"On the same day that Nixon intended to go public with his plan, Anderson handed him a briefing. Over the weeks that followed, this six-page document, a case report about something that had happened in England 150 years before, did the unthinkable: it changed Nixon’s mind, and, in the process, changed the course of history.
The briefing, called “A Short History of a Family Security System,” opened with a quotation from the Spanish-American writer George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Anderson’s short report consisted almost entirely of excerpts from sociologist Karl Polanyi’s 1944 book The Great Transformation. There, Polanyi describes a system suspiciously close to Nixon’s proposed basic income: the nineteenth-century English Speenhamland plan.
According to Polanyi, Speenhamland incited the poor to idleness, damping their productivity and wages, and threatening the very foundations of capitalism by “prevent[ing] the establishment of a competitive labor market.”
Instead of helping the masses, Polyani charged basic income with “the pauperization of the masses,” who “almost lost their human shape.” Basic income did not introduce a floor, he contended, but a ceiling.
The president was stunned. He changed tack and settled on a new rhetoric. Departing from debates about endemic, structural unemployment that had begun under President Johnson, Nixon now spoke of joblessness as a “choice” and began stressing the importance of gainful employment. He deplored the rise of big government while promoting a plan that would distribute cash assistance to some thirteen million more Americans.
“Nixon was proposing a new kind of social provision to the American public,” writes the historian Brian Steensland, “but he did not offer them a new conceptual framework through which to understand it.”
Instead, in line with his admiration for British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli and Lord Randolph Churchill (the father of Winston), Nixon steeped his progressive ideas in conservative rhetoric. “Tory men and liberal policies are what have changed the world,” he declared.
To mollify Republicans and manage concerns over the Speenhamland precedent the president attached an amendment to his bill: unemployed beneficiaries would have to register with the Department of Labor. Nobody in the White House expected this stipulation would have much effect. “I don’t care a damn about the work requirement,” Nixon said behind closed doors. “This is the price of getting $1,600.”
The next day, the president presented his bill in a televised speech, packaging “welfare” as “workfare.” What Nixon failed to foresee was that his rhetoric of fighting laziness among the poor and unemployed would prove more influential than his policy.
The conservative president who dreamed of going down in history as a progressive leader forfeited a unique opportunity to overthrow a stereotype rooted back in nineteenth-century England: the myth of the lazy poor.
To dispel this stereotype, we have to ask a simple historical question: what was the real deal with Speenhamland?"
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/05/richard-nixon-ubi-basic-income-welfare/
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