When Newt Gingrich proposed that poor children should be put to work—for a “three- or four-hour-a-day job,” he clarified this week—he was rightly accused of threatening national child-labor laws. But he was also displaying a curious lack of familiarity with his own political accomplishments.

Gingrich suggests that his proposal is meant to resolve an acute crisis: That kids from the projects don’t see anyone around them working for a living. “Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works,” Gingrich said. “So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash’ unless it’s illegal.”

Truth to tell, there was a time when ghetto kids tended to see alarmingly few adults working a full-time job. It was never, as Gingrich suggested last Thursday, “nobody.” But Gingrich’s tempered phraseology this week about “relatively few people that go to work” does bear a relationship to reality. The problem is that it’s just not the reality of today.

Starting in the mid-sixties, the welfare rights revolution did, in fact, turn poor neighborhoods into places where it was possible for mothers to live on welfare indefinitely. This also meant that fathers were not obliged to work steadily to support children. Growing up in such neighborhoods, one was exposed to full-time work as an option rather than as a necessity. The result was a crippling of work ethic, and multigenerational dependence on the government.

Prior to the 1960s, despite the rule of racism, poor black neighborhoods didn’t have this problem. In Indianapolis in 1940, 9 in 10 black people worked. In Chicago in 1950, almost all black people worked. But then welfare became a commonplace instead of a last ditch safety net. Poor people were encouraged to sign up for welfare and it worked, as I have written about here and elsewhere.