War on Poverty

6 Key excerpts on "War on Poverty"

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  The War on Poverty

  A New Grassroots History, 1964-1980

  • Annelise Orleck, Lisa Hazirjian(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • University of Georgia Press

    (Publisher)

   THE War on Poverty: HISTORY AND MEMORY Professional historians have until recently paid little attention to the transfor-mation of the American welfare state between 1964 and 1980 or to its impact on political engagement by the poor. This omission resulted in part from left-wing and liberal ambivalence toward the War on Poverty. Progressives in politics and academe, some of whom had been community organizers in the 1960s and re-membered their personal as well as political disappointments with federal anti-poverty programs, wrote little about those programs after the early 1970s. Most preferred to examine the grassroots social movements of that era as if they had operated completely independent of government aid. Early in the twenty-first century, a new generation of historians began pre-senting research suggesting that the War on Poverty had wrought important and lasting changes, generating mixed responses from progressive historians. With an edge of irony but also palpable discomfort, one activist-historian quipped, “You mean I have to start saying nice things about the War on Poverty now?” Scholars old enough to remember the 1960s and 1970s had almost reflexively criticized the War on Poverty for its failure to engage in large-scale job creation, for the willful refusal of its planners and key offi cials to address the feminiza-tion of poverty, and for the willingness of Beltway-based offi cials to turn the administration of local poverty programs over to local elites. While such criti-cisms were wholly legitimate, progressives’ widespread dissatisfaction with the cautiousness of the War on Poverty resulted in a gap in historical scholarship. Important exceptions of course existed. Most notable was Michael B. Katz, whose decades of work on poverty history provided the foundation for most of the authors whose work appears in this volume. Nancy A. Naples offered impor-tant evidence of the key role played by poor mothers in community organizing.

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  Who Cares?

  Public Ambivalence and Government Activism from the New Deal to the Second Gilded Age

  • Katherine S. Newman, Elisabeth S. Jacobs(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  Most of the programs that constituted the War on Poverty emphasized instead state investment in human capital, coupled with a legal assault on discriminatory practices. This outcome was a consequence of a battle between two opposing perspectives, outlined cogently by political scientist Judith Russell. 12 Fiscal Keynesians, led by Walter Heller, believed that appropriate economic policy would stimulate growth and that this, combined with appropriate human capital investment and anti-discrimination enforcement, would permit the persistently poor (who were disproportionately black) to claim their fair share. Structuralists, like Willard Wirtz in the Labor Department, disagreed and advocated a more interventionist policy of job creation. The latter lost and the former won. Hence, what we owe one another—Johnson explained in this speech and elsewhere—is not equality of outcomes or economic security through federal job programs or free health care for all but rather the chance to reach one’s full potential. Johnson formally introduced the War on Poverty to Congress in his 1964 State of the Union address with a set of arguments intended to make it clear that this effort would count as a success when every American had the tools, not necessarily the goods. 13 “This budget and this year’s legislative program,” the president explained, “are designed to help each and every American citizen fulfill his basic hopes.” And what were those hopes?. . . a fair chance to make good; his hopes for fair play from the law; his hope for a full-time job on full-time pay; his hope for a decent home for his family in a decent community; his hopes for a good school for his children with good teachers; his hopes for security when faced with sickness or unemployment or old age. Our task is to help replace . .. despair with opportunity. This administration, here and now, declares unconditional War on Poverty. . .

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  The Welfare Debate

  • Greg M. Shaw(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  the rise and fall of the War on Poverty 65 wrote, a “timid call to arms.” 6 Liberals and conservatives alike pointed out the limited and sometimes ineffective nature of federal efforts during the 1960s to address the multifaceted problems of health care, employment, education, hous- ing, and other issues. President Johnson explicitly and appropriately portrayed poverty as a cluster of problems, not simply a lack of money; but the administra- tion also proved its unwillingness to engage the poor on their own terms, instead wringing its hands in the wake of urban riots and noisy protests. The optimism that marked the early 1960s, generally, and the opening vol- leys of the War on Poverty, specifically, would, within a few years, give way to pessimism, disillusionment, and confusion over both the ends and means of fighting poverty. The consensus that seemed so solid a few years earlier would have its many cracks revealed, troubles over race being only one of them. As the consensus historians of the midtwentieth century had underestimated sub- terranean conflicts over some fundamental issues, the War on Poverty did not adequately appreciate the profound misgivings on various sides that would rise to the surface once again during this period of the welfare debate. THE ORIGINS AND DECLARATION OF THE War on Poverty In the early 1960s, the rediscovery of poverty, a faith in the power of the modern state to confront a wide range of problems, and a sufficiently liberal policy orientation among those in government converged to make a significant effort against poverty possible, even if short-lived. Leveraging the power of the market, it was widely thought that government could suc- cessfully tackle a set of problems as large as poverty and much of what goes with it. Complementing this, there was a pervasive belief in government that the science of policy analysis could crack the nut that was persistent poverty and bring about a Great Society.

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  Issues in American Political Life

  Money, Violence and Biology

  • Robert Thobaben, Charles Funderburk, Donna Schlagheck(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 1 The Politics of Poverty and the Welfare State

  DOI: 10.4324/9781315663753-1

  “The poor ye have with ye always.” The belief in the inevitability of poverty is embedded in American culture and history. The question of which government policies and programs will best address the problem of poverty in America is part of a more fundamental debate over whether the government should help the poor at all. The notion that the national government should be involved in large-scale attempts to combat poverty is a relatively recent idea.

  Sources: The Welfare State in America

  Historically, poverty in America has been regarded not as a social problem but as a manifestation of individual weakness, moral deficiency, and shiftlessness. This is a reflection of American religious, cultural, and political traditions. The prevailing American ideology of liberal capitalism, in combination with the Protestant ethic of self-reliance, produced a highly individualistic political culture. Individuals were perceived as free to make choices, to pursue material self-interest, and to be held accountable for the choices they made. The primary role of government was to protect life, liberty, and property. The economic well-being of society was presumed to result from the interplay of competition and self-interest within the market economy. Impersonal economic forces interacted with talent and labor to produce a class structure in which some became rich, some were merely comfortable, and some remained poor. One’s place in the class structure was presumed to reflect individual motivation, industry, and achievement. Hard work was rewarded by success; idleness and indolence were punished by poverty.

  Given this cultural heritage, it is not surprising that government assistance to the poor was deemed unnatural and undesirable. Historically, aid to the poor was a local task divided between charities and local government programs. State governments began to take a more active role in the latter half of the nineteenth century after industrialization, urbanization, and immigration created widespread conditions of congestion and squalor. Even so, prior to the Great Depression, state policies “consisted of a patchwork of very limited assistance in a few states and no aid at all in others.”1

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  The Cultural Rights Movement

  Fulfilling the Promise of Civil Rights for African Americans

  • Eric J. Bailey(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  In fact, a war against poverty was launched with the view that, in but a few years, the condition would be eradicated. The War on Poverty is the name for legislation first introduced by President Lyndon B. Johnson during his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964. This legislation was proposed by Johnson in response to the difficult economic conditions associated with a national poverty rate of around 19 percent. The War on Poverty speech led the U.S. Congress to pass the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, a law that established the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to administer the local application of federal funds targeted against poverty. 10 Congress Member Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. One of the most fascinating aspects of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 was the hearings before the subcommittee on the War on 38 The Cultural Rights Movement Poverty Program of the Committee on Education and Labor. The com- mittee, which debated the need for this new bill—H.R. 10440, was presided over by the Hon. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Before becoming chair of one of the most powerful and influential House of Representatives subcommittees, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., became the first African American elected to Congress from New York, a position he held between 1945 and 1971. As one of only two black congress members, Powell challenged and boycotted many discrimina- tory practices. For example, in Harlem, Powell organized mass meetings, rent strikes, and public campaigns, forcing companies, utilities, and Harlem Hospital to hire black workers. He organized a picket line during the 1939 New York World’s Fair at the executive offices in the Empire State Building, which resulted in the increased hiring of black employees from about 200 to 732. 11 Thus, as his career illustrates, Powell became an ideal chair to preside over the bill that was designed to mobilize the human and financial resources of the U.S.

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  A Decade of Federal Antipoverty Programs

  Achievements, Failures, and Lessons

  • Robert H. Haveman(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  Richard Rose (London: Macmillan, 1974); Anthony King, Ideas, Institutions, and the Policies of Governments: A Comparative Analysis: Parts I and II, British Journal of Political Science 3, part 3 (July 1973): 291-313. In one field, public education, and especially public higher education, the United States has led other Western countries. 6 2 Marris and Rein, Dilemmas of Social Reform, p. 34. Social I Political Context of the War on Poverty 47 that were grossly inflated; hence it is easy to feel that the Great Society failed. And yet, consider how different the world seems now, after these programs came to be. For all their problems, Medicare and Medicaid are permanent parts of the landscape. They may be added to or revamped, but not abolished. Again, the world may be a different place because of the civil rights laws. The War on Poverty is also hard to assess. A general assessment of (say) CAP does not mean that specific programs in specific cities were not highly effective. The legal profession will surely never be quite the same after the government poured money into poverty law; the neighborhood law offices must have had a real impact, not only on the legal profession, but also on the lives of countless people. 63 One lesson of the 1960s is that we know very little about poverty and society. The Kennedy people thought the Eisenhower years were empty and static because Eisenhower ignored the insights of the best and the brightest, relying on men with narrow business minds. The fact was, the experts knew very little themselves; sociologists and psychologists knew next to nothing; social work specialists knew even less, and there were not enough to go around anyway. The economists knew something, but it was less than they thought. The lesson was expensive; but even a discovery of what fails to work against poverty, is valuable.

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