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Thanks so much. Hey, it's Chrissy. This is the uncertain hour.

If you've been listening to our whole season,

you'll know last episode was about the maze of work requirements.

Darnetta Harris had to contend with to get welfare benefits.

All that red tape she had to wade through that was monitoring whether or not she was doing the

labor she'd been told to do in order to get government help in a time of need.

Now we're asking how that work requirement system came to be.

Not just for Darnetta, but for people across the country,

which is why uncertain hour producer Peter Ballon on Rosen went searching for one of America's

first examples of a welfare to work system and found himself in Newberg, New York.

I visited Newberg, New York on a chilly week at the end of November.

It's a small post-industrial city about an hour north of New York City.

You take a ferry across the Hudson River from the closest train station to get there.

And just like that river, Newberg itself has ebbed, flowed, and changed.

Wilbur Higgins grew up in Newberg, a quiet kid who liked math.

One day at the end of the 1950s, Wilbur was heading home from elementary school when these people

caught his eye. Point men going up and down his street, carrying clipboards, knocking on doors,

...