War on Poverty
The "War on Poverty" refers to a set of initiatives launched in the United States during the 1960s, primarily through the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, aimed at reducing poverty and promoting economic opportunity. This initiative emerged in response to the insights of social scientists and activists who highlighted the systemic barriers faced by impoverished communities, as well as the persistent existence of poverty amidst national affluence, notably articulated in Michael Harrington's book, *The Other America*. The War on Poverty emphasized the importance of local community involvement in developing and implementing poverty alleviation programs, fostering the concept of "maximum feasible participation" from those affected.
Led by President Lyndon B. Johnson, the initiative gained support from various political and social groups, including civil rights organizations, labor unions, and urban mayors. However, it faced criticism for not adequately addressing deeper structural issues such as low wages, racial discrimination, and the impacts of deindustrialization. While the War on Poverty led to significant social programs that improved living conditions for many Americans, it was often viewed as insufficient in scope and funding, particularly in light of concurrent spending on the Vietnam War. Ultimately, the War on Poverty had lasting implications for social policy and political dynamics in the U.S., influencing subsequent approaches to poverty and social welfare.
War on Poverty
A set of social and urban programs initiated during Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency. Although these program never received more than a small percentage of the Johnson administration’s social welfare budget, they attracted a great deal of public attention and helped to transform the racial politics of a number of American cities.
Origins and History
Defined largely by the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, the War on Poverty was intended to promote opportunity, stimulate community action, introduce new social services, and expand transfer payments. The idea had both intellectual and political origins. In 1960, socialist Michael Harrington published The Other America, demonstrating the persistence of poverty in the supposedly affluent society. Social scientists such as Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin began to reevaluate social policy, arguing that poverty and social disorder stemmed from blocked social and economic opportunities in poor communities, created in part by overly bureaucratic service institutions such as schools, welfare agencies, and the police. Local institutions and the poor needed to be brought together in order to better coordinate antipoverty efforts.
Attracted by this theory of blocked opportunity, Attorney GeneralRobert F. Kennedy enlisted Ohlin’s help in running the President’s Commission on Juvenile Delinquency in 1961. This commission generated the basic concepts behind the War on Poverty in particular, the idea that the poor would participate in the formulation and administration of local programs (community action). Along with the promotion of opportunity through education and job training, this idea community action became the heart of the War on Poverty.
The Civil Rights movement also helped put the issues of poverty and community action on the national agenda. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders began to argue that economic opportunity and political equality were of a piece. Throughout the urban North, meanwhile, local African American activists led protests against job and housing discrimination, urban renewal, police brutality, and inadequate and paternalistic local public service bureaucracies. Community action seemed to have a local constituency ready to reform the social welfare establishment. An antipoverty proposal submitted to the Johnson administration in late 1963 called for a series of local federally funded demonstration projects that would accumulate knowledge about how to coordinate and implement local poverty wars. This proposal became the basis for the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which created the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to administer community action. The phrase “maximum feasible participation” of the poor, contained within Title II of the legislation, caused little debate; Johnson and Congress assumed that despite the language of community action, local officials and politicians would run the new programs. OEO officials and local community activists had other ideas.
The Economic Opportunity Act faced little opposition in Congress or elsewhere initially. The legislation was strongly pushed by the Johnson administration and was supported by liberals, labor unions, civil rights organizations, and by Democratic city mayors who hoped to use the new money and programs for political gain. Johnson, a great admirer of president Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal social programs, hoped to use the War on Poverty and his later Great Society legislation to step out from the political shadow of his martyred predecessor and extend Roosevelt’s legacy.
Criticism of and opposition to the War on Poverty and in particular the Community Action Programs developed quickly. OEO administrators took “maximum feasible participation” seriously and held local Community Action Programs to strict representational guidelines in late 1964 and early 1965. Although the overwhelming majority of local programs remained in the hands of of city hall and established agencies, in a number of cities, both the OEO and local activists combined to challenge social and political power. Led by Chicago’s Richard Daley, urban mayors mostly Democrats began to put pressure on the Johnson administration in the spring of 1965 to roll back what they saw as overzealous OEO bureaucrats. Conservative Republicans and southerners in Congress began to criticize the OEO and held hearings to publicize abuses of power and wastes of federal money at the local level. The War on Poverty also received criticism from black and white leftists, who argued that the OEO and its programs ignored the structural issues of low wages, deindustrialization, and racial discrimination in unions and employment, in favor of a focus on participation, culture, and human capital.
Increasingly concerned about the Vietnam War and a potential voter backlash against social programs and urban riots in the 1966 congressional elections, which did in fact occur, Johnson reigned in the OEO. In late 1967, Congress passed the so-called Green Amendment to the Economic Opportunity Act, giving local mayors the option of taking over local community action agencies. “Maximum feasible participation” of the poor was all but dead by the end of 1967. Although social spending increased significantly during the Johnson years, the War on Poverty was never more than 1 percent to 2 percent of the federal budget. The financial and political costs of the escalating war in Vietnam ensured that the War on Poverty was never more than a mere skirmish.
Impact
Although community action garnered most of the headlines, the various social programs of the Johnson administration had a significant impact on the lives of many Americans, poor and not poor. Community action helped give rise to a new cadre of African American political leadership in the urban North and to a variety of locally based efforts to affect social service delivery and economic development. The expansion of public assistance and the creation of new “in-kind” social services (food stamps, legal assistance, health care, Head Start) greatly reduced malnutrition and infant mortality among the poor. However, most of the Johnson administration’s social spending (Medicare and the expansion of Social Security and unemployment compensation) primarily benefitted those who were not poor, the elderly in particular. As critics at the time noted, the War on Poverty and Johnson’s social legislation generally did little to address issues of employment and income redistribution, preferring to take the politically expedient route of relying upon equal opportunity and economic growth to alleviate poverty. In the end, Johnson and the Democrats paid a high political price for a poverty war that was oversold, underfunded, and ultimately inadequate; the election of 1968 marked the beginning of a conservative Republican ascendancy in national politics, caused in part by a backlash against the perceived liberality of federal programs and the “ungratefulness” of rioting blacks.
Additional Information
For an overview of the origins, successes, and failures of the War on Poverty, see Michael Katz’s In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (1986). Two classic studies of the Community Action Programs are Daniel P. Moynihan’s Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty (1969) and David Greenstone and Paul E. Peterson’s Race and Authority in Urban Politics: Community Participation and the War on Poverty (1976).