In March 1971, thousands of Nevada's poorest women, their children and supporters marched down the Strip and into Caesars Palace, bringing gambling to a halt in a demonstration against a state welfare system they said was obsessed with throwing "cheaters" off the welfare rolls but uninterested in helping the poor escape dependency.
Network TV cameras focused on Jane Fonda and other celebrity marchers, but the event made a new celebrity of Ruby Duncan, a disabled kitchen worker and former cotton field hand.
Against all odds, Duncan and her friends, nearly all poor, not only forced great changes in Nevada social programs but parlayed their fame and emerging political savvy into Operation Life, which brought food, a library, medicine and money into Las Vegas' neglected Westside nighborhood west and north of downtown for two decades. It was regarded as one of the most successful of all the Great Society grass-roots efforts.
Now a Dartmouth College teacher has documented these events, and the people involved, in a book hitting the stores this month. "Storming Caesars Palace" by Annelise Orleck follows some of the women from their births in deep-South poverty, through their migrations to jobs in a still-segregated Las Vegas, their struggles with bureaucracy, their numerous successes, and their program's dissolution in the Reagan administration. She tells the story objectively, interviewing the principals on both sides of the controversy and depicting their reasoning and thoughts without judgment.
Orleck, an associate professor of history at Dartmouth, says her interest in the project began when she met Maya Miller, a well-to-do white Nevada activist who had spent years fighting poverty. "She told me something that is every historian's dream: `I have a basement full of documents.'
"She told me about this organization of women who had brought medical care and libraries to their community and opened swimming pools and day care.
"I became fascinated," Orleck said, "because the popular view of the War on Poverty is that it was a failure. The second thing she told me that was exciting was that Ruby was still alive."
A fall started it all
The events that catapulted Ruby Duncan to fame began with a fall on her job in a Strip hotel kitchen; she was thereafter unable to work full time and, with several children to raise single-handedly, was forced to go on the federal Aid to Dependent Children program. Nevada's version of the program was administered by unsympathetic officials, including the one who took an application for aid from Duncan's friend Rosie Seals after the latter's stroke. "Application denied," she snapped, and refused further explanation.
But no one was less sympathetic to clients than George Miller, a former migrant farm boy who lifted himself from homelessness via a job with the California Youth Authority and later was an administrator in President Johnson's War on Poverty. In 1968, he became Nevada's director of welfare under the Republican administration of Gov. Paul Laxalt and was retained after Democrat Mike O'Callaghan became governor in a dark-horse victory in 1970.
"In the next few years," wrote Orleck, "Miller would attack those he thought were milking the system with missionary zeal, cutting tens of thousands of poor families off the rolls and urging legislators to reject federal medical, food aid, and job training programs for welfare mothers. In ruggedly individualist Nevada, Miller did not expect much opposition. He was wrong."
One of his moves was to cut Nevada's monthly base grant from $213.50 to $25 per child. All but the largest families lost income. Although Nevada had one of the country's highest per-capita incomes, its grant was the lowest outside the Deep South.
Nevada's welfare eligibility rules favored seasonal employment in its key industry, the resorts, just as Deep South rules favored seasonal employment in agriculture. According to Orleck, 47 percent of Nevada's welfare mothers held jobs -- the highest level in the country. But after 1967 changes in federal regulations, working welfare mothers risked losing medical benefits for their children, so many concealed their gainful employment, making them cheats in Miller's view.
A welfare recipient's possession of a high-quality bed or good clothes could be considered evidence of a secret job, and it was up to the recipient to prove she got them some other way. Caseworkers in many states, including Nevada, made surprise visits in the pre-dawn hours, looking for a male adult in the house, or evidence, such as a man's razor in the bathroom, that one had been there. If either was found, it was presumed the man should support the woman's children, and her children's benefits were threatened.
The U.S. Supreme Court eventually struck down the infamous "man in the house rule," but Nevada caseworkers still found ways to cut the welfare rolls.
The 'Cheaters Report'
The week before Christmas in 1970, Miller announced the results of an audit he called his "Cheaters Report," charging that nearly a fourth of Nevada welfare mothers had lied about outside income or the presence of employable men.
"We found a 55 percent error rate," he said, "with 22 percent completely ineligible." He followed up in January 1971 by cutting more than 3,500 families off the welfare rolls entirely and reducing the benefits of 4,500 more. There was an appeals process, but it was so lengthy, and so many families had been cut, that any who could prove they were improperly cut off might not be reinstated for many months.
Meanwhile, families unable to pay rent faced eviction; appeals to the county to expedite distribution of surplus food commodities fell on deaf ears. With encouragement from the emerging National Welfare Rights Organization, and after frustrating efforts to obtain fair hearings for those cut off, or even a copy of the rules they were accused of violating, Duncan announced that welfare families would strike Nevada in its pocketbook by marching down the Strip and shutting down casino gambling. Would and did, on March 6, 1971.
Battle continues
The protests continued. The weekend after the famous march, many members of the same group marched once more, and this time spontaneously sat down and blocked traffic on the Strip; 86 were arrested. Protesters occupied the office of Las Vegas Welfare Director Vince Fallon, and five were arrested. On a repeat visit, they were locked out; one woman went through a window and unlocked the door from inside. This time they stole a copy of the rules they were supposed to be violating.
The issue was resolved March 19, when U.S. District Judge Roger Foley ruled the welfare cuts illegal. Later that spring, the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare completed its own double-check of Miller's "Cheaters Report" and concluded it had greatly overstated the incidence of fraud. According to the feds, the error rate was only 7.4 percent, and a third of those errors were made by the state, not the applicants.
However, the women did not disburse after their victory. They focused next on hunger. In 1946, Congress had earmarked money for hot lunches for schoolchildren, whether they could pay for them or not. Yet in 1971, children in Las Vegas' poorest schools were not always fed, while those in more prosperous neighborhoods typically were.
The mothers persuaded Clark County Legal Services to sue the school district, and within a month, the school administrators settled out of court. "Within a year," wrote Orleck, "sixty-eight of the district's seventy-two schools were serving hot lunches."
In 1972, when state officials refused to implement the federally funded food stamp program, the women organized an "Eat In." Some 240 mothers and children ordered meals at the Stardust. Duncan and her friend Mary Wesley tried to pay all 150 restaurant bills with personal checks, which were refused. Both were arrested.
Stardust officials initially pressed felony charges and a civil lawsuit, but, realizing the negative publicity that would attend either legal victory or defeat, announced that the meals were on the house and dropped all charges.
The following winter, the Welfare Rights faction lobbied the Nevada Legislature, inviting key committee members to "commodities luncheons" prepared with the government surplus commodities that state welfare officials said were an adequate diet for the poor. Some of the lawmakers became ill. In 1973, Nevada became the last of the 50 states to implement a food stamp program.
Operation Life begins
First organized as the Clark County Welfare Rights Organization, the movement soon spun off Operation Life, which Orleck defined as "a community social service agency run by and for the poor."
The women persuaded former Air Force Gen. R.G. "Zach" Taylor, by then chairman of First Western Savings and Loan, to let them use the Cove Hotel, one of many vacant and unpromising properties the S&L held on a Westside that had fallen into economic ruin.
In the summer and fall of 1972, they organized volunteers to fix up the property, and eventually it housed a variety of programs, including a library and a medical clinic funded under the federal Early Periodic Screening and Diagnostic Testing (EPSDT) program. Doctors and nurses worked there for free or for low pay, but according to Orleck, it was the only such clinic actually managed by the poor. Yet it soon screened 80 percent of all eligible children in Clark County, the highest outreach rate of any EPSDT clinic in the nation.
Over two decades, Operation Life badgered the state into applying for the federally funded Women and Infant Children (WIC) nutrition and medical program, and eventually ran the first program in the state. It became involved in child care, job counseling and mortgage counseling.
It still exists, but cut back operations severely after the Reagan administration cut funds for programs that were the heart of its services. According to Orleck's book, old enemies in the state bureaucracy helped cut off the money.
Orleck took the trouble to interview some of those old enemies and tried to tell their side as they saw it. "I expected those people to be very conservative, but that was not the way they saw themselves; they saw themselves as New Deal liberals. Both Miller and O'Callaghan had worked in Job Corps positions. The problem was they just didn't know what to do with these women. ... A lot of liberals, when they set out to fight poverty, thought that meant giving job training and jobs to men. They just didn't know how to handle a lot of mother-headed families."
Duncan and her allies were at least equally forthcoming in sharing their experiences. "I feel great about the book," said Duncan. "I always wanted to get it out of my system. It felt like a ball of honey or something stuck in the top of my chest. I didn't think that history should be hidden in me, how we did so much in so little time."
The author could easily have published "Storming Caesars Palace" with the university press, which had already published one of her earlier books, but she looked for a more mainstream publisher. "I wanted to reach as broad an audience as possible because I want people to realize that we can fight poverty from the bottom up. ... Both liberals and conservatives believe problem-solving at the local level is important. Conservatives like public-private partnerships; liberals like strong central government, but they both like bootstrap programs."
As might be expected, Orleck had to knock on several publishers' doors before Beacon Press, which has published books about important social issues for more than a century, agreed to add hers.
As for the relevance of her story, Orleck argues, "Congress began the 21st century as it spent much of the 20th, debating punitive welfare legislation that ... required mothers to work but did not allow them to go back to school, that set a five-year lifetime limit on public assistance but did not provide real job training or quality child care.
"As the rhetoric condemning poor mothers heats up yet again, it is worth taking a closer look at what the women of West Las Vegas did. They offer us an alternative model for fighting poverty that affirms and supports poor families instead of demeaning and humiliating them. The Operation Life model worked then, and it could work now, but only if we make the leap of listening to the real experts on poverty: poor mothers."
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