Richard A. Cloward, a sociologist and social activist who was an architect of the welfare rights movement and the co-author of a groundbreaking critique of the welfare state as a tool for containing social unrest, died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 74.
The cause of death was lung cancer, said his wife, Frances Fox Piven, a professor of political science at the City University of New York.
Dr. Cloward wrote "Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare" in 1971 with Dr. Piven, his frequent collaborator.
A faculty member at the Columbia University School of Social Work from 1954 until his death, Dr. Cloward won numerous awards for his teaching and academic work, but he was equally well known for his efforts to influence social policy through grass-roots organizing and lobbying among the poor.
Dr. Cloward first achieved recognition with "Delinquency and Opportunity," a study of juvenile delinquency that he wrote with Lloyd Ohlin, a colleague at Columbia, in 1960. In it they argued that delinquency among very poor inner-city youths was a rational reaction to limited economic opportunities.
They tried to put this "opportunity theory" into practice on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, with the creation of a project called Mobilization for Youth to help youth gang members on their own terms. It quickly became a model for many federal programs under the auspices of the Johnson administration's war on poverty.
Dr. Cloward met his wife at Mobilization for Youth. She was his co- author and collaborator for the rest of his career. Perhaps their most controversial writing was an article published in The Nation magazine in 1966, calling for "a massive drive to recruit the poor onto the rolls" as a means of forcing radical welfare reform. The article helped to foster the emergence of a more militant welfare rights movement, including the occupation of welfare offices in many cities and other acts of civil disobedience.
Critics have since argued that by encouraging both the expansion in the welfare rolls and the militancy that went with it, Dr. Cloward and Dr. Piven helped contribute to a political backlash against the welfare system and the decline of middle- class support for programs to help the poor.
But when asked about it in later years, Dr. Cloward was unapologetic.
"We knew that trouble was coming," he said in 1998 in an interview in The New York Times. "Our view is the poor don't win much, and they only win it episodically. You get what you can when you can get it."
Richard Andrew Cloward was born on Dec. 25, 1926, in Rochester, the son of a radical Baptist minister, Donald Cloward, and his wife, an artist, who was known as Esther Fleming. He went to the Columbia University School of Social Work in 1949 to pursue graduate work in sociology, earning his master's and doctoral degrees, and joined the faculty there in 1954.
In "Regulating the Poor," Dr. Cloward and Dr. Piven analyzed the history of relief and public welfare systems, arguing that periodic rises in the welfare rolls helped the state to moderate disorder among poorer groups. In times of relative economic and political stability, the rolls would be shrunk to ensure a steady supply of low-wage labor for employers. In downturns, they said that the rolls would be deliberately expanded to prevent social disorder. Both controversial and entirely original, the book is still required reading for students of American politics and social policies, even as the analysis within it has remained well outside the political mainstream.
In the Reagan era of the 1980's, Dr. Cloward and Dr. Piven wrote several books that warned of a growing attack on the welfare state and drew attention to the decline of organized labor, including "The New Class War," published in 1982. They also focused more and more on mass voter registration as a means of maintaining support for policies to help the poor, forming an organization, Human Serve (Human Service Employees Registration and Voters Education) for that purpose. In "Why Americans Don't Vote," published in 1988 and reissued in 2000, they put forward some of the rationale for this strategy.
Under Dr. Cloward's stewardship, the group was later to play a major role in the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, known as the Motor Voter Act, which required state governments to permit people to register to vote in welfare agencies as well as in drivers' license bureaus. He and his wife were invited to the White House when President Clinton signed the bill into law.
"This is the kind of thing social scientists don't very often do," said Herbert Gans, a longtime friend and fellow professor of sociology at Columbia. "They actually invented social programs that became social policy. So he'll be remembered for a very long time after his death."
Besides his wife, Dr. Cloward is survived by a daughter, Leslie Diamond of Morristown, N.J.; his sons, Kevin, of Cincinnati, and Keith, of Philadelphia; and four grandchildren.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 212-98-6869
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --
.