The War on Poverty
During the prosperity immediately following World War II, poverty essentially disappeared from the political radar screen. Suburbanization and affluence were the watchwords, and the average American forgot that significant poverty existed in the United States. But in the heightened political consciousness of the 1960s and the Civil Rights Era, Americans rediscovered our poverty. Michael Harrington's
The Other America—graphically describing poverty in our country—symbolized that renewed concern and was itself part of the political process that birthed the Great Society Programs under President Lyndon B Johnson.
The
War on Poverty, as Johnson called it, aimed to eradicate poverty in the United States. It was a time of national self-confidence: if we could put a man on the moon, surely we could end poverty. The "bifurcation of welfare into social insurance and public assistance" codified in the 30s, however,
trapped the architects of … Johnson's Great Society who wanted to wage war on poverty. For it ruled out any serious attempt to redistribute wealth, guarantee incomes, or tamper with the structure of American capitalism. … Unwilling to explain poverty as an inescapable consequence of American political economy, they had two alternatives. One was to place the blame squarely on individuals and to redefine poverty as evidence of moral or intellectual incompetence. The other was to see it as the result of artificial and unjustifiable barriers … inimical to the open and competitive structure of American life. In practice, explanations drifted between both poles.26
Johnson's programs were grandly conceived, creating a significant increase in spending for social welfare. Unfortunately, the War in Vietnam intervened, and funding for almost every program conceived was severely limited. According to Katz, the Office of Economic Opportunity (the hub of the War on Poverty) received less than 10% of the most conservative estimate of what it needed to reach its goals. According to Michael Harrington, "It never cost even one percent of the Federal budget and never reached the 'takeoff' point that is normal in most Federal programs."
Despite these limitations and despite some spectacular failures, there were important successes in the War on Poverty. Headstart, Legal Aid, the Job Corps, Medicaid, Medicare, Food Stamps and other major programs largely succeeded in their aims despite (with the exception of Medicaid and Medicare) inadequate funding. The common wisdom that the Great Society programs failed simply does not match the evidence of their successes. What
is true about this common wisdom was that poverty increased during the period of the Great Society programs, largely due to massive economic shifts against which the inadequately funded War on Poverty was helpless.
Footnotes
26 Ibid, pp. 259 & 263
