In April 1967, Robert Kennedy went to Mississippi as part of a series of hearings around the country to build support for the reauthorization of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964—the war on poverty. Mississippi had the largest Head Start program anywhere. It was widely heralded in the civil rights and antipoverty world, but it was in deep political trouble. The law gave the federal government the power to bypass any governor who refused the federal money and award it directly to nonprofit organizations. That had happened in Mississippi, and the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM) was the result—a twenty-one-county program that for a time was the largest employer in the state. Nor was CDGM just big; its leadership and many of its employees were veterans of the civil rights movement. Governor Paul B. Johnson Jr.—who had succeeded the better-known Ross Barnett—was furious and enlisted the state’s powerful senators to pressure President Lyndon B. Johnson to cut off CDGM’s funding. Kennedy went to Mississippi to show support for CDGM.
But the trip turned out to be about something else entirely: children, thousands of them, hungry to a point very near starvation. Why? To put it simply, the white power structure in Mississippi—conscious of what the recently enacted Voting Rights Act of 1965 might do to their hold on the heavily African American state—was trying to drive out as many African Americans as possible. A number of factors had come together. The previous year, Congress had extended the minimum wage to farmworkers. Nationwide, only the largest 1 percent of all the nation’s farms and only one-third of all farmworkers were affected, but a disproportionate number of those farms were in Mississippi. At about the same time, machines to pick the cotton had become available, and chemicals to kill the boll weevils instead of going after them by hand had also come into greater use. Consequently, the marginally more expensive farm labor could be dispensed with and those who lived on plantations could be evicted.
Their incomes gone, the families had nowhere to turn. Welfare—though it was a pittance then, as it is now—was totally unavailable to two-parent families, which the affected families overwhelmingly were. Surplus commodities, formerly available pretty easily, were being replaced by the recently enacted food stamps program, then a small-scale initiative that was reaching barely 2 million people nationally but had been put in place widely in most of Mississippi. The surplus commodities were less than palatable—the wheat and bulgur were often maggot-infested and hardly enough to live on—but you could get them by going to a warehouse near the train station and they were free.
In contrast to such access, to obtain food stamps one had to go to an office and apply to welfare functionaries who were hostile to the new program in general and to African American applicants in particular. Even more important, one had to pay for the food stamps, a charge that had a big effect on participation in every place where the change in programs occurred. The fee schedule began at zero income with a charge of $2 per person in the family. People with a zero income—thought by the bureaucrats at the Department of Agriculture in Washington to be a purely hypothetical category—actually did exist in Mississippi.
The result—with no jobs, no welfare, no surplus commodities, and no food stamps—was widespread hunger and severe malnutrition. Kennedy and the other senators were accompanied by Daniel Schorr and his CBS cameras on a trip to the Mississippi Delta to see for themselves children with swollen bellies and running sores on their arms and legs that did not heal—and the entire nation saw that evening what Kennedy had seen earlier that day. (Civil rights lawyer Marian Wright, my future wife whom I had met just three days earlier, served as his guide.)
Kennedy was deeply moved and outraged. His children remember him telling them at dinner the next night that they had to make themselves a part of doing something about this—a rare outburst in a house where the expectation of public service usually went without saying. The very next day, he went to see Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman. I was there when he bluntly told the former Minnesota governor and early backer of his brother John F. Kennedy for president, “Orville, you’ve got to get some food down there.” Freeman responded by changing the requirement that families with no income had to pay for their food stamps, a step that was within his power to take without amending the law. It was a small first step, but symbolically a very large and important one.
Kennedy put relieving hunger at the top of his list. His suggestion led to the Field Foundation (which was founded by the liberal New York branch of the Chicago retailing family and went out of business in 1988) sending a group of physicians to Mississippi to examine hundreds of children and to document the degree of their malnutrition. When their report came back with shocking data on the incidence of exotic diseases like marasmus and kwashiorkor as well as rickets and other indicia of severe malnutrition, he arranged a Senate hearing to which he invited Mississippi’s senators, who actually showed up. Senator John Stennis was embarrassed, enough so that he proposed an emergency appropriation of $10 million.
Kennedy also got a friend at CBS to commission a documentary. Completed following his death, it showed a child dying on camera in a San Antonio hospital after being born severely malnourished. Jamie Whitten, the powerful Mississippi congressman who chaired the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, unleashed an investigation of the film to find out whether its stories had been staged. The documentary, shockingly stark, was definitely effective.
Kennedy told me to look into the scope of the problem around the country, and we found out quickly that serious hunger was not confined to Mississippi. He assigned me to work on setting up more trips to help him focus the country’s attention on the extent of the problem. We looked at both South Carolina and eastern Kentucky. His friend Senator Ernest “Fritz” Hollings of South Carolina begged him not to publicize the shortcomings of that state and promised to take leadership on the issue (which he did do after Kennedy died). Kennedy did not go to South Carolina, but he did go to eastern Kentucky, where he was followed by a massive press posse, given that the trip occurred in February 1968, when speculation about whether he would run for president was at a fever pitch. Having advanced the trip carefully before deciding finally to go, we found exactly what we knew we would find: there also was a most serious hunger problem in eastern Kentucky.
We traveled across a stretch of communities, holding hearings in one-room schoolhouses, a high school gymnasium, and a college auditorium, and visited families in their homes, hearing of people’s struggles firsthand. The basic problem was that the closing of the coal mines had left thousands with no income from work. Welfare was limited to single-parent families and was a pittance in any case, and food assistance was spotty at best. Many families had left for points north in search of a better life, but that could not be a solution for everyone. Representative Carl Perkins had steered various job-training programs to the region, and the favored few survived by participating in successive trainings. For the most part, though, the feudal sway of the local political barons and their cronies left ordinary people on the outside looking in. As in Mississippi, politics had a great deal to do with the widespread incidence of egregious hunger in Kentucky.
That was the last trip Kennedy was able to make; he jumped into the presidential race in March and was killed in June. But he had launched a process that proved to be enormously successful. Senator George McGovern picked up the mantle, becoming chair of a newly minted Special Committee on Hunger and Malnutrition. The Field Foundation’s financing of advocacy continued as well, with a Citizens Commission on Hunger report that attracted wide attention. President Richard Nixon—prodded by his first secretary of agriculture, Clifford Hardin, a former president of the University of Nebraska and a longtime advocate against global hunger—sent to Congress the first-ever presidential message on hunger. (President Johnson, spiteful because it was Robert Kennedy who had brought the problem to national attention, had refused to do anything on the issue.)
Fritz Hollings kept his promise. It was most likely not an entirely selfless act, but it was important regardless of his motives. Southern Democrats were in something of a bind. In the wake of the Voting Rights Act, they needed an issue (if they could see beyond the end of their noses) with which to appeal to the African American vote without losing the white vote. They couldn’t embrace civil rights legislation directly, but feeding hungry people would be all right. Hollings took a hunger tour of South Carolina and pronounced himself appalled (as he no doubt was) by what he had seen.
Hollings needed to convince his fellow southerners that it was in their interest to act. The southern members of Congress controlled the Agriculture Committees on both sides of the Hill, bodies through which any legislation to alleviate hunger would have to pass. Had they decided to play the race card and stand in the way, it would have been difficult to get a bill enacted; pressed by Hollings, however, the committees acted—led in particular by Senator Herman Talmadge of Georgia, the chair of the Senate committee and a die-hard segregationist (in contrast to the more moderate Hollings). Civil rights would ultimately hand the South to the Republicans, but responding to hunger may have slowed arrival of the day of reckoning because it helped attract African American voters to go to the polls and vote for the Democrats.
None of the movement forward was automatic. Senator McGovern’s special committee held hearings around the country and issued numerous reports that received extensive publicity. By 1971, legislation creating national standards for the program and limiting the purchase price for the stamps to 30 percent of a family’s income was enacted. Further legislation in 1973 (after Senator McGovern had been the 1972 Democratic candidate for president) required that the program become national by July 1, 1974. This was extremely important because rural counties in many states across the country had up to then refused to have food stamps in their domains. The final building block, a 1977 law passed at the initiative of President Jimmy Carter, eliminated the purchase requirement, so that stamps would be issued based simply on a family’s income.
Support for food stamps has until now been bipartisan throughout the history of the program, with Senator Bob Dole of Kansas the most notable Republican advocate. When President Ronald Reagan and Senator Jesse Helms proposed deep cuts to food stamps in 1981, Dole’s leadership in the newly Republican majority Senate was the key to stemming the tide, although dramatic cuts were made nonetheless. Significant cuts—$27 billion over the first six years—were again made in the 1996 welfare law, and only about half have been fully restored. By contrast, President George W. Bush supported the program to a surprising extent, one of the reasons the rolls increased while he was in office even before the recession. But now we see House Republicans trying to turn the program into a block grant—in effect cutting benefits by capping them—just when SNAP (just to reiterate, the current name for food stamps) has been a lifeline to millions.
SNAP is unquestionably a successful public policy story. Its original expansion and maturation to nationwide status under a Republican president is a case study in effective advocacy. It provides a small underpinning of income to those who have no other income, and it is an important income supplement for struggling low-wage workers. It brings almost all poor people together within a single benefit structure and has also now proven itself to be a powerful tool to cushion the devastating force of our Great Recession.
Why is SNAP such a success, especially in comparison to welfare? For one thing, fighting hunger is more attractive politically than handing out cash. It has more instinctive appeal and tends to assure voters that the aid is less likely to be abused. Beyond that, nearly every antipoverty success over the past half century has marched under a banner other than fighting poverty: health care, housing, education, the elderly, child care—and hunger. I am quite aware of my earlier statement declaring my displeasure with the absence of leaders like Robert Kennedy and Paul Wellstone who stand up and say unequivocally that poverty is unacceptable. But in our current political world, it works better to call it by other names.
The political decision of the Bush administration to support food stamps is a perfect example of this. The Newt Gingrich–Rudy Giuliani camp had denounced food stamps as “welfare” and set out to destroy the program (an attitude that has resurfaced in the current Tea Party–driven House of Representatives). The Bush-Bloomberg camp embraced it as “nutritional assistance” and worked to expand it, with Bush giving bonuses to states that enrolled more people. This support was in part the doing of Eric Bost, a Texan close to President Bush and the undersecretary in charge of the program at the Department of Agriculture, but it also shows that nomenclature matters.
Of course, the whole food stamp story is also deeply rooted in the self-interest of groups with political clout. The food industry supports food stamps. Farmers, processors and manufacturers, and grocers have all supported food stamps (although farmers—wanting to preserve their own subsidies—have been less supportive in recent years). This kind of backing is not invariably a guarantee of success, but it does always help, and in the case of SNAP—along with the moral sense that no one should go hungry—it has definitely worked.
We could start a history of poverty policy with the Bible, and of course some of the key building blocks of our federal safety net, patchwork though it is, were enacted as part of the New Deal. But if our mission is to understand why it has been so hard to reduce poverty further since it reached its historic low of 11.1 percent in 1973, our discussion should begin with the 1960s. In a very real sense, the 1960s were the beginning of the modern American history of antipoverty policy and, concomitantly, of the modern American history of the politics of poverty. Most of us remember Reagan’s declaration that “we fought a war on poverty and poverty won.” Fewer are aware that the poverty rate actually dropped spectacularly in the 1960s, going from 22.4 percent in 1959—the first year for which we have poverty statistics—to the 11.1 percent of 1973.
There were millions in poverty in the 1930s because the economy had collapsed. There were still millions in poverty in the 1960s, albeit fewer millions, but it was now poverty in the midst of plenty, a novel American phenomenon. Initiatives to deal with that poverty were a new venture.
With the advent of the 1960s, we turned a page—one that had begun to turn with the Brown v. Board decision in 1954 and the first highly publicized student civil rights sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, in early 1960. Spurred by the civil rights movement, Americans began to develop an awareness of the inequality in their midst, not only racial inequality but also inequality of income. John F. Kennedy’s campaign in West Virginia is said to have opened his eyes to white poverty, and Michael Harrington’s now-classic The Other America captured a surprising degree of attention.
Newly in office as the attorney general, Robert Kennedy installed his high school friend David Hackett in an office opening directly into his and charged Hackett with developing a program to reduce juvenile delinquency. The cadre of experts Hackett assembled from inside and outside the government developed key aspects of what became the war on poverty, with White House involvement increasing in 1963 and the White House taking over the planning after President Kennedy’s assassination. At the last Cabinet meeting before he was murdered, Kennedy is said to have been doodling the word “poverty.”
President Johnson dragooned Kennedy’s brother-in-law R. Sargent Shriver to take over the responsibility, assigning to him the tasks of getting legislation drafted and of setting up the new agency, all without leaving his already demanding position as director of the Peace Corps. After a frenetic six weeks of effort, the bill was sent to Congress in March 1964. On August 20, President Johnson signed into law the Economic Opportunity Act, and implementation of it followed at a similarly dizzying pace. The war on poverty was of course not a single program but an array of individual programs, each of which required major effort to make it operational.
To those involved, the new law was truly a war on poverty, and confidence abounded that it was a war that would be won (putting aside our unfortunate American penchant for calling major initiatives “wars”). Objectively, it was not a war but rather a collection of skirmishes, although it is also true that the energy it unleashed created an important sense of empowerment in low-income communities and helped produce a new generation of leaders who went on to hold public offices and to stay involved civically throughout their lives—important outcomes that should not be minimized.
At its heart, the war on poverty was a strategy of opportunity and support services of various kinds—a basket of programs to mold children, youth, and young adults into capable people who could function successfully in the job market and be good citizens. It was coupled with legal services to challenge practices both private and public that victimized the poor and also with health clinics to improve access to medical care. And it was topped off by a dash—a highly controversial dash, as it turned out—of community organizing to help the poor gain political efficacy to improve their lives, both personally and communally. It was not focused directly on creating jobs and raising incomes. The theory of the case was that the tax cut of 1964 would warm up the economy and create the necessary jobs.
Signing the Economic Opportunity Act, President Johnson said, “[T]he measure . . . offers the answer that its title implies—the answer of opportunity. For the purpose of the Economic [Opportunity] Act of 1964 is to offer opportunity, not an opiate.”1 Nor was President Johnson obfuscating the facts. The strategy of the war on poverty was primarily one of opening the door of opportunity to all Americans.
Head Start was the positive poster child of the poverty war, the one piece that Reagan deemed acceptable. Not surprisingly, Americans have instinctive sympathy for a program that gives young children a “head start” in being prepared for school. There were politicized critiques of particular local programs, as in Mississippi, but they disappeared as time passed (although significant questions about the quality of some local programs are still extant). The good news about Head Start now is that it reaches about half the eligible children in the country; of course, the fact that it reaches only half is also the bad news.
The negative poster child of the poverty war was community action, an alternative human-service delivery system based in low-income neighborhoods to serve their residents. A key idea behind it—that the people who would benefit from it would have a major say in its operation—was idealistic. Its core organizational point was that traditional social service agencies had too often drawn a red line around low-income neighborhoods, especially neighborhoods of color, and would not serve those who lived there. The new local agency would receive funds directly from the federal government, bypassing city hall. Its governance was to involve the “maximum feasible participation” of the poor to avoid capture by local political bosses who might see a new opportunity for patronage or revenue.
Many mayors and other elected officials were infuriated. New federal money was coming to town, and they had no say in how it was spent. In some places, community action agency staffers took residents downtown to voice their grievances at city hall, often not at all decorously. Nor did the backlash come only from public officials. Landlords bridled at rent strikes organized by community action employees, and growers saw the hand of antipoverty activists in fomenting dissent among migrant farmworkers.
Congress responded by amending the law to permit mayoral or county government control of the community action agencies, and the confrontational behavior quickly ended. Nonetheless, it was the early missteps of some local community action agencies that gave the entire program a bad name.
Trouble also came for the federal funding of lawyers who represented poor people and their organizations in civil cases against state and local governments, agribusiness and landlords, and even the federal government itself. That the program—reframed in 1974 as the Legal Services Corporation—still exists, albeit with less funding and subject to restrictions on the categories of cases its lawyers can handle, is largely attributable to the staunch support over the years of the American Bar Association.
The rest of the war on poverty was, in the main, less controversial. Job Corps is now funded at about $1.7 billion annually. It is expensive because it is a residential program, but it is widely regarded as worthwhile. VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) experienced controversy in the 1960s because of the activist behavior of some of its volunteers, but it nevertheless became a component of the AmeriCorps program enacted at the behest of President Clinton. Upward Bound and Foster Grandparents still operate and are very popular. The Community Health Centers program, now based in the Department of Health and Human Services with an annual budget in excess of $2 billion, enjoys broad bipartisan support.
So the “war on poverty” was not an all-out war on poverty, nor would it have been even if it had been funded at levels far beyond those of the 1960s. Many of its programs were excellent and did make a great difference in the lives of millions of people, but it was not a strategy that could ever have come close to eradicating American poverty.
What about President Johnson’s Great Society, which dwarfed the war on poverty in size and scope? When we talk of the Great Society, we are talking about Medicare, Medicaid, the historic civil rights laws of the period, federal aid to education, housing and community development programs, employment and training programs beyond Job Corps, and more. The list includes far-reaching accomplishments that have been critically important for low-income people.
The 1960s were truly a historic decade of progress on civil rights and poverty. President Johnson deserves great credit for what was done under his leadership; second only to Abraham Lincoln, he was our greatest president on civil rights. His achievements with regard to poverty are very important, too, although sullied in the eyes of many by the weakness of his response to the underlying causes of the unprecedented civil unrest that swept the inner cities of the country throughout his presidency.
When all of its programs are added in, can we say that the Great Society amounted to a war on poverty? After all, poverty was cut in half between 1959 and 1973. Why did poverty drop so impressively in the 1960s?
Although the Great Society is certainly part of it, the answer is complicated. So is the broader historical framework. The economy had boomed since World War II. There had been some inflation and a couple of recessions, but the postwar period was truly a time when a rising tide lifted all boats. The real incomes of people at the bottom, including minorities, grew. Union membership exceeded 30 percent of the workforce. There had been trepidation that the demobilization of the war effort would create economic slack, but meeting pent-up housing and consumer needs at home and postwar reconstruction abroad kept things humming. The war-torn economies of other nations left the United States facing little competition on the global playing field. The GI Bill pumped money into higher education and also created opportunities. Women who had worked in the war plants obligingly returned to homemaking, and men were in general able to support their families with the income they brought in. But not everyone benefited. The poor were out there; they just needed to be seen.
The economy was in a slack period when President Kennedy was elected, but the generally upward trajectory of the postwar years was still operative. Civil rights and antipoverty advocacy began to intersect, as civil rights activists realized that having the right to sit at a lunch counter didn’t mean a person had the money to pay for a meal. The March on Washington in 1963 was a March for Jobs and Freedom. The main grievance of the civil unrest that swept the nation’s inner cities was about jobs. The Poor People’s Campaign that Dr. King was leading when he was murdered was a campaign for economic justice. The civil rights and antipoverty legislation of the 1960s, together with movement advocacy and changing public attitudes, opened labor markets to African Americans and others who had been left behind by the rising tide.
The powerful civil rights laws, especially the ban on employment discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, were instrumental in opening employers’ doors. Big-city mayors—pressured by activists and organizers (some of them employees of community action agencies)—hired large numbers of people of color. African American poverty fell from 55.1 percent in 1959 to 33.5 percent in 1970. The improved employment results contributed to that change, along with the increased wages of workers who had migrated from the rural south to the urban north and west.
The opening of the welfare rolls was another major factor. The number of people on welfare went from 3 million in 1960 to 8.5 million in 1970, an increase that substantially augmented family incomes in many states and contributed to the reduction of poverty. Welfare did not raise a family’s income above poverty by itself, but it could bring a partial check to supplement a low-wage job and could add to the resources of an extended family. It contributed particularly to the reduction of African American poverty, because African Americans had been disproportionately denied assistance over the years. Coupled with a robust jobs policy, welfare is a necessary element of an antipoverty strategy, and what happened in the 1960s is an apt illustration of this point.
The civil rights movement and community action activists stimulated, directly and indirectly, the formation of a welfare rights movement, which in turn reached low-income mothers and inspired them to march on welfare offices and demand assistance. In some cities, welfare bureaucracies were newly responsive because their mayors were feeling political pressure. The new cadre of legal services lawyers advised people that qualifying applicants had a legal right to receive benefits and went to court when welfare officials did not respond. The advice was validated when the issue reached the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren in 1968. In the first case about welfare to reach the court in the thirty-three years of the law’s existence, the court ruled that the Social Security Act did indeed provide a legal entitlement to help.
The near-tripling of the welfare rolls in one decade occurred mainly because there was a large backlog of women—disproportionately African American—who had always been eligible for benefits but who had been turned down in a world in which welfare officials were regarded as having total discretion to help or not as they deemed. Unfortunately, though, the welfare agencies’ liberalized according of cash assistance did not include much help for women to get jobs and get off the rolls once on. As a result, the newly enlarged rolls stayed large, and the political backlash against welfare that brought the Reagan cuts of 1981 and eventuated in the welfare law of 1996 began.
If the programs of the 1960s do not add up to a war on poverty or account by themselves for the big drop in poverty during that decade, does adding in everything else that has been enacted between 1935 and the present add up to a coherent set of policies to fight poverty, a serious “war on poverty,” if you will?
The answer is “yes,” but it is a heavily qualified yes. The American framework is a patchwork, not a coherent weave of policies, but it contains important pieces that do make a big difference. The programs do not follow a blueprint. They were enacted in fits and spurts beginning in 1935 and continuing to the present day. Some of what we have is excellent public policy, yet there are also enormous gaps. Unlike the Europeans, who are much more systematic in their approaches, we have done well in some areas but horribly in others.
The elderly are viewed as the most deserving and so are cared for the best in our public policy, although Social Security and Medicare are under attack now. The disabled have achieved a status as modestly deserving, we might say. People who have children and work at poorly paying jobs get some help. Children are nonetheless the poorest age group because too many of their parents cannot find full-time work or have no job at all and are seen in our politics as undeserving, especially if they are single mothers. Working-age nondisabled adults who have no children (or no custodial children) have always been seen as the least deserving, although single mothers with children are hardly the “apple of America’s political eye,” so to speak.
If there is an impression that the New Deal and the 1960s were the Golden Age after which we stopped creating public policy helpful to low-income people, it is quite wrong. The Nixon period was one of extensive legislation to help low-income people (in a time when Congress was controlled by the Democrats), including a proposal he made for a guaranteed minimum income for families with children that was not enacted. President Reagan is not an exemplar of concern for low-income people, but, even so, he signed a tax reform bill that relieved millions of low-income people from paying federal income taxes (a provision that is now, ironically, the subject of a Republican backlash) and also signed major Medicaid expansions every year from 1984 through 1988. The first Bush administration saw significant child care legislation, and President Clinton achieved a major expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and enactment of the Children’s Health Insurance Program (as well as the more controversial 1996 welfare law). And of course President Obama secured passage of a truly historic health care law that adds 16 million low-income adults to Medicaid.
So we have accomplished a great deal. But there are two huge fissures in our national income support structure and a number of other gaps we must fill. One is the enormous hole in our response to the 20.5 million people who have incomes below half the poverty line (although our help to people between 50 and 100 percent of the poverty line is hardly adequate). The second is the inadequacy of the support we offer to ensure that low-wage workers receive a living income. There is much more, of course, going beyond weak policies about income—a criminal justice system that incarcerates too many in general and especially locks up people of color, a continuing shortfall in our attention to the inner city and suburban and rural areas of concentrated poverty, and the still-elusive goal of giving every child a quality education.
Nevertheless, before we turn to a discussion of where we went wrong, it is vital to understand what we have done well. The framework we have, flawed as it is, kept some 40 million people out of poverty in 20102—close to 20 million from Social Security alone.3
Still, our politics have reflected a continuing “yang” from the right ever since the “yin” of President Johnson. In 1991, the first President Bush chose the venue of a commencement address at the University of Michigan (where LBJ had made his Great Society speech in 1964) to contrast Johnson’s Great Society with his own idea of a “good society.” Bush characterized the Great Society as involving “huge and ambitious programs administered by the incumbent few.” He declared that President Johnson had “believed that cadres of experts really could care for the millions and they would calculate ideal tax rates, ideal rates of expenditures on social programs, [and] ideal distributions of wealth and privilege.” But, Bush continued, “No conclave of experts, no matter how brilliant, can match the sheer ingenuity of a market that collects and distributes the wisdoms of millions of people all pursuing their destinies in different ways.” 4
Johnson’s actual remarks back in 1964 had been, however, quite different. In fact, poverty was not his sole or even his major focus, and big government was definitely not his solution. He had said, “The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use . . . [our] wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization. . . . [T]he Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.” After enumerating a series of problems needing national attention, including poverty as one item in a lengthy list, Johnson had concluded, “The solution to these problems does not rest on a massive program in Washington, nor can it rely solely on the strained resources of local authority. They require us to create new concepts of cooperation, a creative federalism, between the National Capital and the leaders of local communities.”5
Bush’s words decades later were just another stanza in the ever-echoing conservative refrain of failed big government. The conservative mantra since 1964 has been one of constant attack on big government and on assistance to low-income people (especially welfare) as promoting dependency. Their platform has stressed transfer of federal programs to the states with reduced funding and no accountability, privatization of the operation of publicly funded responsibilities such as corrections, application of market models generally, volunteerism, charity, and faith-based programs. And of course the so-called wars on crime and drugs have produced a rate of incarceration that tops the industrialized world and disproportionately chews up the lives of African American and Latino men.
Even with the Reagan budget cuts of the 1980s and the shifts in the economy that widened disparities in income, we ended up in the year 2000 in about the same place as we had been in 1973 as far as the national numbers on poverty and achieved progress on the overall numbers for poverty among minorities and single mothers with children. The outcomes have been more troubling with regard both to criminal justice and to welfare policy and in inner-city neighborhoods and rural and other high-poverty areas. And we are far from where we should be as a nation. The reasons why are a toxic pool of economic facts and nasty conservative politics, bubbling into the current of Republican resolve to defeat President Obama regardless of the damage it wreaks on the economy.