The Newburgh Advocate

The Historical Society of the Newburgh Bay and the Highlands, The Newburgh Free Library, and the City Historian of Newburgh, NY welcomed Joseph P. Ritz back to Newburgh for a talk October 1, 2006, at 2 p.m. at the Newburgh Free Library.

Joseph P. Ritz was a reporter for The Newburgh Evening News in the 1960s assigned to cover city government shortly after City Manager Joseph Mitchell launched a welfare policy which was aimed largely at welfare recipients whom many in the community believed responsible for the community’s economic decline.

Ritz is introduced by Professor Mark Carnes, an historian at Columbia University and Barnard College.

Ritz, who had newly arrived in Newburgh from New York City where he had been assistant news director at Fordham University, had fresh contacts with several news organizations in NYC. The first wire story on the controversy was an Associated Press digest of a headlined article he had written for The Newburgh Evening News on his third day on the paper. For the next three years he reported the welfare story either for The Newburgh News or as a stringer for The New York Post and New York Herald-Tribune. During that period, he wrote background stories on the controversy for the AP and The London (England) Sunday Express. His writings on the subject caused him to be taken off the city beat by his editors at The Newburgh News, who supported Mitchell.

After leaving Newburgh to become a journalist in Buffalo, Ritz wrote The Despised Poor, Newburgh’s War on Welfare (Beacon Press). The book was praised by The New York Times and other newspapers, as well as national magazines. It is still quoted by sociologists and political scientists.

Ritz’s latest book out this year, I NEVER LOOKED FOR MY MOTHER and Other Regrets of a Journalist, includes chapters on Newburgh and his experiences with editors at The Newburgh Evening News when he was here.

While he was in Newburgh, Ritz was one of the writers of a newspaper series entitled, The Road to Integration, which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. He has also received local, state and national awards for his reporting in Buffalo.

Below is the draft of Ritz’s talk, reproduced with his kind permission.

Joseph P. Ritz
Speech at Newburgh Free Library Newburgh, NY, 2 p.m. October 1, 2006

Thank you for inviting me to speak here. It is a welcome and unexpected pleasure. I guess I’ve now lived long enough to become a historical figure. When I left more than 40 years ago I was not popular, particularly at the Newburgh News, which had earlier taken me off the City Hall beat. As I mentioned to Chuck Thomas in an email, at other places at which I have worked there was a party and a gift and good wishes when I left. That didn’t happen when I left the Newburgh News. Only one reporter said goodbye and when I finished cleaning my desk out, the editorial room was empty.

I was already working on my book and I felt when it came out I would be even more unpopular. I may be wrong in that. Ann and I have lived in several places. I think the nicest neighbors we’ve ever had were those we had when we lived here. Anyway, I’m very happy to be here and to find I have fans.

First, I’ll give you a little background about what the Newburgh welfare program consisted of and why it caused such a national sensation.

In the early 1960s, city manager Joseph Mitchell and the council attracted nationwide attention and the admiration of many when the city government required welfare recipients to pick up their payments at police headquarters. Mitchell later announced a program aimed largely at blacks on welfare, whom many in the community blamed for its economic problems. The program would have denied welfare payments to all after three months except the aged, the blind and the handicapped. Those affected would have largely been single mothers of young children, the only category in which blacks were predominant. The program also would have denied payments to single mothers who had working relatives living in the city or had additional children.

What was the public reaction? What was the reaction from most of the press?

Overwhelming approval.

And particularly from the Newburgh News and the local radio station. One of the few objecting voices in the press was the Middletown Record.

But that summer, the summer of 1961, Newburgh and its welfare program were the subjects of articles, cartoons and editorials in publications ranging in size from The Montana Citizen to LIFE magazine, then a national institution with a circulation of more than 3 million. Religious magazines such as the Roman Catholic magazines Commonweal and America and the Protestant Christian Century added their voices to the discussion. Overseas, the controversy was aired in such respected journals as the Manchester Guardian and popular newspapers as the London Sunday Express.

NBC filmed an hour-long special on the controversy, as did CBS. The number of journalists coming to Newburgh to do stories at the time nearly exceeded the number of welfare recipients.

Initial reaction to the Newburgh program, as I said, was overwhelmingly in favor, not only in Newburgh, but also throughout the nation. A writer from Palisade, New Jersey termed Mitchell’s actions: “A ray of light in a world that is on the wrong tracks.”

A New Rochelle man wrote Mitchell,

I wish to congratulate you on the guts you have in correcting a situation that is gradually growing to such proportions that the tax load to take care of the chiselers is becoming unbearable.

Similar sentiments were expressed by 90 percent of the 15 thousand writers who sent letters, telegrams postcards and checks to the city manager.

The New York Herald Tribune put the story on its front page under an eight-column headline. The NY Daily News carried an editorial praising Newburgh’s action. Newspapers across the country carried wire dispatches about the program. Most papers, if they commented, were in favor of what the city was trying to do.

The Wall Street Journal commented:

Unfortunately, not many localities are willing to give up government handouts, even though welfare fraud could cut off fuel for corrupt political machines and even help arrest urban blight. But at least Newburgh has shown one way a community can meet its obligation to those who need help without obliging those who abuse help.

Of the then seven daily newspapers in NYC, only The New York Times and The New York Post opposed the Newburgh plan. This was back in the days before Murdoch when the Post was a liberal paper.

Said the Times:

The state has a duty to help in Newburgh, as well as forbid cruel and unusual punishment for the crime of being poor. Newburgh, enjoying know-nothing applause from near and far for getting tough on the needy, must be made by the state to realize that it is not a law unto itself.

But that opinion was definitely not the view of the public.

In a poll conducted among nearly three thousand readers of the New York Daily Mirror, Newburgh’s welfare program got the approval of 95 percent.

A Gallup poll found that 85 percent of those polled nationally approved of at least parts of the program. In another poll one third of those interviewed believed that 40 percent or more of those on welfare are chiselers. Nearly as many thought the percentage of chiselers was slightly below that, but only slightly. In the Senate, Barry Goldwater said he’d like to seethe Newburgh program in every city in America.

The area’s congresswoman, Katherine St. George, favorably compared the program to the Boston Tea Party.

For a time, it looked like local and state legislators throughout the country would adopt at least part of the program. Citizens of Bartlesville, Oklahoma wrote asking for copies of the Newburgh welfare rules so they could ask their state legislature to adopt them.

In Richmond, Virginia the city manager proposed to try the Newburgh plan there. Officials and candidates in communities across the nation ran on platforms promising to duplicate or surpass the program being advanced in Newburgh.

But then what happened? The Newburgh plan failed to find any chiselers. St. Luke’s Hospital had to increase its rates because it wasn’t getting reimbursement from the state and federal governments for the care of welfare patients. Catholic Charities and other charities were forced to double their budgets to care for the needy.

Furthermore, Mitchell’s claims that blacks and migrants coming from the South to live on welfare were not borne out by facts. In the two years before the welfare program was announced only a total of $305 in relief funds had been spent on persons who had lived in the city for less than a year.

It was also found that Newburgh was spending less on welfare than cities of similar size, even those cities with few Negroes. For instance, Oswego, which also had its own welfare department, had 42 persons per thousand on welfare, compared to Newburgh’s 29 per thousand. And Oswego black population represented on a tenth of one percent of the total. Newburgh’s blacks represented 16 and one-half percent of the city’s population.

But what was more telling for the average citizen was that after 1961 the community continued to lose industry and jobs. One of the reasons may have been because the city was now believed to be a community overwhelmed by the downtrodden and the uneducated. Welfare rolls increased, as did the welfare budget.

Now the newsmen and women and the television cameras are long gone as is City Manager Mitchell. Most of those involved at the time are dead. And yet, for many, Newburgh remains a symbol.

Newburgh became a rallying cry for those who regard welfare programs as weakening the moral fiber of both the recipients and of the nation. That feeling still exists.

It is a reminder that the belief that the poor are essentially unworthy and immoral is as old as debtors’ prisons and as widespread as poverty itself.

Conservatives use it as an example of a courageous fight by a local government against federal and state “tyranny.” Liberals point to it as a lesson on how a community can be held, for a time, in the power of a publicity-seeking demagogue. It has been credited with bringing about a change in state and federal welfare laws and derided for its failure to uncover chiselers or cut its welfare budget.

Had Newburgh remained an ordinary small town, known to few outside the Hudson Valley, the number of those on its welfare rolls, the way they live, the racial makeup of the population, the social philosophy of its city manager or the politics of its city council would be of little concern to the nation.

But, like Selma, Alabama later in the sixties, Newburgh both stirred national indignation and evoked national applause. And, like Selma, it had an effect on future legislation.

Persons who live on welfare and the poor in general are held in low regard most every place. They are often uneducated. They are too often uninformed. In general they don’t vote, don’t read newspapers or watch news programs and so hold little political or economic power.

Politicians can and sometimes do use that general feeling of antipathy against those on welfare to get votes. That happened here. There were only a few influential voices to counter balance what was being done by the politicians and most of those were from outside the community. And, particularly at that time — there were strong feelings against any outsiders, particularly if they came from NYC and most of the outside press was from NYC.

I can, in part, sympathize with those feelings. While I had just come from NYC, I was a Midwesterner born in Chicago and raised in Ohio and my wife was raised on a farm in Mass. Neither of us were happy living in the New York City area. We were just beginning a family and were happy to flee the Big Apple. We liked the area. We liked our neighbors. We thought we had a permanent home here.

However what I found was that the local press, for which I worked, instead of giving balance to the false reports and alarms being issued, was largely in the service of city hall. When I found that what Mitchell was saying wasn’t true, I was told it was none of my business. My job was to transmit the statements I was getting from City Hall.

There are, of course, cheats — people who don’t need help but who collect money by lying or other immoral ways. But that is true in every walk of life and profession.

There will always be people who satisfy their desires by immoral means whether by force or deception. You will find them even among a few of the clergy and certainty among politicians and even among newspaper reporters and editors.

But every study confirms what is our experience. That is they are the small minority and not representative of everyone in the group. In society there will always be persons who are crippled, who are blind, who are elderly, who don’t have the mental capacity to hold a job. There will be single mothers without the means to care for their children and at the same timework.

Welfare does not cause low wages or the lack of jobs for those without a college education. It does not cause hurricanes or other disasters. It does not cause lack of education or lack of skill. It does not cause inadequacy of personality or the need for medical care. It does cause our problems of a growing national debt, a massive trade imbalance, a longer life span or illegal immigration.

There are no studies to support the belief that welfare is the reason that blacks have moved from the South to northern cities. Welfare does not cause disease.

And it does not cause slums.

All these things are the reason for welfare.

A large segment of the population then, and today despises the poor. There is an assumption that their condition is a matter of desire. People have willed to be poor.

If we make them, they will change. That was Mitchell’s doctrine.

There were brave persons who spoke out against the city’s harsh welfare program and since there were relatively few of us some of them became my friends.

One of them was Dan Boudreau, head of Catholic Charities here. I quote him in my book speaking before a Newburgh audience.

Essentially the Newburgh crusade is a bold attack upon age-old principles of social justice and neighborly concern for the unfortunate which are our heritage from religion, morality and the fair-game sense of American democracy.

Another person who spoke out was former Family Court Judge Edward O’Neil. He said on national television,

Welfare recipients aren’t necessarily chiselers, or deadbeats, or criminals. They’re poor. They’re often ignorant. And in an industrial society they have a very bad time. But they are human beings.

But the opponents were few and in view of the popular support of the welfare program both by their neighbors and in much of the local media, people were afraid to speak out in opposition.

The man who was city manager just before Newburgh, Al Abrams, said this to me during the height of the turmoil,

I wondered how Hitler could have come to power in Germany, a nation which had perhaps the highest ratio of intellectuals in Europe. I think I’ve discovered the answer here in Newburgh. What happens is that the leaders in the community remain silent and let someone like Mitchell take over.

If I can express your fears, hopes and aspirations so that I can identify myself with your longings and prejudices, than I’ve got you hooked.

The role of the politician is often one that requires him to express publicly what the people fear privately…. And that’s what happened in Germany and in Newburgh, except in this case the object was to keep the city growing colored.

There is a prejudice against welfare recipients, which pictures them as either a dirty, lazy, able-bodied freeloader or an immoral woman. That belief exists in nearly every community in the United States today and I think just as strongly as it was then in the 1960s.

Mitchell was able to exploit that belief for his own ends and ambitions.

That is an important lesson and a warning coming from the Newburgh controversy. Mitchell tapped a deep reservoir of popular emotion, which extends much further than Newburgh or New York State. That message has been forgotten, its lessons unlearned. And we need to learn from what happened here. Let us realize that nothing suggested yet, either by politicians or by welfare officials, is going to abolish all welfare programs.

I was rereading my book, The Despised Poor, Newburgh’s War on Welfare when I prepared this talk. I think the best way to conclude this speech is to quote some of the words I used to end the book.

In a society which regards it a sin to cast its aged, its blind, its disabled, its maladjusted and its incompetent adrift on a convenient ice floe, it’s obvious that no program or combination of programs is going to return all of those on welfare to useful roles. This presents a problem which religious leaders, social scientists, welfare workers, politicians and the public will be struggling for generations.

Too many of us pay no more than lip service to Christ’s words:

When I was thirsty, you gave me something to drink; when I was hungry, you gave me to eat; when I was a stranger, you took me in; when I was naked you clothed me; when I was sick and in prison you visited me; because as long as you did it to one of these the least of my brethren, you did it to me.