to provide for their needs or their spouses’ needs as they aged. The range of programs and services for aged Americans with financial need is significant, and some – such as Meals on Wheels – reduce the burden on other family members. An analysis of all programs serving the aged with financial need is beyond the scope of this study. This book analyzes three parent dependency policies through the lens of adult children’s responsibility to support. The book also considers the families of aging parents, particularly their adult children, who helped to fill those financial gaps, either voluntarily or involuntarily. Hearing the voices of those who needed the aid, those who sought to provide it or faced intense scrutiny in the determination of potential support, or who advocated for more generous public benefits is a key goal of this project.

The relationship between OAA and OASI under the Social Security Act of 1935 is critical in the analysis of parent dependency; the two programs developed in tandem and the expansion of OASI directly affected the numbers of elderly receiving OAA.Footnote ¹³ The 1935 Social Security Act – and its subsequent amendments – is fundamental to discussions of economic assistance and security (or insecurity) for older Americans. OASI and OAA were intended to address economic security for the elderly via both social insurance and public assistance. The Social Security Act reinforced the two-track system of benefits in America’s federal welfare policy – contributory in OASI and means-tested in the public assistance programs (OAA, Aid to the Blind and Aid to Dependent Children). OASI was a contributory program funded in part by payroll taxes from both employees and employers; the goal was to provide retired workers, at the age of sixty-five, with a monthly benefit based on their earnings and contributions. Under the 1939 amendments, widows, children, and dependent parents were eligible for survivor benefits based on the earnings of the deceased worker, and the program was renamed OASI.Footnote ¹⁴ OAA, funded by general tax revenues, targeted Americans over sixty-five who were ineligible for OASI, or whose OASI benefits and other income were insufficient for their basic needs.Footnote ¹⁵

Taxation links all three policies but funds the policies via different tax mechanisms. Architects of the Social Security Act framed OASI as a contributory program – a type of insurance premium that would be funded by contributions from workers, in contrast to OAA which had no dedicated tax revenue. The long-term goal, several scholars argue, was to expand OASI to more workers and to make public assistance unnecessary. Molly Michelmore argues that OASI was positioned in contrast to public assistance in its design and cost, in part to address taxpayer resistance to the program: “The [Roosevelt] administration’s reliance on the payroll tax to finance its most significant welfare policy initiatives – and its commitment to the annuity fiction – successfully muted taxpayer resistance to these programs and to the dollars used to fund them by distinguishing between social insurances premiums and the taxes that financed other forms of public welfare.”Footnote ¹⁶ In the process such arguments “called into question the legitimacy of other forms of public spending,” including public assistance.Footnote ¹⁷ Michael Brown argues that taxation is central to the development of social policy, as debates over taxation and spending determine social policy choices: “These political leaders seeking to build welfare states face conflicting demands for economic stabilization and growth (capital accumulation), on the one hand, and for creation of social rights and economic security, on the other.”Footnote ¹⁸ Support for social policies hinges on who benefits, or is believed to benefit, from those policies. Expansion of OASI eligibility meant that most Americans were covered by the 1960s. That trend, in conjunction with increases in benefits, meant OASI had far more support than means-tested programs such as OAA, ADC, and AB by the post-World War II era.Footnote ¹⁹

Tax policymakers, and priorities among those crafting tax policy, played a significant role in which programs expanded and which did not. Termed the “tax community” by Julian Zelizer, the group included legislators, such as Wilbur Mills, chair of the House Ways and Means Committee from 1958 to 1975, Ways and Means committee members, Department of Treasury officials, academics, and Congressional staff members.Footnote ²⁰ The Ways and Means Committee was a powerful force in parent dependency programs as it had jurisdiction over the social security programs, including public assistance and OASI, and wider tax policy. By the early 1970s the committee members “would be responsible for 40 percent of federal spending.”Footnote ²¹ Zelizer identifies three different factions in this policy community: “Social Security, Growth Manipulation, and Tax Reform.” The first is most relevant to OASI and public assistance, and support for the former often came at the expense of public assistance programs throughout the post-World War II era. The other two categories relate to the larger goals of taxation, and to the final policy analyzed in the book – federal tax benefits directed at adult children who provided significant support for aging parents. Tax expenditures can be either tax credits, taken directly off the federal taxes owed, or a tax deduction, which reduces the taxpayer’s gross income. Zelizer argues that tax expenditures, directed at specific individuals and groups, became key targets in tax reform efforts in the 1950s and 1960s, as taxation as a tool of economic growth gained traction within the tax community.Footnote ²² Patricia Strach argues that tax expenditures were part of a shift in tax policy to include family in tax administration. Her analysis focuses on higher education tax benefits, often gained via a parent or grandparent taxpayer on behalf of their child or grandchild, but her argument also applies to taxpayers seeking dependency credits for their support of aging parents. Strach argues that family played an increasing role in tax policy and administration after World War II.Footnote ²³ Gender and marriage also played critical roles in tax policy, via both survivor benefits under OASI and tax expenditures for dependent parents. As Brown argues, analysis of policies that transcend different areas of American social policy requires attention to taxation and spending to understand their design and implementation. Opposition to taxation, concerns about protecting “the taxpayer,” and claims for benefits by taxpayers are key themes in this book’s analysis of the three policies.

Support for and opposition to the expansion of both OASI and OAA were bound with who benefited – or was perceived to benefit – from the two programs; such beliefs and perceptions fostered racial and gender inequities in social policy that persist to this day. As the demographics of public recipients shifted over the twentieth century, support for the programs, particularly ADC (later Aid to Families with Dependent Children), waned and became intertwined with racist stereotypes. This fueled opposition to increased funding for public assistance.Footnote ²⁴ Exclusionary practices grounded in racism and sexism were central to the demographics of the OAI program and other programs under the Social Security Act. OAI benefits did not begin until 1940, even with the 1939 amendments creating survivors benefits under the renamed OASI. Occupational exclusions also limited access; scholars estimate that initial coverage provided benefits for about half of all workers, or 26 million people. Domestic and agricultural workers were excluded, as well as public employees and those employed by nonprofits. These exclusions eliminated coverage for 65 percent of all black workers, 60 percent of all women, and 85 percent of black women. Latino and Asian workers also were largely excluded from the program. Occupational exclusions prevented nearly half of all workers from contributing to or drawing payments from the system in its first decades, resulting in long-term effects on asset and wealth accumulation among those groups.Footnote ²⁵ The limitations of OAI coverage relegated many people of color and women to OAA when they could no longer work, as they were not eligible for social insurance benefits under the Social Security Administration (SSA) until the 1950s.Footnote ²⁶

In the first decades of the SSA, OAA was the major program addressing the elderly poor, and the number of OAA recipients outpaced OASI beneficiaries until the 1950s.Footnote ²⁷ Because of the limited benefits under OASI, some elderly received both OAA and OASI, speaking further to the interconnected nature of the two programs. In 1949, the average OASI benefit was $25, while the average OAA grant was $42 ($308 and $518 in 2022 dollars, respectively).Footnote ²⁸ Recipients of OAA numbered 1.738 million in September 1938, or about 21.6 percent of all Americans over age sixty-five.Footnote ²⁹ In 1954, more than half of all elderly were not eligible for OASI, and most relied at least in part on OAA.Footnote ³⁰ Amendments in 1950, 1954, and 1956 greatly expanded coverage of OASI but did not eliminate the need for OAA. In 1960, OASI recipients outnumbered OAA recipients four to one, but 2.4 million aged still relied on OAA for support.Footnote ³¹ OASI benefits were also limited, and some beneficiaries relied either on other sources of income or received OAA as well as their social insurance benefits. A 1953 national survey by the Bureau of Public Assistance found that 17 percent of OAA recipients also received OASI benefits.Footnote ³² That percentage dropped to 6.7 by 1960, but the number of recipients receiving both remained significant: 675,000 aged received both OAA and OASDI in 1960.Footnote ³³ The trend continued; more than two-thirds (69 percent) of those added to the OAA program in mid-1964 to mid-1965 also received OASI. Authors attribute this trend to expansion of those covered, and more relaxed regulations in eligibility for insured status. That trend also indicates that social insurance benefits were low enough to make many elderly receiving OASI benefits still eligible for public assistance thirty years after the Social Security Act was enacted, and just seven years before the SSI program was created.Footnote ³⁴

Scholars argue that the Social Security Act of 1935, which brought public assistance and social insurance programs into federal American social policy, profoundly affected family relations and responsibility. In this view, the SSA was part of an ongoing trend of shifting responsibilities once held by the family to the state. It reshaped the role of the federal government and families in promoting the security of Americans by instituting a national social insurance program, albeit on a limited scale in the first decades, and brought federal funds into the categorical public assistance programs, including OAA, ADC, and AB. OAI, and subsequently OASI, required citizens to save for their retirement, provided the elderly with income that enabled many to live independently, and reduced the burden of care on their children. Carole Haber and Brian Gratton argue that social insurance reshaped the economic relationships within families and “made the aged the children of the state.”Footnote ³⁵ Andrew Achenbaum argues that the public assistance and social insurance programs provided more resources for the middle-aged by reducing the need to support their aging parents: OAA and OASI “were thus inspired by a genuine (and imaginative) concern for addressing the vicissitudes of old age in the context of the family and the passage of generations.”Footnote ³⁶ Other scholars argue that programs such as social insurance and Medicare (enacted in 1965) were critical for aging Americans, but “their adult children benefit almost as much. The financial burden of parent care has been lifted from their backs.”Footnote ³⁷ In this view, the Social Security Act enabled adult children to shift resources from supporting elderly parents to addressing the economic needs of their own children.Footnote ³⁸

I argue that consideration of parent dependency policies complicates this assessment. These policies were predicated on specific notions of family obligations and demonstrate how policymakers and those administering the programs viewed family as a means to secure specific policy goals – such as support for an aging parent.Footnote ³⁹ As discussed earlier, neither OAA nor OASI was enough for full support for many aged Americans, who looked elsewhere, including family, to fill the gaps. Policies either regulating or rewarding family support sought to gain economic resources for elderly in need by tapping into the resources of adult children. State-level responsible relative laws sought to enforce support obligations on children whose parents applied for public assistance programs, particularly OAA. Proponents of these laws believed that the first line of support for people in need should be family. Survivor benefits in the 1939 amendments to the Social Security Act were conceptualized as a return on adult children’s contributions; if the deceased adult child left neither a wife nor children, dependent parents could receive survivor benefits in the interests of equity for their adult son or daughter. Providing benefits for surviving spouses, children, or dependent parents ensured that the contributions paid by the worker were “returned” via the survivor. Policy design ensured that adult children remained a key source of support for elderly parents, even after the 1935 Social Security Act.

The conceptualization of family – or the family norms underscoring these policies – shifted depending on the policy. State laws regarding marriage and family also shaped the implementation of these policies. Assumptions about gender roles, and whether married daughters and sons-in-law were responsible for parental support, informed responsible relative laws and varied across states. These variations prompted dissent among family members, as daughters-in-law saw their family resources required for their husband’s parents while daughters were at times exempt from those expectations. The assumptions regarding family informing parent dependency policies remained very static across the scope of this study despite increasing resistance and demands for acknowledgment of diverse family forms. Stephanie Coontz argues that mythologizing the American family – including nostalgia for the traditional nuclear family with two heterosexual parents and children – is a recurring theme in American history and contradicts the reality of diversity in American families across the decades.Footnote ⁴⁰ Robert Self echoes these ideas, arguing that the traditional nuclear family with a male breadwinner “was always more ideological than real.”Footnote ⁴¹ That ideological vision of family drove many social policies, including those analyzed in this book, even before the white, heterosexual nuclear family became so valorized in the 1950s. Embedded in these notions is the importance of family to American life and democracy, as well as the concept that families were independent and self-contained.Footnote ⁴² The belief that functioning families did not rely on social supports fueled what Coontz calls the “myth of self-reliance.”Footnote ⁴³ The persistent defense of the male breadwinner model was in part a response to challenges to those family norms, particularly in the social movements of the 1960s but even before.Footnote ⁴⁴

The categorical aid programs and OASI emerged in the 1930s, and the context of the Great Depression and New Deal are crucial to understanding how family was deployed in the Social Security Act’s programs. The family model was not consistent across policies; the male breadwinner model drove the design and function of OASI while belief in a more extended family model, fueled by anti-dependency and fiscal conservatism, underscored administration of the categorical aid programs. The extended family model was the norm in many New Deal relief programs, from the Federal Emergency Relief Administration to the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to social security programs analyzed here. While scholars have shown that many programs sought to promote the white male breadwinner, the emergency of the 1930s fostered employment of other family members on behalf of the family unit.Footnote ⁴⁵ Assignments to WPA or other work relief programs preferenced men and were often conditioned on the support of siblings, parents, and other relatives. Civilian Conservation Corps enrollees – only single men between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three were eligible – were required to send the majority of their wages home to support their families. Siblings assigned to work relief were expected to help support their families during the Great Depression, and case workers looked to adult children to help support aging parents receiving ADC or OAA. Enforcement of support by adult children, in both ADC and OAA, often generated conflict among families when adult children resisted contributing their income to the family’s resources.Footnote ⁴⁶ Dependence on public assistance for support prompted policymakers, case workers, and administrators to look to the extended family model to ensure that such reliance was minimized by other family contributions.

Analyzing debates over responsible relative laws provides a lens into larger debates that centered on family obligations and the role of the state. Using the voices of both opponents and proponents of support laws, I argue that both sides invoked the need to limit the role of government: for advocates of responsible relative laws, this meant reducing the tax burden on taxpayers while for critics it meant limiting the reach of an intrusive public assistance bureaucracy into the lives and families of aged Americans seeking or receiving OAA benefits. Critics of responsible relative laws, which included recipients and their families, argued that the economic security of the aged was a responsibility of all, including taxpayers, rejecting fiscal responsibility as a valid reason to enforce support.Footnote ⁴⁷ Proponents of such laws sought to enforce family responsibility, arguing that families should support their own before taxpayers were asked to contribute, while opponents argued that the support obligations harmed family relationships and resulted in minimal savings for state coffers. These debates focused on the intersection between the goal of security for the elderly, benefiting aged recipients and their adult children, and fiscal responsibility, which protected the taxpayer.

Analysis of responsible relative laws adds to our understanding of the role of the state in regulating American families via public assistance. The regulation of families, particularly single mothers receiving mothers’ pensions and later ADC or AFDC and the fathers of children in those programs, has been well documented by historians.Footnote ⁴⁸ Regulation also extended to the aged receiving OAA and their family members, particularly adult children. Hendrik Hartog argues that cases involving conflicts over inheritance in the nineteenth century show that private law was the site of property disputes among surviving family members, and that “during these years, public power was rarely mobilized directly to confront or discipline wrongs done within families.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Analysis of responsible relative laws over their long history complicates this assessment. Public officials investigated family members’ ability to support parents and property lien laws prevented family inheritance of property if parents were supported by public assistance programs. This system of regulation is what scholars term the “family law of the poor,” or “a dual system of family law.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Grounded in the nation’s earliest poor laws, requirements for relatives’ support of needy family members are a key continuity in the development of more modern relief systems beginning with the Social Security Act of 1935. While middle- and upper-class Americans could choose to use the legal system to address family conflicts over property and support, poor Americans seeking public assistance often faced unwelcome investigations into their finances and those of their adult children. Chapter 2 demonstrates how public assistance recipients employed the discourse of rights to contest agency decisions via fair hearings and court challenges.

Conceptions of dependency are central to this analysis, and definitions of dependency have shifted across time and place. Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon’s analysis of the history of the term focuses largely on the development of “bad” dependency, which included any adult who was not employed for pay with particular disparagement directed at single mothers on public assistance – a trend that continues today. The valorization of wage labor was central to the stigmatization of dependency across groups, and extension of that to mothers, particularly single mothers of color. By the 1980s and 1990s, dependency discourse centered on dependency via AFDC.Footnote ⁵¹ Central to this discourse was the absence of wage labor and reliance on public benefits; Fraser and Gordon argue that in late twentieth century America, “there is no longer any self-evidently good adult dependency in postindustrial society.”Footnote ⁵² Critical in their analysis is the type of social benefit one receives: public assistance or an earned or contributory benefit. Few expected elderly Americans to work rather than receive benefits, as many were physically unable to do so; the stigma of unemployment or a perceived unwillingness to work did not apply. William Graebner calls the Old Age Insurance program “retirement legislation” designed to remove older workers from the workforce in the 1930s; several pension movements also argued for old age pensions for the same reason.Footnote ⁵³ The elderly are often among the “deserving” in their receipt of benefits.

The type of benefit – whether means-tested or an “earned” benefit – also shapes how older Americans are viewed and elderly Americans’ perception of those benefits. As Fraser and Gordon note, “Hardly anyone today calls recipients of Social Security retirement insurance dependent.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Instead, the benefits are perceived as earned via payroll contributions from a lifetime of wage labor. Suzanne Mettler echoes the link between independence and wage earning, but acknowledges the limits of that conception in programs for the aged: “social citizenship in the national state was linked to independence as defined by wage earning – unless the wage earners happened to be toilers in excluded occupations.” Those outside the scope of OASI – either as a direct beneficiary or a survivor – had to rely on OAA, which was a state-defined benefit to some degree.Footnote ⁵⁵ The role of the government – whether local, state, or federal – is also important to conceptions of dependency. Margot Canaday, in The Straight State, argues that federal policy and the policing of immigration, welfare, and the military were central to understandings of homosexuality throughout the twentieth century; in policing the boundaries of sexuality, state actors also helped define those categories. In privileging specific types of benefits in the development and implementation of policies – such as OASI and OAA – the state is also not only acting on ideas of dependency but also fostering how they are understood. What is less clear is how the elderly receiving public assistance – OAA or its replacement program, SSI – fit the concept of dependency. I argue that the debates over parent dependency policies were less about positive or negative conceptualizations of dependency among the elderly, as many presumed elderly Americans who were no longer able to work were to some degree dependent. The question was on whom they were or should be dependent – whether that dependency was presumed or needed to be proven varied in different programs based on either state or federal policy.

The variation of these policies’ administration across states and within states translated into very different experiences for recipients and their families; similar to so many parts of the American welfare state some groups benefited more than others, and where individuals landed on that spectrum of benefits often followed their race, gender, citizenship, and employment status as well as the state or county in which they resided. The administration of policies – either at the state or federal levels – affected conceptions of parent dependency and eligibility for programs targeting needy parents. OASI was a federal program, and thus all eligible beneficiaries had access to these programs and experienced similar investigations, regardless of geography. Eligibility for OASI was not universal, but among those eligible for survivor benefits, the experience was intended to be uniform across the country, although implementation proved to be less consistent as Chapter 3 will show. While OAA was a federal program, the SSA allowed states some latitude in the administration of the program. Some states had no responsible relative provisions, other than parents and minor children, while many states enforced the support of a broader range of family members. Support enforcement mechanisms in the laws also varied, with some state practices simply asking for support but not taking action if a person refused, while other states had court procedures to enforce contributions. Geography shaped how OAA recipients experienced the program and what eligibility requirements they faced. Any taxpayer who provided the required support level for a parent could claim a tax credit on their annual income tax return. This policy somewhat reimbursed the individual providing support, rather than the parent, but was available to anyone filing an income tax return who met and could document the support requirements. Thus a recipient’s experience with the administration of responsible relative laws in OAA varied from state to state, and even within states via county agencies, in contrast to the federal tax system. OASI, also a federal program, demonstrated variations in the awarding of survivor benefits depending on administrative decisions by bureau employees although was far less varied than state public assistance administration.

What program an elderly parent experienced depended in part on their adult children’s position as well as their own, again emphasizing the exclusions inherent in American social policy. These programs’ practices of either rewarding family responsibility (survivor benefits under OASI or tax benefits via the federal Internal Revenue Service) or regulating it (OAA) again parallel the two tracks of the welfare state: means-tested (OAA) and contributory (OASI).Footnote ⁵⁶ In this sense, they again reflect the “dual system of family law” in American safety net programs: one system that regulated support in low-income families, such as the aged needing OAA, and another that rewarded families through less stigmatized programs such as OASI.Footnote ⁵⁷ The divide was not only wealth, as family members supporting parents via OASI were not necessarily well off. Instead, parents gained access to survivor benefits via occupation (their son or daughter was covered under OASI). They could also avoid OAA if they had a son or daughter with the willingness and resources, which could be somewhat meager, to provide enough support. The creation of survivor benefits (OASI) in 1939 covered widows, parents, and children of qualified workers who died before they could claim benefits. The same exclusions that limited coverage of all workers also limited coverage for their survivors. Widows, children, and parents of deceased workers in covered occupations were eligible for OASI; survivors of workers in excluded occupations had to turn to public assistance.Footnote ⁵⁸ Exclusions under the OASI program also affected what parents were eligible for survivor benefits; parents of those workers excluded from coverage, disproportionately women and people of color, were then relegated to OAA – a means-tested program with eligibility requirements to qualify.

Eligibility for the two programs also rested on race and gender, as many scholars have demonstrated. Occupational exclusions for OASI relegated many people of color and women to public assistance. Elderly Americans of color relied on OAA in much higher rates than white Americans: in 1962, 30 percent of all married couples of color received OAA compared to 6 percent of all white married couples. For Americans of color, 48 percent of non-married men received OAA and 61 percent of non-married women received OAA.Footnote ⁵⁹ The decentralized nature of public assistance and the discretion left to states resulted in discriminatory treatment, if not outright exclusion.Footnote ⁶⁰ Scholars have documented that people of color received lower grants than whites in many states in the OAA program.Footnote ⁶¹ Tax credits might benefit adult children if their support met federal guidelines, but such credits provided no direct support to aging parents. In order to benefit from provisions in the tax code, one had to pay taxes. How aging Americans encountered parent dependency policies throughout the twentieth century depended in part on their race and class, as exclusions and discriminatory practices persisted for decades after the Social Security Act’s passage.

In addition to racial exclusions noted earlier, citizenship status, which often intersects with race, was another factor in access to OAA. States had some discretion over eligibility restrictions based on citizenship, although federal officials discouraged states from requiring citizenship for eligibility. States could not exclude citizens, and states that had enacted laws requiring naturalized citizens to have held citizenship for a number of years – in some cases as long as fifteen years – had to change those requirements. States could exclude noncitizens and were more likely to have citizenship requirements in OAA rather than ADC, in part due to the number of elderly noncitizens as potential recipients. OAA was much larger than ADC in those early years, and the aged population also was significant in number. In 1939, citizenship was required for OAA in twenty-five states as well as the District of Columbia. Such laws declined over the next decade, but states were reluctant to drop the citizenship requirement when they drafted their OAA programs.Footnote ⁶²

Citizenship requirements persisted in the southwestern states in particular, including California. Debates over Old Age Security (California’s OAA program by a different name) were largely silent regarding race, in part because citizenship exclusions prevented many people of color from eligibility. Twelve percent of OAS recipients in California were non-white in 1953; 9 percent were African American, 2 percent were Mexican American, and 1 percent were categorized as “other.”Footnote ⁶³ Ellen Reese argues that stereotypes about both black and Mexican recipients appear in the rhetoric and debates regarding ADC in California but were far less central than in other regions, particularly the North and Southeast. She also argues that hostility toward African American recipients in California’s ADC program was limited in part because most opposition to the program came from rural areas seeking to preserve access to the Mexican labor force, while most African American people lived in the cities.Footnote ⁶⁴ California’s law specifically excluded noncitizens until 1961. Seven percent of the state’s population over the age of sixty-five were foreign born, and 56 percent of that group were Mexican immigrants; only those who were citizens had access to OAS benefits.Footnote ⁶⁵ Program exclusions regarding noncitizens made the issue of race resonate less in California, as other barriers to access, including language and discrimination, further limited the number of Mexican American people receiving OAS.Footnote ⁶⁶ Race and public assistance were less intertwined in California’s debates over OAS and responsible relative laws; little overt evidence of racial hostility appears in the records. Reese argues that the citizenship exclusion made racism less visible since many Mexican immigrants were already excluded.

Methods

Parent dependency policies cross federal, state, and local boundaries. Responsible relative laws are state policies, with some local participation, with the federal SSA providing oversight but also granting states discretion. Thus state agencies and legislatures implemented these laws in very different ways. Federal records of the SSA provide important information about state programs and the conversations between state and federal officials regarding compliance with federal requirements. These detail not only the mechanics of the policies but also provide insights into specific debates in each state. Because these laws were a function of state policy, it is very much a state story. Federal records provide the perspective of federal officials tasked with oversight, which I pair with research in state records, including state welfare department reports, state archival materials (including state welfare board minutes and correspondence), published reports and periodicals, and newspaper records. Chapters 1 and 2 analyze these relationships – and negotiations – between officials at the local, state, and federal levels more fully.

Identifying states to analyze more fully began with reviews of published materials outlining changes and trends in responsible relative laws, including periodicals such as Public Welfare and the Social Security Bulletin. That led me to review those states’ correspondence in the SSA records in the National Archives at College Park, MD, in what would become the first of several trips to that facility. I also reviewed a sampling of states that had no responsible relative laws and other states with these laws to ensure my sampling included states across different regions and demographics. Silences in the federal records regarding responsible relative laws indicated which states did not prioritize their enforcement, even if such laws existed on paper. State welfare department reports provided guidance on which states to explore further and a state perspective on reports by federal officials in the SSA records. State welfare publications also provided useful insights into state policies and context.

As the maps in Chapter 1 indicate, these laws predominated in certain regions; the Midwest and Plains states, and Oregon and Nevada, had both recovery and responsible relative laws, but Southern states – from North Carolina to Utah – did not have responsible relative laws and few had recovery laws. The book seeks to analyze the implementation of these laws across regions. All states with responsible relative laws were in part motivated by fiscal reasons but they differed in their administrative priorities and zeal for enforcement. Many states that enforced responsible relative laws had strong beliefs in home rule – favoring local authority over state and federal power – and fiscal localism or “the attempt to minimize local expenditures and provide tax relief, even at the expense of welfare services.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Many welcomed federal aid for public assistance, beginning in the 1930s with the New Deal programs and continuing under the Social Security Act, but sought state and local control over those funds. Many states saw brief shifts to Democratic rule in the 1930s, particularly in the 1932 and 1936 elections, but the change was short-lived; a return to Republican dominance in state and national offices occurred before the decade’s end. In some cases, such as South Dakota and Indiana, the Democratic Party proved nearly as conservative as the Republican Party, thus limiting the scope of change even when Democrats controlled state government. The close ideological stances of both parties spoke to the conservative politics in the state, often reflecting significant rural and farming constituencies which reinforced both home rule and fiscal localism.

Indiana and California quickly emerged as states that embraced responsible relative laws but in very different contexts. In part this was due to demographics and politics. Pension organizations were one such variable. Pension movements were active in California, Nevada, and Washington, but the role of responsible relative laws varied in each state. Washington had an active pension movement and taxpayer organization, but responsible relative laws were not a major area of debate and the state had them for only a short time. California, despite the active old age advocacy movements, persisted in its use of responsible relative laws the longest, not repealing its laws and abandoning their administration until 1975. California had among the highest grants in the OAA program and Indiana among the lowest. Both states had active business organizations – the Chamber of Commerce in Indiana and the California Taxpayers Association (CTA) – that resisted efforts to eliminate responsible relative laws. Both also embraced home rule, or the power of county and city governments to play significant roles in the administration of public assistance. Indiana was the most pronounced of the two, but state officials in California also defended local authority to some degree. They are both unique among other states but also representative of larger trends, including the push for fiscal control on state and local relief expenditures. Chapter 2 draws heavily on California for its analysis for resistance by families, individuals, and organized advocacy groups on both sides of the issue, but also speaks to other forms of resistance, including the courts and fair hearing system more common in other states as well. Missouri is a unique state; it had no specific responsible relative law but enforced family support via its general support law. Its court system, which allowed OAA recipients to contest social welfare department decisions, was a state with among the largest numbers of court cases challenging family support enforcement. Thus Missouri also plays a significant role in Chapter 2. Many states with no responsible relative laws also paid the lowest OAA grants in the country, again in part due to fiscal concerns, the financial status of the state, and because of the demographics of eligible individuals, including immigrant populations and people of color.

Federal records of the 1939 Advisory Council to the Social Security Board, including transcripts of the council’s deliberations on proposed amendments, document the role of parent dependency, although minimal, in the debates over how to revise the Old Age Insurance program. Records of the US House Ways and Means Committee, including their hearings on the proposed amendments, also illuminate debates regarding the inclusion of parents and conceptualizations of family. The House committee added parents to survivor benefits; the Advisory Council made no such recommendation. The policy files of the Bureau of Old Age and Survivors Insurance document rulings and debates on specific cases where parents, wives, and widows sought benefits, revealing how officials considered parent dependency in comparison to cases involving children, wives, and ex-wives. These records do not provide the direct voices of those appealing benefit decisions, but they do detail the applicants’ stories and circumstances. Together these records demonstrate how policymakers perceived parent dependency, support, and family responsibility.

Research on the role of federal tax policy in parent dependency is enriched by the voices of adult children and the parents they supported via a 1966 hearing by the US Senate’s Special Committee on Aging. The letters sent to the committee, as well as the testimony at the hearing, underscore the hardship that parental support exacted on adult children, and document policy priorities regarding tax benefits for those supporting aged parents from different stakeholders. Letters from parents demonstrate their awareness of the toll their children’s support took on the children’s family, but also show the limited options available to parents in need. Hearing transcripts as well as records from the US Department of Treasury and the US House Ways and Means committee speak to tax reform debates centered on support for aging parents.

Organization

The book is organized by policy, and within that by chronology. The first two chapters address responsible relative laws in OAA. Responsible relative laws included requiring contributions for support from family members via OAA investigations, property lien laws, and recovery provisions from the estates of OAA recipients. These laws include family support investigations as a part of the application process to receive OAA, as well as the recurring investigations to ensure that recipients remained eligible for benefits. It also includes property lien and recovery provisions that sought to ensure that public assistance costs were reimbursed before others, including potential heirs, benefited from the recipient’s property. This chapter argues that fiscal concerns and opposition to federal authority were critical motivations for states to enforce responsible relative laws. These laws were an important part of the significant backlash against public assistance costs in the 1950s and 1960s. Scholars have ably documented efforts to limit aid to single mothers in ADC, but responsible relative laws enforcing the support of adult children are less recognized. Supporters often invoked “the taxpayer” as a reason to strengthen and expand support obligations. This chapter examines specific states that engaged in significant debates about responsible relative provisions, both internally and with federal officials, and illustrates the range of policies and administrative practices employed by states. The chapter also analyzes the administration of responsible relative laws at the county level, demonstrating geographic variation not only between states but also within states.

Resistance to federal regulations and oversight in the public assistance programs was a key factor in how these laws operated in a given state or locale. The stance of officials – in the state or local department of social or public welfare, the state legislature, the governor’s office, or county or city government – on the role of federal authority in relief administration played a key role in the assertiveness of a state’s enforcement of responsible relative laws. Karen Tani’s States of Dependency documents the resistance of state governments and legislatures to what she calls a right to relief that developed via federal regulation of relief beginning in the 1930s; this chapter argues that enforcing responsible relative laws was a key means of resistance to federal authority. The degree of opposition to federal authority combined with a desire to protect state autonomy and local or home rule often translated into significant enforcement of responsible relative laws, usually with significant variation among counties in a state.

Chapter 2 outlines the activism and opposition to the different provisions of responsible relative laws from both individuals and organizations. This chapter addresses the key critiques of responsible relative provisions, relying on the voices of recipients of aged assistance, their families, and pension organizations’ spokespeople. Opponents of responsible relative laws rejected a needs-based program and embraced the “pension philosophy,” arguing that individuals over sixty-five had earned benefits. Support for responsible relative laws, fueled by fiscal control, came from states that provided limited benefits and exhibited reluctant support of the elderly, such as Indiana, and also from states with a strong commitment to financial support for the needy aged, such as California. Several pension movements of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, particularly in California, proposed plans to address the needs of aging Americans, but California’s Citizens Committee for Old Age Pensions is the most critical for this project. The Washington Pension Union, in the state of Washington, was another organization that pushed for more generous benefits for OAA recipients. This chapter analyzes these organizations through the lens of responsible relative laws, with an emphasis on successful, although short-lived, campaigns in both Washington and California to eliminate the support obligations and secure guaranteed benefits for the aged. Although they did not often achieve their goals, these organizations played a crucial role in the liberalization of benefits at both the state and federal levels. Recipients and their families also employed fair hearings, the administrative appeal process in OAA, and court challenges to contest agency decisions regarding OAA grants. In some cases, these organizations helped recipients challenge those decisions, but many cases were initiated by the recipient or their families independent of any organization. The efforts of these organizations, and the use of fair hearings and the courts to challenge public assistance decisions, prompt a rethinking of the welfare rights movements, more typically associated with the National Welfare Rights Organization in the1960s.

Chapter 3 turns to “earned” benefits, or benefits derived from either contributions via payroll taxes in OASI or from military service. Under the 1939 amendments to the Social Security Act, parents were among those eligible for survivor benefits if a contributing worker died leaving no widow or children. Parents had to prove specific levels of dependency to qualify for benefits – eligibility was not automatic – but once deemed eligible, parents could receive survivor benefits for their lifetime. A part of the contributory track of American social policy, survivor benefits lacked the recurring investigations that OAA recipients endured. Because eligibility was not automatic, the program represents a middle ground in the spectrum of American policies: not fully contributory but also not solely means-tested requiring recurring investigations. Survivor benefits were initially means-tested and required proof of dependency, but then were contributory, as parents were then eligible for lifetime benefits. Survivor benefits were administered under different measures of dependency for different groups. This chapter analyzes those categories, and addresses how military survivor benefits fit this analysis. Survivor benefits were predicated on different assumptions about parent dependency compared to public assistance programs. But the benefits, if an aged American qualified, removed the recipient from the intrusive and repeated investigations found in the OAA program.

Chapter 4 turns to tax expenditures offered to income tax filers who provide specific levels of support for aging parents. Scholars such as Christopher Howard have demonstrated how the tax system incentivizes certain actions, such as purchasing a home, with tax benefits, usually in the form of a deduction or credit.Footnote ⁶⁸ The tax system provided more direct benefits to elderly Americans through their taxes, but policies also sought to encourage and reward individuals who provided support to parents in need. In this case, categories of family are key. In the case of the tax code, “the government is able to provide for the welfare of its citizens through incentives and inducements that rely on family relations. Family status not only confers the benefits of public assistance to particular individuals – and restricts it from others – but also requires family members to act in particular ways for the benefit of others.”Footnote ⁶⁹ In the case of dependent parents, tax policy rewarded those who fulfilled support obligations for parents by partially reimbursing them. The goal ultimately was to encourage additional support by adult children via the tax code.

Debates over tax credits for taxpayers supporting aging and needy parents were the focus of Congressional hearings in 1966, and this chapter draws on those debates. A key question was how best to meet the needs of financially strained aged parents. The hearings occurred during larger debates about tax reform focused in part on limiting the number of tax expenditures available in the tax code. The chapter also analyzes the experiences of taxpayers supporting parents, often at great personal and financial cost. Drawing on letters and testimony at the hearings, this chapter uses the voices of both parents and taxpayers who argued for more generous benefits for such support. Although a small sample of parents and adult children, these letters provide important insight into the limitations of the tax benefits accorded to those who provided parents with support. The chapter highlights the toll – financial and emotional – that such support took on both parents and adult children, and their proposals for change.

The conclusion addresses the decline of enforcement of responsible relative laws, and why that happened. For many states, the shift occurred in the 1960s. Medicaid provisions prohibited the consideration of family resources, other than spousal assets, in determining eligibility. Scholars argue that this prompted many states to cease all filial responsibility laws, but this is only a partial explanation. The implementation of SSI and the elimination of OAA in 1974 changed the public assistance landscape and shifted debates about responsible relative laws. Even the most persistent state enforcement waned in the 1970s. It is not until more recently that states have returned to these laws. The conclusion ends with a call for rethinking our conceptualization of aged Americans and the care and support they need.

The needs of aging parents, from medical care to financial support to assistance with daily living, are a growing policy issue in the United States. The burden falls on family members, often adult children, to provide either financial assistance or direct caregiving. Such care also is a significant part of Medicaid costs as families are unable to afford astronomical nursing home care costs. This book analyzes social policies that sought to address these issues throughout the twentieth century and – I hope – conveys a cautionary tale of requiring such support and assistance from adult children. Many children of aging Americans voluntarily help their parents with these needs, but legal responsibility has many pitfalls. As a colleague aptly pointed out to me in reading this manuscript, most parents choose to have – and keep – their children, but no one signs up to be children.Footnote ⁷⁰ This book historicizes the question of who bears responsibility for this support and care, and who should shoulder that responsibility in the future.