RESIDENT RONALD REAGAN FAMOUSLY quipped that the nation fought a war on poverty and poverty won. This summary judgment assented to without reservation even by many liberals is far too harsh. Through the War on Poverty and Great Society, the federal government helped millions of Americans find medical care, food, housing, legal aid, early childhood education, and income security at a level unprecedented in America’s past. Poor Americans also helped themselves. The day-to-day War on Poverty took place at the grassroots in the complicated interactions among activists on the ground, local officials, and the federal government. Many of the gains wrested with great difficulty in these years remain in place today. The War on Poverty and Great Society did not eradicate poverty in America, but during the years when the programs flourished, poverty dropped to its lowest recorded point in the nation’s history. At the same time, through these programs many poor and minority women and men gained at least limited power over institutions and programs that affected their lives and were set on the road to new careers. In these programs lay the origins of the black middle class and political leadership that expanded in the decades to come.1
The idea of a comprehensive assault on poverty had been formulated by President John F. Kennedy. On November 23, 1963, the day after Kennedy’s assassination, President Lyndon Johnson met with Walter Heller, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, and instructed him to continue planning the anti-poverty program. Johnson used the phrase “unconditional war on poverty” for the first time on January 8, 1964, in his State of the Union message. On February 1, he appointed Sargent Shriver, director of the Peace Corps, to direct the new anti-poverty program. For two years, he directed both agencies—highlighting the ideas and strategies shared by international and domestic development activities in the 1960s.2
Shriver, along with a planning committee that drew members from various branches of the federal government, developed a strategy for the program and drafted the Economic Opportunity Act (creating the OEO), passed by the Senate on July 23, 1964, and by the House on August 8. President Johnson signed it into law on August 20. At the same time, President Johnson attacked other problems, including poverty among the elderly, the lack of health insurance for old people and the very poor, and substandard housing through a dazzling array of new programs loosely grouped under the banner of the Great Society.
For its model, the poverty program located in the Office of Economic Opportunity drew heavily on Mobilization for Youth, a comprehensive program in New York City organized to combat delinquency by boosting poor minority youngsters over the structural barriers to social mobility. Mobilization for Youth influenced the formulation of the War on Poverty through the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency (PCJD), which adopted many of its ideas, especially its emphasis on the role of blocked opportunity and the importance of community participation, and hired some of its key staff. Economists, the new monarchs of public policy analysis, also played pivotal roles through their novel tools and macroeconomic theories about growth and underdevelopment, which they applied to both foreign and domestic policy.
The poverty war focused on programs to promote opportunity in four areas: juvenile delinquency, civil rights, job training, and education. Without doubt, the most popular, and many would argue the most successful, was Operation Head Start, which funded preschool education for poor children. The most controversial aspect of the program was community action—the requirement in Title II of the Economic Opportunity Act that the new community agencies created to receive and administer federal anti-poverty funds be “developed, conducted, and administered with the maximum feasible participation of the residents.” Historians are still unpacking community action’s complicated origins and rescuing its legacy.
Histories of the War on Poverty disagree about the relative influence of ideas, bureaucratic politics, and political strategy. Was the War on Poverty guided by a coherent response to the nature of inequity and deprivation in American society? Or did it emerge from a struggle for power among federal agencies and between old-line bureaucrats and the new administration? Was its driving force compassion for the poor, or the need to win black votes and quell the riots in America’s cities?
It is possible to write a history of the early War on Poverty that stresses the primacy of ideas and goodwill. By the early 1960s, the story would begin, politicians influenced by the small but growing literature on poverty in contemporary America had determined to attack the remnants of destitution in the land of plenty. It is also possible to write about the poverty war as the outcome of bureaucratic maneuvering. Within the federal administration, at least four agencies—the President’s Commission on Juvenile Delinquency, the Council of Economic Advisors, the Labor Department, and the Bureau of the Budget—jockeyed to shape and control the new initiative. In the same years, the Social Security Administration quietly pressed for one incremental benefit expansion after another, with the result that benefits increased dramatically. It is similarly possible to portray the poverty program and the expansion of social benefits as a response to great social and political forces: the migration of southern blacks to northern cities and the civil rights movement, or as a way to meet the political needs of the Democratic Party and assuage the unrest within America’s cities.
All these stories are correct. The history of the poverty program is incomplete without any one of them. The difficulty is assessing their relative weight and combining them into a coherent explanation.
Some common stories about the poverty war’s origins apparently are apocryphal. John F. Kennedy did not read Michael Harrington’s The Other America and suddenly declare war on poverty. A long essay on poverty in The New Yorker by Dwight Macdonald, which reviewed The Other America, exerted a greater impact than Harrington’s book on Kennedy and his advisors. Also influential was John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society, which stressed increased investment in the public sector and in other unmet social needs such as relief of poverty. Cloward and Ohlin’s opportunity theory of delinquency (described later in this chapter) influenced the initial design of the program, and echoes of the culture of poverty thesis also ran through early discussions, even though Oscar Lewis and his writings apparently played no direct part. Nor should we forget that anti-poverty measures did not form an explicit part of Kennedy’s early urban policy. Indeed, the war on poverty, influenced especially by Homer Bigart’s articles in the Herald Tribune on rural Kentucky, at first tilted strongly toward Appalachia.3
The poverty program also drew on ideas formulated by reformers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At a 1973 conference of former poverty war officials at Brandeis, David Austin, who had served as planning director of the Cleveland Demonstration Project funded by the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, recalled: “There’s been a long tradition … based … on an assumption that essentially the poor, in many cases seen as immigrants, essentially were to be helped up and into a stable position in society by the down-reaching hands of the well-to-do and the intellectuals.” The reforms of the 1960s, he thought, represented “a rediscovery of many of the innovations of the progressive era, had many of the same characteristics and in the end were influenced very much by the same scientific philanthropy, which strongly emphasized professionalism, social theory and the idea of incorporating the poor into society without disruption and on an individual case basis.”4 In the tradition of American liberalism, early poverty warriors defined reform as education, not redistribution, and focused their slim resources on the individual rehabilitation of poor people.
In part, the formulation of the poverty program was also an exercise in bureaucratic politics, with William Cannon of the Bureau of the Budget mediating among contending units within the Executive Branch. In fact, one of the poverty war’s most contentious phrases, “maximum feasible participation,” emerged from bureaucratic compromise among the program’s planners. Richard Boone had wanted to use the word “involvement,” which others found too strong. “To my knowledge,” Boone remembered, “at that point and thereafter for some time—at least in our circle-the-word ‘control’ was not mentioned. It wasn’t part of that vocabulary. It was ‘involve’ and ‘participate.’ Those were the two terms that were used and the compromise was ‘feasible.’” Another and more serious conflict erupted over the location of the National Youth Corps and Job Corps, both of which Willard Wirtz believed to have been delegated to the Department of Labor by a “treaty in advance.”5 Bureaucratic politics also shaped anti-poverty programs at the great foundations. At the Ford Foundation, for instance, Paul Ylvisaker wasn’t “altogether happy” with “that bag of opportunity theory which Pat [Daniel P.] Moynihan and others take off so much at—there’s a kind of an ideology to it.” Nonetheless, a common goal motivated foundation staff: “what always bound us together … we could forgive each other our theology if we knew that we were in the same rag-tag group who were taking on the establishment.”6
Political concerns also fueled and directed the early poverty program. According to William Capron, former official of the Council of Economic Advisors and Bureau of the Budget involved in the planning and administration of the War on Poverty and Great Society programs, Kennedy “was persuaded politically that, having made his major ‘63 domestic program a tax cut which helps the middle and upper income people, that the next piece had to be something to help people that [sic] didn’t have enough income to pay taxes.” None of the former federal officials who gathered at the 1973 Brandeis conference to discuss the poverty program dissented from Capron’s reminiscence, or, for that matter, from each other’s enumeration of influences and tales of bureaucratic compromise. They did, however, disagree sharply about the role of the civil rights movement and race.7 In part, the disagreements reflected the diverging perspectives of those inside and outside the administration, whose different views have shaped interpretations of the War on Poverty since early in its history.
Disagreement centered on the political impact of racial issues, for no one disputed the impact of demography on reshaping America’s cities. More than any other single development, in the late 1950s and early 1960s the massive migration of southern blacks to northern cities framed the formulation of both urban and anti-poverty policy. Distinctions between the situation of earlier European immigrants and contemporary black migrants underpinned Cloward and Ohlin’s interpretation of delinquent subcultures. The culture supposedly brought by black migrants shaped Moynihan’s interpretation of black family structure and the mechanisms by which it helped perpetuate poverty.
The impact of migration likewise determined Paul Ylvisaker’s strategy for urban policy at the Ford Foundation: “I came to that sudden perception of the city as the magnet and passage-point of great migrations,” he remembered. “It was … for me an intellectual breakthrough … But at the same time it was also strategic because if you could conceive of an overarching process within which one could deal with the Verbotens of race relations and so forth, and where you weren’t talking black immediately, which raised all the hackles, then you had much more chance of getting a program accepted.”8
Consensus on the intellectual and strategic role of black migration did not reflect agreement on the more direct links between race, politics, and social programs. Did Kennedy and then Johnson plan their attack on poverty in response to mounting black protests? Were the War on Poverty and Great Society devices for cementing black loyalty to the Democratic Party? Opinions among those connected to policy at the time differed sharply. Adam Yarmolinsky, Shriver’s deputy in planning the poverty program, denied the role of political concerns not only in the early War on Poverty, but in the Kennedy administration’s stance on civil rights, which was “99 and 33/100 percent noblesse oblige” with “no concern whatsoever about holding the black vote, about an upsurge of revolt of the masses.”9
Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, the two participants at the conference least connected to actual federal policymaking, argued the opposite case. Warning against a view of history in which “the main actors were some intellectuals and some bureaucrats,” Cloward reminded other participants of the events surrounding the initial discussions of anti-poverty policy in 1963: the Birmingham civil rights campaign; the March on Washington in August; the bombings in September. Throughout, Kennedy commissioned “various groups within the administration to study black unemployment and to come up with plans and so forth in order to begin to respond to what were very large political forces particularly within the Democratic party that were being activated and radicalized to some extent by the civil rights movement and by the insurgency that was beginning to take form in the cities.” William Capron, referring to the Council of Economic Advisors, conceded: “We saw, literally, the March on Washington and that sure didn’t do anything to cool us off on pushing this embryonic program.”10
Yarmolinsky disagreed. “During the late winter, spring and early summer of 1964,” he asserted, “we were concerned with explaining to the Congress and the public that the poverty program was in no sense a help-the-blacks program, and not only were we saying this, but we didn’t think it was.” In fact, planners expected the poverty program to offer “very little for blacks” because “Most poor people are not black, most black people are not poor,” to cite one slogan that Yarmolinsky repeatedly inserted into speeches. In 1964 OEO “hadn’t the faintest gray tinge to it. If anything, color it Appalachian if you were going to color it anything at all.”11
Capron, disagreeing with Yarmolinsky, distinguished between political rhetoric and intellectual understanding. The reelection campaign of 1964, he recalled, was much on their minds: “We knew that it would be death … to bill any kind of program as a help-the-blacks program. But that doesn’t mean that we didn’t realize that this program was very important in terms of the black vote … Now, we did not articulate it that way … But we did understand that this was an important part of what was going on.”12 On occasion, the poverty program’s supporters dropped their reticence about race. In April 1964, at a symposium on integration, Shriver linked the struggle against poverty to the civil rights movement as “all part of the same battle,” and explained that in the congressional floor debates, the Economic Opportunity Act “sometimes was regarded as but the logical counterpart of the Civil Rights Act which had just been passed in June.”13
At the roundtable on the War on Poverty, Piven emphasized that she and Cloward were not claiming that blacks were the only concern of the Kennedy administration. But, she contended, the poverty program represented in part a strategy of political mobilization designed to ensure Democratic electoral success. Documentary evidence clearly showed the prominence of black votes among the administration’s priorities. Because black allegiance to the Democratic Party had weakened, even in 1960 Kennedy showed concern for the black vote. She pointed to his “famous call to Mrs. Martin Luther King, followed by massive pamphleteering about that fact in the ghettos.”
Piven failed to convince David Hackett, former executive director of the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, who countered, referring to his program: “We would have run it completely different [sic] if we had followed your thesis. If it had been a political program and if the administration wanted to cater to the black vote, we would have done it completely different [sic] … We did it completely the opposite way.”14
Nonetheless, Piven continued to press the impact of race and politics on the poverty program. All the morning’s speakers, she pointed out toward the end of the discussion, had talked about “very large developments in American society having to do with race, with class and with politics.” However they evaluated them, “we’ve raised again the question that no one wanted to discuss, which is the relationship of the specific federal programs to very broad social, economic and political developments in American society in the 1960s. That relationship, it seems everybody was saying today, did exist.” In the end even Yarmolinsky agreed: “I guess I’m also agreeing with Frances,” he conceded in his closing remarks, that the poverty program “was in part a response to profound … social movements in the United States. All I was saying earlier was that it was not … a concession by the executive committee of the ruling class to the rising demands of the masses.”15
In part, the argument had revealed inevitable differences in perspective: outsiders (Cloward and Piven) stressed context; most insiders (former federal officials) remained preoccupied with the day-to-day process of policymaking and the politics of bureaucracy. Outsiders focused on broad social and political goals; insiders defended their motives. No one, it should be stressed, denied the influence of racial politics on the poverty program after 1964. They disagreed, rather, about its origins.
In The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964–1980, Annelise Orleck and Lisa Gayle Hazirjian side with Piven and Cloward. “The War on Poverty has usually been seen as distinct from the southern civil rights movement,” they write, “but the two historic movements were inextricably tied together.”16 They remind readers that when President Johnson described his vision for a Great Society at the University of Michigan in May 1964, “he did not shy away from acknowledging that the effort formed part of a struggle for racial justice. He evoked a future of ‘abundance and liberty for all’ Americans, ‘an end to poverty and racial injustice.…’ Johnson was speaking, they underscore, “after a decade in which hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children had put their bodies on the line to end a century of legal segregation; less than a year after a quarter million marchers had listened to Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.…” In one way or another, all the essays in Orleck and Hazirjian’s book show the intersection of the poverty war with civil rights activity in communities throughout the country.17 In rural Mississippi, for example, the Child Development Group of Mississippi, recounts Amy Jordan, “a network of child care and educational centers and one of the most controversial programs to emerge from the Community Action Program of the War on Poverty, began as a hopeful outgrowth of the movement schools established during the 1964 Freedom Summer campaign.”18 In Memphis, writes Laurie B. Green, the organizers of the Memphis Area Project, a War on Poverty program, viewed “the antipoverty struggle as a continuation of the black freedom movement.…”19 Robert Bauman excavates the story of three women in Los Angeles who made “signal contributions” to the city’s War on Poverty. All three had “long and consistent connections to civil rights and social service organizations, giving them experiences that informed their leadership of community organizations during the War on Poverty.”20
The insiders had based their case on narrow grounds that ignored the intertwining of civil rights and powerful grassroots mobilizations unleashed by the War on Poverty. Although no spokesperson for the civil rights movement joined the discussions that shaped the poverty program,21 the image most insiders tried at first to convey—an intelligent, well-meaning circle of white male federal officials uninfluenced by the racial struggles (and oblivious to the gender issues in poverty) headlined in newspapers across the country—remains implausible, as in the end even the most intransigent insider agreed. Nonetheless, despite its often narrow focus, the insiders’ account remains crucial because it describes the complex process by which the anti-poverty initiative moved from impulse to federal program, and without which it cannot be understood. Their perspective also illuminates key strategic decisions: Why did the administration locate the poverty program in a separate agency? Why did it label it a war?
Lyndon Johnson placed his poverty program in a new federal agency and called it a war. Neither decision represented his only alternative. He could have spread anti-poverty funds throughout existing federal departments and used his office to stimulate and coordinate new programs. He also could have promised less than total victory or framed the program in terms of inequality, income, or—for that matter—race. His choices carried profound consequences. As a separate agency, OEO remained both visible and vulnerable—a target for both Congress and a sometimes hostile public—and the federal agencies bypassed in its creation. It lasted only a decade. As an unconditional war, the poverty program raised expectations that even an adequately funded and redistributive initiative could not be expected to meet within a few years. Its own overblown promises became a principal factor in the disillusion it aroused among contemporaries and the unfavorable verdict rendered by many of its historians. That said, it is important not to blame the victim. Proclaiming war on poverty was a brave, unprecedented act on the part of an American president, an expression of optimism, faith, and idealism rarely encountered among politicians. It must be remembered that the poverty war fell short of its goals not just on account of its internal weaknesses but, as well, because the Vietnam War robbed it of necessary resources and because of the political backlash its successes provoked.22
In part, the War on Poverty seemed to its planners to require a separate federal agency because its projected budget was so low. As President Kennedy thought about the 1964 campaign, he planned the War on Poverty and the tax cuts as his major domestic program, William Capron remembered. And although it was not clear what the dimensions of the program would be, the sum of available money was so small that his advisors realized, according to Capron, “if you threw this into the existing bureaucracy … it was political suicide … it would be clear to everyone that it was nothing, that it was just window dressing.”23
The poverty program also required a new agency because it assumed the inertia and incompetence of the agencies that existed. Anti-poverty strategists within the Kennedy and early Johnson administrations lacked confidence that existing federal departments could create bold and effective programs. Two alternatives emerged. The first, favored by Hackett and his associates in the President’s Council on Juvenile Delinquency, was to expand the PCJD model. That meant an independent staff with money for experiments backed by the power of the president. Shriver chose a different course. He so distrusted the Department of Labor that he insisted the Job Corps be run from within the Office of Economic Opportunity. By repeating the pattern with every major OEO initiative, Shriver surrendered the possibility of reforming departments and programs within the federal government. Hackett recalled with regret that each OEO program had been built outside the system. Manpower programs, for instance, operated outside the Department of Labor; Head Start never confronted “the educational system head-on.” Therefore, OEO never accomplished any basic reform in the agencies of the federal government.24
For William Cannon at the Bureau of the Budget, the “key decision” in the early anti-poverty initiative was the adoption of the designation, War on Poverty. The Bureau of the Budget opposed the label because it raised unrealistic expectations about the amount of money available for the new program. Nonetheless, during the Christmas holiday in 1963, Johnson decided to call the anti-poverty program a war. He chose the language deliberately: “The military image carried with it connotations of victories and defeats that could prove misleading. But I wanted to rally the nation, to sound a call to arms which would stir people in the government, in private industry, and on the campuses to lend their talent to a massive effort to eliminate this evil.” As David Zarefsky notes in his excellent analysis of the poverty war’s rhetoric, the military metaphor solved important political problems confronting Johnson and facilitated the passage of the Economic Opportunity Act. For one thing, it responded to the national mood after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. “Aroused by President Kennedy’s untimely death,” asserts Zarefsky, “many Americans longed for redemption through sacrifice.”25
As an issue, poverty also helped the new president with delicate problems of image. Johnson needed to establish a national identity and create a positive impression by shedding his image as a Texas conservative. He also faced the task of managing the “transition between his caretaker role after the Kennedy assassination and his own presidency.”26 For this reason, he needed a program that appealed to Kennedy’s supporters but had not yet been publicly labeled a Kennedy effort.
Because poverty had not yet become an important national concern, Johnson began a rhetorical campaign to alter public opinion in which the military metaphor, announced in his 1964 State of the Union message, played an important role. The metaphor of unconditional war aroused national interest and participation and placed the administration in a moral position that opponents attacked only at great risk. “When a nation is at war,” points out Zarefsky, it has “acknowledged the existence of a foe sufficiently threatening to warrant attack.” Characterizing opponents as “almost treasonous,” the war metaphor “served as a unifying device, rallying the nation behind a moral challenge.”27
The military metaphor proved to be brilliant political strategy. Other metaphors for the poverty program would have failed to mobilize public opinion, or aroused even more hostility among conservatives. Robert Lampman, for instance, advised Walter Heller in 1963: “Probably a politically acceptable program must avoid completely the use of the term ‘inequality’ or of the term ‘redistribution’ of income or wealth.” As the military metaphor fueled the passage of the Economic Opportunity Act, it aroused the sympathy of the nation. It also aroused its expectations, which proved a huge risk for an underfunded program addressing a massive and historical social problem with little theory and no proven methods.28
The War on Poverty began with a structural analysis and ended up with a service-based strategy. How did this happen? As David Austin reflected in 1973, “The issue is really why a service strategy when you had a structural diagnosis.” Although the most influential analyses of poverty stressed its roots in unemployment, federal anti-poverty planners deliberately avoided programs whose main purpose was to create jobs.29 Nonetheless, as we shall see, the poverty program and Great Society sometimes deliberately, sometimes as a by-product of their other activities, created many jobs.
In his economic report for 1964, Lyndon Johnson summarized the problem of poverty in America in structural terms. His presentation drew on the detailed second chapter of a report by the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA), written primarily by Robert Lampman, an economist from the University of Wisconsin and an expert in poverty statistics.30 Using the most detailed data yet published, the CEA’s report argued that economic growth by itself would not eliminate poverty in America. It anchored poverty in income distribution, employment discrimination, and inadequate transfer payments by government, and it proposed a comprehensive program for its reduction. “By the poor,” asserted the report, “we mean those who are not now maintaining a decent standard of living—those whose basic needs exceed their means to satisfy them.” It also firmly rejected explanations based on character or heredity: “The idea that the bulk of the poor are condemned to that condition because of innate deficiencies of character or intelligence has not withstood intensive analysis.”31 Those in poverty lacked “the earned income, property income and savings, and transfer payments to meet their minimum needs.” Many employed people earned inadequate wages, while other poor people could not work on account of “age, disability, premature death of the principal earner, need to care for children or disabled family members, lack of any saleable skill, lack of motivation, or simply heavy unemployment in the area.” For others, low pay reflected racial discrimination or “low productivity” that resulted from inadequate education and skills.
Property and savings income were most important for the elderly, but many had earned too little to save, and about half of them had no hospital insurance. Without such transfer payments as existed, many more families would have been poor. Nonetheless, only half the poor received any transfer payments at all, and the most generous payments (private pensions and Social Security) offered the least help to those employed irregularly or in the worst-paying jobs. Aside from earnings, poverty’s roots, according to the report, lay in a “vicious circle.” Poverty bred poverty because of “high risks of illness; limitations on mobility; limited access to education, information, and training.” As a consequence, parents passed on their poverty to their children. With discrimination often an insurmountable barrier, escaping poverty proved nearly impossible for “American children raised in families accustomed to living on relief.”32
Despite its structural diagnosis, the Council of Economic Advisors laid the foundation for a War on Poverty based on economic growth, civil rights, and new social and educational services designed to equalize opportunity. The CEA report revealed the hallmarks of American liberalism in the 1960s: an uneasy mix of environmental and cultural explanations of poverty; a continuation of the historic American reliance on education as a solution for social problems; trust in the capacity of government; and faith in the power of experts to design effective public policies. The council stressed removing handicaps that denied the poor “fair access to the expanding incomes of a growing economy” and introducing new federal programs “with special emphasis on prevention and rehabilitation.” As for jobs, the council urged their indirect creation through a tax cut that would stimulate the economy.33 In fact, as historian Alice O’Connor tells the story in Poverty Knowledge—her indispensable history of social science, social policy, and poverty in the twentieth century—the CEA, drawing on recent economic theory, confronted “an alternative analysis of unemployment that threatened to stop the high-growth agenda before it got off the ground. This analysis, increasingly popular among economic conservatives as well as left-liberals in the labor movement, held that unemployment was a ‘structural’ rather than an aggregate growth problem and hence would not respond to the simple solvent of more growth.” Labor stressed “[s]tructural change, technology, and, especially, automation” as “responsible for persistently high unemployment rates” that “threatened to render industrial, low-skilled, and, especially, minority workers unwanted and obsolete.” This version of a structural diagnosis of poverty received strong support in 1958 from the noted economist John Kenneth Galbraith in his book The Affluent Society and in 1962 from the famous Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal in Challenge to Affluence, which proposed a “Marshall plan to eradicate poverty.” It found support as well in Michael Harrington’s The Other America.34 At the same time, points out O’Connor, “focusing on automation, labor market exclusion, and racial exploitation as primary causes of poverty, influential leaders within the civil rights movement were also articulating a more structural concept of poverty in the early 1960s, building toward their own version of a ‘domestic Marshall Plan’ that would come to include job creation and income guarantees as well as more specifically race-targeted measures to combat segregation, discrimination, and the absence of capital in black urban communities.”35
In 1961 the CEA saw its “immediate challenge” as disproving this version of a “structural unemployment analysis altogether, quashing the idea that it was impossible or undesirable to reduce unemployment without a direct government role in creating jobs.”36 In this task, O’Connor reports, they found support in a new economics that combined an updated Keynsianism, which stressed the use of “government policy to stimulate faster economic growth and full employment” with the emphasis on market forces among neoclassic economic theorists and human capital theory, which implied that the “gains made by American workers… should be understood not as the product of institutional factors such as unions, government policy, or firm practices, but as market returns to individual investments. Similarly, individual skills and behavior, not institutional practices or sociological factors, could explain both differences in earnings and why people were poor.” Adding to economic theory was the “increasing emphasis on mathematical theory and quantification, spurred along by expanding computer capacity and by sophisticated econometric” methods that supposedly lent economics scientific precision. This new economics, O’Connor stresses, gave liberals “a powerful analytic and institutional platform from which to wage a national campaign against poverty” by making “the struggle against poverty compatible with lightly managed, if not free-market, capitalist growth.”37
In its emphasis on growth, the CEA reflected the ubiquity of the idea of growth in post–World War II America. Growth was the magic elixir that would permit the improvement of living standards for all Americans, indeed for the whole world, without economic redistribution. “Rapid economic growth, it was felt,” claims political scientist Alan Wolfe, “could expand the pie sufficiently so that it would not have to be cut in a different way.… Growth was … transpolitical.”38 It is hard to overestimate how pervasive this idea became in the decades following the war, giving liberals the means to serve progressive goals without adopting the social democratic models gaining traction in Europe. The consequences for policy were immense, and, when the idea proved a delusion, tragic for the boats that did not find themselves buoyed by a rising tide. “Growth,” claimed Andrew L. Yarrow in Measuring America: How Economic Growth Came to Define American Greatness in the Late Twentieth Century, “was a magical word, carried from the economics profession to the broader public. It was a proxy for progress, and the creator of abundance and better living.” Yarrow’s JSTOR analysis of major economic journals found that the number of articles including the term “economic growth” skyrocketed from 226 in the 1940s to 2,980 in the 1950s and 6,788 in the 1960s.39
The decision by the Johnson administration to back away from direct job creation reflected practical politics as well as the new economics, with its emphasis on reducing unemployment and poverty through growth. An early poverty warrior, Adam Yarmolinsky, remembered, “You ask yourself, do you concentrate on finding jobs for people or preparing people for jobs. There our tactical decision was let’s concentrate first on preparing people for jobs.” The strategists thought the 1964 tax cut would create jobs; they believed poor people needed a long process of job preparation; and they knew that “it was less expensive to prepare people for jobs than to create jobs for people.”40
Like other domestic and international policies of the era, this strategy assumed the continuation of growth and abundance: an anti-poverty plan that stressed increased educational opportunity and work preparation depended on the continued expansion and easy availability of jobs. Because growth would stimulate demand and enlarge the available rewards, the eradication of poverty required no painful reallocation of money and power. In the buoyant economy of the early 1960s this analysis still remained plausible, and an analysis of poverty as primarily a problem of employability reasonably could result in a relatively cheap public policy directed toward equalizing education and job preparation.41
Not all members of the administration agreed, however. The Department of Labor, led by Secretary Willard Wirtz, proposed a poverty program that stressed employment. Wirtz’s objections drew on the Labor Department’s commitment to macroeconomic policies based on reducing unemployment, where necessary, through public employment. In 1961 Arthur Goldberg, then secretary of labor, advocated a Full Employment Act of 1961, and Wirtz continued to press this Labor Department position. He “violently attacked” the CEA report, which was “published over his strenuous objection.” In a memo to Theodore Sorenson, who had circulated a proposal for a poverty program, Wirtz emphasized, “The Poverty Program must start out with immediate, priority emphasis on employment [italics in original].” Because poverty “is a description of income,” he argued, the major “single immediate change which the poverty program could bring about in the lives of most of the poor would be to provide the family head with a regular, decently paid job.” Job creation did not depend solely on direct action by the federal government. The attack, Wirtz believed, should be launched principally at the local level, because “the private forces are stronger than the public [italics in original].” The tax bill was “an anti-poverty bill, probably the principal weapon we have.” Nonetheless, the problem of unemployment demanded “special programs designed to create useful jobs.” Wirtz, in common with other advocates of a poverty program, also stressed health and education, but his emphasis on job creation set the Department of Labor apart from the Council of Economic Advisors.42
Wirtz apparently persuaded the staff designing the poverty program, because at the last minute it added a job component. Armed with a proposal for a supplementary tax on cigarettes to finance it, Sargent Shriver presented the plan at a cabinet meeting, where Wirtz also argued vigorously on its behalf. President Johnson, however, wanted neither expanded economic transfers nor direct job creation, and he finessed the question of income transfers by appointing a commission. As for the job creation plan, “I have never seen a colder reception from the president,” recalled Yarmolinsky. “He just—absolute blank stare—implied without even opening his mouth that Shriver should move on to the next proposal.”43
Direct attacks on unemployment never had a serious chance of passage in either the Kennedy or Johnson administrations. Kennedy did not appoint the most influential advocate of Keynesian policies, John Kenneth Galbraith, to the Council of Economic Advisors. His three appointees, led by Walter Heller, did not share Galbraith’s interventionist approach. Instead, they stressed aggregate economic objectives, particularly economic growth. Because they believed tax cuts would achieve their goals most efficiently, the focus of the War on Poverty and the Great Society, as Margaret Weir concludes, “shifted from the structure of the economy to the characteristics of the individual, characteristics that training was supposed to modify.”44 By default, the War on Poverty adopted the culture of poverty.
And yet, the War on Poverty and Great Society in fact did create a very large, if indeterminate, number of jobs, a large proportion of which went to minorities. One of its other accomplishments was launching a new African American political and institutional leadership. How did this happen? In part, the answer is found in the jobs provided by new programs directly associated with the poverty war; in part, by the poverty war’s community action arm; and, as well, in the expansion of social services during the Great Society years. Operation Head Start was the most dramatic instance of deliberate and direct job creation by OEO. The next section will take up the community action story and the following section, the expansion of social services.
Gretchen Aguiar’s pioneering research has excavated the role of Head Start in job creation. The story begins with the New Careers Movement led by Frank Riessman, a professor at Bard College, which argued for launching poor people on careers through decently paid subprofessional jobs. NCM stressed employment first, with training on the job. NCM advocates saw in the War on Poverty and its community action arm the perfect opportunity to put its ideas into practice, and it found a favorable reception in the Office of Economic Opportunity. From the outset, the provision of jobs for low income parents, almost entirely women, as teacher aides formed an integral part of Head Start program requirements. In Head Start’s first summer alone, the program employed 100,000 local parents. “In his final report to Congress on Head Start,” Aguiar points out, President Lyndon Johnson “praised this new emphasis on jobs for the poor. Head Start had created ‘many thousands of employment opportunities for poor persons as health, community, and teacher aides. Their successful performance has led to the establishment of similar opportunities in hundreds of public and private agencies.’ Head Start jobs counted as one of the program’s signal achievements.”45 As well as in Head Start, the War on Poverty created jobs through its most controversial and innovative wing—the Community Action Program.
As finally approved by the president, the poverty program linked two major strategies: equal opportunity and community action. As an anti-poverty strategy, equal opportunity stressed improved and expanded services, especially those related to education and job preparation—for example, Operation Head Start for preschool children and the Job Corps for adolescents. (It also led to the unprecedented infusion of federal funds into the schools attended by poor children—a result not of the poverty program itself but of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965.) Community action refers to the active participation of community residents in the formulation and administration of programs. It required the establishment of local agencies to receive and spend federal funds. As a strategy, it deliberately bypassed local political structures, empowered new groups, and challenged existing institutions.
At the outset, the theory that most influenced the poverty program joined opportunity and action in a coherent and novel explanation of juvenile delinquency. Recall the formative influence of the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency on the poverty program. The theoretical base of Mobilization For Youth drew on the work of the famous Chicago Areas Project as adapted by its research directors, Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin of the New York School of Social Work of Columbia University.46 Cloward and Ohlin presented their theory in an influential book, Delinquency and Opportunity, published in 1960. By 1964, the year of the poverty program’s official origin in the Economic Opportunity Act, the book was in its fifth printing.
During the panic over adolescent behavior in the 1950s, individualist and psychological theories had begun to dominate the literature of delinquency. By contrast, Delinquency and Opportunity developed a self-consciously social and cultural approach closer to the criminology of the 1930s and 1940s. Cloward and Ohlin wanted to reinsert delinquency into the social and cultural matrix from which psychological theory had abstracted it.47 Much like Oscar Lewis’s portrayal of poverty, Cloward and Ohlin presented delinquency as a subculture. They differentiated between three delinquent subcultures: criminal, conflict (gang violence), and retreatist (drug-based). They then asked why the prevalence and appeal of these three variants shifted across time.48
Usually associated with males, delinquent subcultures, they argued, concentrated among the lower class, emerged during adolescence, and occurred most often in cities. (Note the irony of drawing on a male model of delinquency to construct a national poverty program when women constituted a huge proportion of the poverty population and, as we have seen, black women were increasingly criticized for their baleful influence on the psycho-social development of black men.) In modern urban America, they believed, unlimited and unrealizable aspirations fueled the practice of placing blame for failure on the larger social order, which in turn reduced its legitimacy and hence its restraining power. The result was an explosive discrepancy between aspiration and opportunity. Delinquent subcultures did not represent alternative value systems; rather, the adolescents within them had internalized conventional goals. Only they faced limits on legitimate means of attaining them. “Unable to revise their aspirations downward,” frustrated adolescents explored “nonconformist alternatives.”49
To account for the relative strength of the variations in delinquent subcultures, Cloward and Ohlin turned to the historical interaction between immigrants and cities throughout modern American history. They argued that in recent decades the bureaucratization of crime, decline of political machines, and slum clearance had intensified political disorganization. At the same time, the most recent arrivals in northern cities, black migrants from the South, confronted unprecedented conditions that blocked group mobility and frustrated historic processes of assimilation. With traditional social structures crumbling and mobility blocked, urban adolescents turned increasingly to crime, conflict, and drugs.50
Although Delinquency and Opportunity offered no policy proposals, the importance of both opportunity and community action was one implicit message. Expanded opportunities would close the gap between aspiration and achievement; empowerment would help combat the subcultures of conflict and retreatism that grew out of hopelessness and despair. Cloward and Ohlin, much like Oscar Lewis, offered a cultural explanation that pointed to the need for a redistribution of power downward and outward to communities of the poor.51
Cloward’s and Ohlin’s stress on community had deep roots in twentieth-century American history. It drew on the traditions of the settlement house movement, which had always encouraged active citizen participation. Early in the twentieth century, Jane Addams, with customary simplicity and eloquence, had stated one premise from which community action eventually grew: “unless all men and all classes contribute to a good, we cannot even be sure that it is worth having.”52 Indeed, as Alyosha Goldstein argues, from the start of the twentieth century through the three decades following World War II, “ideas and initiatives that centered around the idiom of community became especially significant for debates about social and economic equality.”53
Mobilization for Youth illustrated the shift toward a focus on poverty and its consequences as it drew out the implications of Delinquency and Opportunity for opportunity and community action. Its 1962 summary proposal argued, “Obstacles to economic and social betterment among low-income groups are responsible for delinquency.” No effort to prevent juvenile delinquency could succeed unless it offered young people genuine opportunities to behave differently. At the same time, community participation remained critical. For programs to be truly effective, residents must create and participate in them “rather than have them imposed from without by persons who are alien to the traditions and aspirations of the community.” Combatting delinquency therefore required more than the expansion of opportunity: Young people would respond more positively to an adult community that exhibits “the capacity to organize itself, to impose informal sanctions, and to mobilize indigenous resources.”54
Community action infiltrated the nascent War on Poverty through David Hackett, executive director of the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, who, reports Alice O’Connor, “mobilized the juvenile delinquency and urban reform networks to put the idea into the policy pipeline, eventually leaving both community action and the poverty initiative significantly changed.” As a result of his frustration “with the limitations the PCJD was encountering in its efforts to create better opportunities for low-income youth, and particularly with his difficulties in persuading old-line federal agencies to coordinate and concentrate their resources in experimental communities,” Hackett put together an interagency group, which called itself “Hackett’s guerrillas” because of “its aim to shake up the bureaucracy.…” Hackett’s guerrillas drew its members “heavily from the networks that had been forming around juvenile delinquency and urban reform since the late 1950s.”55 Four of the guerrillas, Jack Conway, Richard Boone, Sanford Kravitz, and Fred O’R Hayes, “conceptualized and developed the legislative provisions for the new community action program, including the language requiring ‘maximum feasible participation of the poor.’” The first director of CAP was Conway, a trade union organizer “on loan” from the AFL-CIO. Boone, formerly a Chicago-area police captain, Ford Foundation official, and member of the PCJD, became associate director; Boone’s deputy for research and development was Kravitz, “a social work and planning professional who had staffed the PCJD … Hayes, a budget officer with the Housing and Home Finance Administration at the height of urban renewal, was in charge of CAP operations.”56 Despite their lack of experience with administering large government programs, this initial CAP leadership shared “a history of engagement in community-based reform and a growing conviction that no meaningful change would occur without basic political as well as administrative changes in the local status quo.” In the agency’s controversial 1965 Community Action Workbook, Boone wrote that “the poor need access to power as well as resources.” Nonetheless, the guerrillas also stressed the need for “consensus-building.” The “ideal community action agency,” Conway “spelled out … would operate like a ‘three-legged stool,’ joining public officials, private agencies, and the poor in a planning process.” Built into the simultaneous stress on empowering the poor and working through consensus lurked an explosive contradiction that CAP’s founders chose not to confront until it nearly destroyed the program.57
It is misleading to grant community action too much ideological consistency. For community action emerged in practice as an ambiguous concept whose appeal rested as much in practical politics as in theory. By late 1963, Hackett, Boone, and other community advocates had persuaded administration officials of the value of a poverty program based on community action. Shriver, however, remained unconvinced. He worried about its appeal to Congress and about potential problems in coordinating “agencies, organizations, and disparate interests.” Nonetheless, his resistance wore down, although for exactly what reasons remain unclear.
As Yarmolinsky recalled in an exchange with Arnold Gurin, dean of the Heller School at Brandeis:
YARMOLINSKY: I think I’d have to say that the principal factor was that when someone shows you the stripe down the middle of the road and you’re not going to redefine the road, the chances are you’ll include the center stripe.
GURIN: So it was really that residual?
YARMOLINSKY: It was being pushed very, very hard … There was no one in the room who said, “That is really a bad idea and we oughtn’t to do any of it.” … after the first day, and the first week when no one had said, “Throw it out,” because it was there, we thought about it. We thought about its pros and cons. We didn’t think about it on a yes or no basis. We thought about what it can be… Look, Shriver thought about it, again, primarily as a salesman. I suppose I thought about it primarily as how you would administer it; it was a fascinating administrative problem.58
Within the Kennedy and early Johnson administrations, a group of former federal officials recalled, community action assumed several different meanings. William Capron, for example, stressed the utility of community action as a planning mechanism. He recalled how impressed he and his colleagues were with variations in the “situation in each group of the poor” among and within cities. Because this variation required different mixes of resources, each local group should have “a major say in deciding what their highest priorities were in the way of services.”59 Community action also was a method for encouraging social experiments. Shriver’s principal deputy, Adam Yarmolinsky, for one, saw it “as a way of attempting to test out a variety of solutions to the poverty problem.”60
Community action appealed to federal planners as a technique for coordinating policy. Lloyd Ohlin stressed the need at both local and federal levels for “creating a coordinating structure that could funnel money into the new programs and use that as the carrot to bring programs together.” A community action agency, continued former OEO official Fred Hayes, was a “treaty organization,” an effort to bring the “school system, the city and other interests together in a new structure simply because you had no old ones that were both competent and nonsuspect.”61
For others, community action was a form of social therapy. Community participation overcame anomie and social disorganization by energizing previously apathetic and disaffected poor people to act on their own behalf. At the same time, it promoted the success of new services by capturing the loyalty of the constituents who had participated in their planning and implementation. This was the meaning of community action in the settlement movement; it was implicit in Delinquency and Opportunity (whose authors taught in a school of social work); and it wafted through federal planning for the poverty program. William Cannon, formerly of the Bureau of the Budget, recalled that one “version [of maximum feasible participation] was the fact, almost in psychology, that you don’t get programs well done unless you have the participation of those people who you were delivering them to.”62
Community action had a practical appeal as well. It was a cheap strategy for attacking poverty. William Capron recalled that officials within the Bureau of the Budget knew the administration would appropriate little new money for the anti-poverty initiative, and they groped for some way to focus limited funds on a highly visible program. Clearly, a negative income tax, which Budget Bureau officials would have preferred, remained “ahead of its time.” Instead, they looked for a “cheap program” that “would show us ways to get … lots of federal dollars.” For this reason, “community action struck us as very attractive.”63
Finally, community action offered a way to attack the rigid, self-protective, unresponsive, interlocking federal and local service delivery network. The heart of the War on Poverty was an institutional critique rather than a program. Community action was the method for “shaking the system” and forcing change on reluctant school administrators, welfare and employment service officials, and even settlement houses and Community Chest leaders, what Yarmolinsky called the “board ladies” and the “bureaucrats.” Federal poverty warriors expected to build an alliance between mayors and poor people. They believed (naively, as Yarmolinsky admits) that mayors and their constituents wanted new services and would join forces to formulate a program “which we from Washington would insist that the bureaucrats carry out.” When Frances Fox Piven asked why federal planners expected mayors to join a fight against their own bureaucrats, Henry Cohen and Fred Hayes answered, “Ah, that’s the key point.” They emphasized the fact that the mayors were dealing with school boards that “were almost totally insulated from them,” with welfare agencies that were “run by county governments rather than by the city,” with a whole range of “categorical programs,” all “administered by special districts, state governments, or county governments.” Community action, they believed, would enlist the support of mayors because it offered them the prospect of control over services of immediate concern to their constituents.64 This turned out to be a costly misreading of American politics.
On the ground, in fact, community action immediately threatened mayors. From the start, the tension between empowerment and consensus-building proved an illusion. Frances Fox Piven captured the program’s early novelty, radicalism, and threat.
Some deference to “citizen participation” has always been important in legitimizing governmental action in America. But the Great Society programs went beyond token representation. They gave money to ghetto organizations that then used the money to harass city agencies. Community workers were hired to badger housing inspectors and to pry loose federal welfare payments. Later the new community agencies began to organize the poor to picket the welfare department or to boycott the school system. Local officials were flabbergasted; one level of government and party was financing the harassment of another level of government and party!65
The urban riots that convulsed American cities—Harlem 1964, Newark 1967, Detroit 1967, and hundreds of others—fueled hostility toward the War on Poverty and, especially, toward its Community Action Program; they appeared “proof of the agency’s subversive and incendiary character.”66 Employees of CAP faced accusations “of inciting riots” while “employees of flagship projects such as MFY were being labeled communist provocateurs.”67 Combined with alleged scandals in some CAP-funded programs, the riots gave mayors and right-wing critics, some of whom amplified their attacks with charges of subversion, the opening they needed to provoke congressional hearings on OEO appropriations and to amend the Economic Opportunity Act in ways that drew strict boundaries defining the limits of acceptable participation. “Almost all of these allegations,” points out Goldstein, “were either dropped or proved to be false.”68 Nonetheless, anticipating Congressional action, OEO itself introduced strict limits. At the insistence of the US Conference of Mayors, it prohibited CAP employees from participating in voter registration or local political organizing. An Administration-sponsored amendment prohibited the use of federal funds for “illegal picketing or demonstrations … participation by antipoverty employees in any form of direct action in violation of the law, or in partisan political activity.” Finally, in 1967, an amendment introduced by Congresswoman Edith Greene undermined the transformative potential of community action by mandating direct municipal control over CAP funds. Funds for community action now would pass through mayoral hands before they reached local groups. In its self-presentation, OEO redefined community action, dropping the radical emphasis on fighting poverty through political empowerment and stressing, instead, building community through cooperation and consensus. In its 1968 report, the National Council on Economic Opportunity wrote:
Neither an extension of welfare nor a training ground for revolt, community action is rather a box of tools made available to communities to use where they will do the most good—along with a set of instructions on some of the infinite number of ways the tools may be used.… [Community action] provides the organizational basis for developing, planning, funding, and initiating a variety of programs designed to enable communities to develop methods of their own to break the poverty cycle. It includes services and programs of self-help. But it acts fundamentally to move the poor so that, by their participation in a multitude of activities, they will change their pattern of life and join the mainstream of American achievement.69
The definition speaks volumes. Not only were OEO and CAP emphatically not programs for the redistribution of economic or political power. They re-translated poverty from a problem rooted in unemployment, politics, and institutions to one centered in the life patterns of individual poor people that kept them outside the “mainstream of American achievement.” In the end, it was poor people themselves, with the assistance of a government-provided tool box, who would have to work their own way out of poverty.
The toolbox, it should be remembered, was filled with useful instruments for constructing programs that brought improvements to the lives of many thousands of poor people. In its 1968 annual report, CAP gives examples of its achievements under the five purposes laid out for it in the 1967 amendments.
1. To strengthen community capabilities for planning and coordinating federal, state, and other assistance;
2. To improve the organization of a range of services;
3. To stimulate use of new types of services and innovative approaches in attacking poverty;
4. To develop and implement programs and projects designed to serve the poor with the maximum feasible participation of the members of the groups served; and
5. To broaden the base of poverty-related activities to assure greater participation of the members of the groups served by business, labor, and professional groups in the communities.
As its example of purpose number four—enhancing maximum feasible participation—the report pointed to neighborhood councils in Little Rock, Arkansas, whose members worked with staff and “other professionals in the community” to improve or implement an array of services. The councils also “won concessions from public officials,” such as improved mail services and in one neighborhood, “an underpass to eliminate the need for children to crawl beneath and over railroad box cars going to and from school everyday.” As for the fifth purpose—including representatives from local businesses, labor, and the professions—the report highlighted the work of Total Action Against Poverty, the Community Action Agency in Roanoke Valley, Virginia. The agency had partnered with the Municipal Court and HELP, a local organization, to open “a halfway house and rehabilitation program for alcoholics” and also “formed a business advisory council of the area’s leading businessmen to provide one-to-one counseling assistance to job seekers who have unstable job histories” and help them find and hold jobs.70 A long way from the initial vision of community action as shaking the system and empowering the poor, these achievements cumulatively were far from trivial in the day-to-day lives of the people served.
Nonetheless, “it would be a mistake to underestimate the significance of the OEO’s mandate of maximum feasible participation” that, for all its problems, unleashed democratic energies that refused to remain constrained by official boundaries.71 The principal players were women, a fact troubling to OEO staff who believed “that the primary purpose of poverty programs was to transform poor men into wage-earning heads of household.”72 Instead, what Orleck and Hazirjian label “mother-ist politics” underlay the implementation of community action at the grass roots. Many poor mothers were “drawn to activism by the belief that good mothers have a right and an obligation to demand that government agencies provide improved services for their children.” The focus of many War on Poverty programs reinforced this idea. For poor women who headed their own households, job training programs directed at male wage earners “were of no use,” and “they wanted government programs geared toward women.” Nationally, motherist politics coalesced in the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). The militant tactics of its local branches wrested many important victories from municipal governments, assuring that poor women received the public benefits to which they were entitled.73
Community Action Programs (CAPs) not only offered poor mothers services and resources for their children; they were a source of jobs. Women, point out Orleck and Hazirjian, “found alternative routes to paid work through the War on Poverty.” Legal Services staff taught them that many new programs included money with which to hire poor people. “Growing increasingly sophisticated in their activism and their understanding of government programs, they pushed for federally funded jobs as Head Start teachers, school lunch aides, health outreach workers, community organizers, and screeners at local clinics.” As a result, CAP facilitated women’s upward mobility. “Career development … for non-professional staff members,” asserted OEO’s 1968 Annual Report, As the Seed is Sown, “is an important ingredient of community action training. CAP places a high priority on the hiring and training of residents of the target area.… [and] encourages the up-grading of non-professionals to positions of greater responsibility … Opportunities for continuing education on the part of staff members is [sic] also encouraged. The aim is to assist non-professionals in career development so that they can aspire to and achieve permanent positions involving greater economic and vocational rewards.”74
Poor women’s successful experience as workers in CAP-funded programs led them to the belief that mothers should control programs that affected their children. The motherist politics that resulted created “fresh and unlikely coalitions” between, for example, working-class black and white mothers in Durham, North Carolina; Puerto Rican and African American mothers in the Bronx; and black and Chicana women Los Angeles.75 Poor women without high school degrees navigated byzantine city, state, and federal agencies and skillfully “played officials from different branches and levels of government against one another.” They lobbied in city halls, state capitals, and the federal government. When state governments proved recalcitrant, either refusing to accept or implement new War on Poverty programs “such as food stamps, free breakfast and lunch programs, WIC, and Early Periodic Screening and Diagnostic Testing,” poor mothers took their protests from the streets to the federal courts—where they won.76
Across the country, untold numbers of poor mothers became politicized during the 1960s and 1970s in pursuit of better food, schools, and health care for their children. Unwilling to remain passive clients of social welfare and health professionals, they came to see themselves as the true experts on poverty and to believe that they could run poverty and community health and education programs more effectively than the supposed experts. This was the promise of maximum feasible participation fulfilled.77
However, this was not the revolution. Male organizers often “derided” motherist politics as “counterrevolutionary—piecemeal, temporary, and apolitical,” arguing that “women’s focus on service delivery undermined community action.” To them, “the only permanent way out of poverty was for the poor to demand power, to overhaul the entire American system, to create revolution.” Many of the poor women energized by the War on Poverty, by contrast, “were less interested in overturning the system than in becoming voices for change within it.”78 Strong arguments can be made in defense of both positions. In the end, it was motherist, not revolutionary, politics whose accomplishments in winning services, opening up careers, and politicizing poor women have proved most enduring.
Community action also raised profound questions about the role of popular participation in politics. What, in fact, did “action” mean? Was it membership in organizations that planned programs and received and distributed funds? Or was it mobilization—militant action organized around demands? How could poor people best redress the imbalance of power that helped perpetuate their poverty? In their controversial and influential Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward offered an answer that stressed mobilization. Protests, they argued, remain unusual events. They do not erupt “during ordinary periods,” but when “large-scale changes undermine political stability.… It is this context that makes political leaders somewhat vulnerable to protests by the poor.” During these moments of vulnerability, as in the 1930s when the Roosevelt administration needed the votes of the urban working class or the 1960s when the Democratic Party depended on the vote of African Americans in cities, insurgencies by the poor exacted concessions. Power, emphasized Piven and Cloward, derives from insurgency, not leadership or organization.
Elites respond to the institutional disruption that protest causes as well as to other powerful institutional imperatives. Elite responses are not significantly shaped by the demands of leaders and organizers. Nor are elite responses significantly shaped by formally structured organizations of the poor. Whatever influence lower-class groups occasionally exert in American politics does not result from organization but from mass protest and the disruptive consequences of protest.79
When protest ebbs, politicians withdraw some concessions. “Since the poor no longer pose the threat of disruption, they no longer exert leverage on political leaders; there is no need for conciliation.” But some important concessions and institutional changes remain, such as the right to join unions or the extension of the franchise to southern blacks. Because the retreat from protests’ initial passion is inevitable, all “organizers and leaders” can do is to seize the moment. “They can only try to win whatever can be won while it can be won.” After protest dies out, organizers find themselves incorporated into “stable institutional roles”; they become part of the established order, not sources through which poor people can continue to leverage power on their own behalf.80
Community organizers also believed that poor people could muster power on their own behalf through mobilization and protest, but, unlike Piven and Cloward, they emphasized the importance of building organizations and developing leaders. The great founding figure of community organizing was Saul Alinsky, who began his work in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood in the 1930s. Alinsky “recruited local leaders from the churches, block clubs, sports leagues, and unions that formed the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council, the first of what Alinsky would call the People’s Organization. Alinsky guided them to identify common interests that brought together into a large organization previously hostile ethnic groups of Serbs and Croatians, Czechs and Slovaks, Poles and Lithuanians. The council pressured, demanded, and negotiated with government officials and businesses on bread-and-butter issues such as better garbage collection, improved schools, fresh milk for children, and more jobs.”81 Like Piven and Cloward, the organizing tradition Alinsky inspired stresses concrete, local grievances, not abstract causes. Only the role of the organizer is central. Organizers bring together local people, help them define their grievances, and plan militant strategies, often called “actions” to pressure authorities. The Industrial Areas Foundation, founded by Alinsky in 1940 to train organizers, turned organizing into a profession whose members have mobilized poor people to win local, and even not so local, victories. When organizers threaten entrenched interests, however, they provoke reaction that can be vicious and devastating. This is what the history of one of the most effective community organizing networks, ACORN, illustrates. Subject for years to vicious attacks by right-wing media, ACORN, which won important national and state, as well as local, victories, finally was brought to its knees by a carefully orchestrated scam designed to discredit its integrity.82
Its opponents killed ACORN as a national organization, but they did not destroy community organizing. Indeed, of the several varieties of community action, the community organizing movement has emerged as the one with the most transformative potential. The remarkable PICO provides the best example. It claims many achievements in health-care access and reform, immigration policy, housing, school improvement, rural development, and other areas. Like ACORN, PICO organizes at neighborhood, state, and national levels. It even has established a policy office in Washington, DC. Founded in 1972 by Father John Baumann, a Jesuit priest, PICO originated as a regional training institute to assist neighborhood community organizing in California. Unlike ACORN, PICO works through a congregational-community model that it pioneered. Its networks embrace congregations of all denominations and faiths and now count 44 affiliated federations as well as 8 statewide networks working in 150 towns and cities and 17 states. More than one million families belong to the one thousand congregations in its networks. In 2004 the organization changed its name from Pacific Institute for Community Organizing to PICO National Network so as to underscore its national scope. It describes its strategy this way:
PICO begins with the concrete problems facing working families, helps them to conduct a careful research process on these issues, and creates policy innovations from the ground up. These solutions come out of specific places and problems, but offer models for communities and states across the U.S. They are solutions that unify rather than divide.83
The Living Wage Movement underscores the transformative potential of community organizing. The idea of a living wage—“a wage,” according to legal scholar William P. Quigley, “that enables a worker to earn enough to lift the worker and his or her family out of poverty”—has found advocates for well over a century. In his Address to Congress in 1937, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt asserted, “No business which depends for its existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level—I mean the wages of decent living.” At first intertwined with the call for a minimum wage, promotion of a living wage emerged on its own as a vibrant locally based movement in the 1990s, winning its first major victory in Baltimore in 1994. An alliance known as BUILD led by a coalition of churches organized by the Industrial Areas Foundations and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) convinced the city government to enact a local law requiring city contractors to pay wages high enough to lift a family of four over the poverty level. The Baltimore victory inspired similar campaigns around the country in which ACORN, as well as labor unions and religious congregations, played a lead role. ACORN developed a Living Wage Resource Center to monitor the movement’s progress and make resources available online. Other victories came quickly—within a decade 122 cities had passed living wage ordinances and campaigns were in progress in another 75.84
Community organizing, along with other community-based tactics, poses profound questions about strategies for social change in general, and for anti-poverty efforts in particular. How much can be accomplished at the local level? Can community-based tactics do anything at all to reduce or prevent poverty, which, after all, is a problem with deep roots in political economy and is national (indeed, global) in scope? What resources can be mobilized at the local level to create jobs and increase incomes? In political scientist Ira Katznelson’s acidic account of community action on the ground in a section of New York City during the War on Poverty, community action emerges as a toothless strategy for change, at once coopted into the “city trenches” that had channeled local politics since the nineteenth century and manipulated by the city administration to cool out potential insurgencies.85 Local mobilization, in fact, often has worked against the interests of poor people and African Americans, as in successful opposition to halfway houses and similar institutions and, especially, in resistance to racial integration. Arnold Hirsch, for one, described the violence unleashed by local neighborhood groups against African Americans trying to move into white working-class neighborhoods of Chicago, and Thomas Sugrue has charted the tactics of neighborhood associations dedicated to preventing integration in Detroit.86 Some accounts of locality based strategies to deal with poverty-related issues, especially the role of community development corporations in building affordable housing (discussed in Chapter 5), reveal a more mixed record. As the case studies in the book edited by Orleck and Hazirjian show, the actual on-the-ground history of community-based movements contains many stories of success, while the major community-organizing networks—IAF, ACORN, PECO—can count victories that made substantial differences in the lives of poor people. The living wage campaign conducted mainly at the local level has won gains that translate directly into better incomes.87 The same can be said for local trade union victories. Successful movements for social change in America, moreover, have started outside legislatures and built from the ground up. Abolition, temperance, women’s rights, civil rights, anti-war, gay rights: all these movements grew from the grassroots, building pressure, until they found their way into state and national legislation. Finding the sweet spot where local and national work together: this is the great conceptual and strategic challenge for activists against poverty. Another way to think about the question is this: poverty is, in part, a problem of power. It persists at such high levels in the United States because poor people lack the power to take effective action against it. Community organizing provides a necessary, although not sufficient, means for mobilizing the power to press for change, first, usually, at the local level, but, aggregated, at the national level as well. Without mobilization at the grass roots, the prospects for effective action against poverty—and other huge and pressing public issues—remain dim.
Neither community action nor the War on Poverty’s new service programs increased the amount of money spent on redistributive social welfare programs. Nonetheless, between the late 1960s and early 1970s, the federal government expanded public social spending in five major ways. First, the Public Welfare Amendments of 1962 initiated the massive increase in government-funded social services, which not only made new and existing services much more widely available but also created a vast number of new professional and semiprofessional jobs and altered the character of the voluntary sector by making it dependent on government for funding. In real dollars, between 1960 and 1995, public spending on social services increased 500 percent. By 2009, together federal, state, and local governments spent about “$150 billion annually on means-tested food, housing, education, and social service assistance for tens of millions of working poor Americans.” Programs of cash assistance, by contrast, received only about $11 billion to help 4.5 million people in need.88
Second, the number of persons receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) exploded, partly as a result of the work of welfare activists to move eligible women onto the program rolls. Third, food stamps became more widely available and free to the poor, signaling a de facto acceptance of the right to food as an entitlement of citizenship. Fourth, through Supplemental Security Income (SSI), the aged, blind, and disabled received a guaranteed minimum income, a residual outcome of the failed campaign for a national minimum income, discussed below. Fifth, Medicaid and Medicare created a system of national health insurance for welfare recipients and the elderly, a truly major injection of a new principle into the nation’s welfare state but one that remained—with the exception of medical care for children—stuck, unable to reach true universality until the Affordable Health Care Act brought it closer in 2012. Still, Congress defeated the most dramatic proposal for expanding the basis of social citizenship: Richard Nixon’s guaranteed minimum income for families. In many ways, Nixon’s abortive Family Assistance Plan remains the most intriguing part of the story because it was the first major attempt to overhaul the social welfare structure erected in the 1930s. As such, it rested on ideas about anti-poverty strategy that differed sharply from the service-based strategy of the War on Poverty. The Family Assistance Plan, like other varieties of guaranteed assistance plans proposed in the 1960s and 1970s, according to their major historian, Brian Steensland, “called into question deeply held assumptions about the causes of poverty, the adequacy of the labor market, and the goals of welfare reform that are rarely debated in American society but that nonetheless guide policymaking.” Although the Family Assistance Plan was dressed as conservatively as possible, it was, Steensland contends, “still revolutionary. It provided benefits to two-parent families. It guaranteed all families a minimum income. And, most important, it provided benefits to the unemployed and employed poor within the same program, thereby erasing the existing distinctions between different categories of poor people.”89
On August 8, 1969, President Richard Nixon proposed a Family Assistance Plan that would guarantee all families with dependent children a minimum yearly income ($1,600 for a family of four). He also proposed that states pay a prescribed federal minimum to disabled, blind, and elderly people eligible for public assistance. The House Ways and Means Committee held the first hearings on the bill between October 15 and November 13. At the same time, it examined a bill that would increase social benefits and link them automatically to inflation. In March the Ways and Means Committee approved the bill, and the House passed it on April 16 by a vote of 243 to 155. The Senate proved more resistant. Throughout the next two years, the Senate sent administration proposals back for redrafting and considered alternatives. It did, however, agree to raise Social Security benefits and to broaden the food stamp program. At last, on October 17, 1972, the Senate passed a welfare reform bill stripped of the Family Assistance Plan. Instead, it created Supplemental Security Income (SSI), which folded aid for the blind, disabled, and elderly not eligible for Social Security into one program with a federally mandated income floor, and workfare (an unsuccessful attempt to link welfare to work discussed in Chapter 4).
Nixon’s plan reflected proposals for a negative income tax or national minimum income advocated by many economists of that period. Its earliest major proponent was conservative economist Milton Friedman. It also had appealed to economists in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, who considered increasing the income of poor people the most straightforward way to reduce poverty.90 Johnson himself remained more cautious, and he fended off the advocates of an income-based approach to anti-poverty strategy by creating a national commission on income maintenance, otherwise known as the Heineman Commission.91 Its report, Poverty Amid Plenty: The American Paradox, published in November 1969, offered an informed and eloquent plea for a national minimum income. Because commission members included the chairman of the board of IBM, the president of Northwest Industries, the president of Equitable Life Assurance Society, the chairman of the Westinghouse Electric Corporate, and the chairman of the Republic National Bank of Dallas, as well as professional economists, politicians, and union officials, its advocacy of a strategy anathema to many conservatives (not to mention the president who appointed it) is startling. However, for businessmen able to overcome their resistance to any expansion of government social benefits, the national minimum income meshed with important conservative goals.
The commission’s main recommendation was “the development of a universal income supplement program to be administered by the Federal Government, making payments to all members of the population with income needs [italics in original].” Most people were poor because they “lack money, and most of them cannot increase their incomes”; only the government had the resources to provide “some minimum to all in need [italics in original].” The commission stressed that poverty did not result from personal failings and offered a blistering criticism of existing welfare programs, which failed to provide adequate support or incentives and demeaned recipients. Underlying their inadequacy were an ineffective strategy and outmoded assumptions. The strategy depended on services that could not “substitute for adequate incomes,” “pay rent,” or “buy food for a poor family.” The obsolete assumption, which considered employment and receipt of welfare “mutually exclusive,” had become “untenable in a world where many employable persons have potential earnings below assistance payment standards.”92
By proposing to supplement wages, the commission staked out a new position in official American discourse on poverty and welfare. Nonetheless, despite its radical surface, it rested on premises compatible with business interests. First, it simply accepted the spread of low-wage labor as inevitable and did not recommend improving working conditions or wages. Second, it provided an “alternative to the minimum wage,” as University of Minnesota economist George Stigler had pointed out nearly twenty-five years before Nixon’s proposal. Thus, a negative income tax would help business by socializing the cost of labor and give economists worried about the effect of the minimum wage on the market a way to support the needy without risking inflation—this is precisely the function of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a watered-down version of a national income plan established in 1975 and expanded greatly with bipartisan support during the administration of President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.93 (In fairness, the EITC has proved effective at moving huge numbers of families over the poverty line—although only families close to the poverty line to begin with and those having some income from work. In 2010 the EITC lifted 6.3 million people, of whom 3.3 million were children, out of poverty. Without it, child poverty would have been 25 percent higher.)
Third, in contrast to in-kind programs (ones that provided goods such as food and housing), which the commission wanted abolished, income supplements worked on market principles. The market system, argued the report, “is more effective at distributing goods and services than direct governmental distribution.” Income supplements permitted “greater consumer choice” and “greater flexibility of family resources.” In its emphasis on the market, the commission prefigured the attempt to redesign the welfare state, and American social policy more generally, with a market template—a move whose hegemony, starting in the 1980s, stretched across political party lines. Fourth, income supplements avoided the problems inherent in expanding social insurance, which performed “an antipoverty function far less efficiently than programs which pay benefits on the basis of need.” Social insurance, argued the commission, paid disproportionate benefits to the nonpoor and lacked incentives. By contrast, an intelligently designed income maintenance program would provide “financial incentives to work, and limit incentives for family breakup.” It also would reduce the administrative costs associated with direct subsidy by 15 to 30 percent.94
Nixon supported a family assistance plan for complex reasons. Influenced especially by HEW Secretary Robert Finch and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had joined his administration, Nixon reached his decision by stages. He disliked both social workers and the current welfare system, and a bold welfare reform plan offered concrete political advantages. “Why not utterly repudiate the old Democratic-devised welfare system as socially destructive and unfair? Why not insist that a reformed system reward those who work more than those who could work but don’t?” Nixon, assert Vincent and Lee Burke in their history of the Family Assistance Plan, “liked to think of himself as a modern-day Disraeli, a Tory bringing social progress,” and his welfare reform “offered a dazzling opportunity to win a place in history.” Nixon would gain regardless of how Congress acted: “If Congress approved his plan, Nixon would be credited with reforming a despised institution; if Congress balked, Nixon would get a political issue.”95
The commission’s proposals managed to anger not only many conservatives, but potential allies on the Left as well. Conservatives objected to Nixon’s plan because it would expand the number of families eligible for benefits and because it violated their beliefs about the limited role of government and the harmful effects of welfare. On the Left, opinion divided between those who, like Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, supported the bill as an important precedent and those, like the National Welfare Rights Organization, who believed its benefits to be woefully inadequate and its workfare provisions punitive.96
No such coalition formed to defeat the other expansions of public social provision in the same years. Because everyone grows old, Social Security cuts across class lines and draws on the massive political power of the elderly. As for food stamps, hunger historically has moved Americans more than any form of deprivation. In 1968, after a powerful television documentary on hunger, Senator George McGovern, chair of a new Senate Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, began public hearings on the issue. By proposing the expansion of the food stamp program, Nixon preempted what otherwise surely would have become a major political issue for the Democrats.
Through an adroit series of compromises, which assured physicians could profit handsomely, in 1965 the Johnson administration overcame enough of the historic opposition of the organized American medical profession to national health insurance to pass Medicare, national health in insurance for the elderly, and Medicaid, a program of health care for the indigent.97 Medicare and Medicaid cemented the division of health care into the social insurance and public assistance tracks of the welfare state. America was left with an uncoordinated system of health care: private insurance for the fortunate employed, social insurance for the elderly, public charity for the indigent, and nothing at all for tens of millions others.
Unlike the other expansions of public social provision, the explosion of the welfare rolls required only modest legislative changes. In 1960 745,000 families received AFDC at a cost of less than $1 billion; by 1972 the number of families had become 3 million and the cost had multiplied to $6 billion. The reasons were several. The migration of southern blacks to northern cities increased the number of poor people dependent on cash incomes and reduced the number of subsistence farmers. Starting in 1961, Congress permitted states to extend aid to families headed by unemployed male parents. (As of 1988, only twenty-eight states had taken advantage of this opportunity, which was a minor factor in the increase.) Some states loosened the standards for eligibility. More important, mobilized by the welfare rights movement, the proportion of poor families applying for welfare increased dramatically, as did the proportion of applicants accepted, which skyrocketed from about 33 percent in the early 1960s to 90 percent in 1971. The latter event reflected the efforts of the nascent welfare rights movement to recast welfare as an entitlement, reduce its stigma, and mobilize poor people to claim assistance as a right. Indeed, welfare rights became a social movement acted out in demonstrations that pressured reluctant welfare officials and in courtrooms where lawyers successfully challenged state laws restricting eligibility.98
Welfare rights was a new idea in American social policy. “Prior to the 1960s,” writes Rand Rosenblatt in his review of its legislative history, “recipients of benefits under programs such as AFDC were not seen as having ‘rights’ to benefits or even to a fair process for deciding individual cases.” The achievement of welfare rights required both the mobilization of poor people and new legal doctrines. Funded by the poverty program, the Legal Services Corporation for the first time in American history provided poor people with lawyers to act on their behalf. With the example of civil rights victories in the courts, a new generation of welfare and poverty lawyers successfully challenged state laws in the Supreme Court.99
Welfare rights advocates won legal victories in three key areas: length-of-residence requirements, invasion of privacy practices, and unregulated state discretion over eligibility conditions and the amount of grants. Three key Supreme Court decisions dented these historic features of welfare law. King v. Smith (1968) struck down an Alabama rule that effectively denied public assistance to any children and their mother if the mother had sexual relationships. (The rule had defined any man with whom a recipient mother had sexual relations as the “substitute father” of her children, regardless of his relation to them.) Shapiro v. Thompson (1969) declared that a state residency requirement—a one-year waiting period before new state residents could receive public assistances—“penalized the fundamental constitutional right to interstate travel and thereby denied equal protection of the law.” Goldberg v. Kelly (1970) required welfare agencies to offer clients a hearing that met “minimal due process standards” before stopping benefits.
These cases extended benefits to hundreds of thousands of women and children. According to Rosenblatt, in King v. Smith, the Supreme Court had estimated that the substitute father rule in Alabama alone had excluded about 20,000 people, including 16,000 children. The Court’s reasoning in the King decision prompted many lower court rulings that struck down other exclusionary state rules. Nonetheless, by the early 1970s, a backlash against welfare rights surfaced among voters and within all levels of government as the Court began to change direction. In Dandrige v. Williams (1970), the Court refused to force states to match welfare grants to living needs. In Wyman v. Tames (1971), the Court agreed that states could terminate public assistance benefits if a client denied a caseworker access to her home, and in 1973, in New York State Department of Social Services v. Dublino, the Court upheld state work requirements more restrictive than those in federal law.100 Welfare backlash—played out as an attack on AFDC—continued to mount, culminating in 1996 in its abolition and replacement with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), a development discussed in Chapter 4.
Legal philosophers buttressed the welfare rights movement by redefining the concepts of property, rights, and entitlements. By far the most important and influential of these redefinitions was law professor Charles Reich’s article, “The New Property,” which appeared in the Yale Law Journal in April 1964. Property, stressed Reich, is not a natural right but a deliberate construction of society. Because it is created by law, property is not limited to land, possessions, or other forms of material wealth. Property, rather, “represents a relationship between wealth and its ‘owner’” sanctioned by law. Therefore, a person with property “has certain legal rights with respect to an item of wealth.” In the modern state, governments have created myriad new forms of wealth: income and benefits, job, occupational licenses, franchises, contracts, subsidies, use of public resources, and services. Together, these compose what Reich called new forms of “government largesse.” “The valuables dispensed by government take many forms, but all share one characteristic. They are steadily taking the place of traditional forms of wealth—forms which are held as private property.” Changes in the forms of private wealth enhanced the significance of government largesse, because “today more and more of our wealth takes the form of rights or status rather than of intangible goods.” Thus, a profession or a job is frequently far more valuable than a house or bank account. As for the jobless, “their status as governmentally assisted or insured persons may be the main source of assistance.”101
For Reich, the new forms of government largesse had significant costs: They eroded conventional boundaries between public and private, enhanced the power of the state, and threatened individual liberty. Only new procedural safeguards, he argued, could both protect individual liberty and guard individuals’ access to this “largesse.” “Eventually,” he wrote, “those forms of largesse which are closely linked to status must be deemed to be held as of right.” And he saw the concept of right most urgently needed with respect to benefits like unemployment compensation, public assistance, and old age insurance. These forms of largesse, he emphasized, rest on a recognition that “misfortune and deprivation are often caused by forces far beyond the control of the individual.” Their goal is “to preserve the self-sufficiency of the individual, to rehabilitate him where necessary, and to allow him to be a valuable member of a family and a community; in theory they represent part of the individual’s rightful share in the commonwealth.”102
The conservative judicial retreat of the 1970s circumscribed the influence of Reich’s elegant redefinition of property, although his article set off a debate among scholars. William Simon, writing from a political position to the left of Reich, pointed out that “The New Property” offered no criteria for distribution and reified individual rights and state power as “distinct and opposed entities.” Reich’s portrayal of welfare benefits as matters of right obscured their role in the transfer of wealth “from one group of right-holders to another.” Rights for Simon reflect power; they do not guard against it. For this reason, he found Reich’s argument unintentionally conservative. When all wealth is translated into rights, its forced redistribution by government becomes impossible. This was one paradox; the other was the contradiction between Reich’s intended legitimation of the welfare state and his portrait of the state as a menace. Simon’s final verdict on Reich’s new property was harsh: “[Its] view of welfare rights is incoherent as jurisprudence and exhausted as politics. It is irrelevant to what ought to be the two principal concerns of liberal welfare jurisprudence.” These were theories and programs based on need as a distinctive principle and an approach to public administration that recognized “the values of a responsible state as well as the dangers of an irresponsible one.”
Moral as well as legal philosophers also reconsidered distributive justice in the 1960s. Most important among them was John Rawls of Harvard. First in a series of articles, then in his immensely influential A Theory of Justice, Rawls challenged the utilitarian basis of liberalism and, by implication, its translation into the opportunity-based strategy of the War on Poverty and Great Society. Rawls argued for a concept of justice based neither on utilitarianism, which stressed efficiency, nor on its leading philosophic criticism, intuitionism. Instead, starting with social contract theory, he returned to first principles: “The principles of justice,” he wrote, “are the object of the original agreement,” or social contract. “They are the principles that free and rational persons concerned to further their own interests would accept in an initial position of equality as defining the fundamental terms of their association.” These principles regulated “all further agreements,” specifying permissible forms of “social cooperation” and “government.” Rawls called this way of regarding the principles of justice “justice as fairness.”103
Justice as fairness depended on liberty and social justice. “First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others. Second: social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all.” Rawls’s emphasis on social justice led to the criterion he then applied to social policies and institutions: They are to be judged by the degree to which they improved the circumstances of “the least advantaged members of society.”104
This criterion led Rawls to criticize a concept he labeled “liberal equality,” which, although he did not draw the connection, underpinned the War on Poverty and Great Society. For Rawls, liberal equality intuitively appeared “defective” because its stress on removing barriers to opportunity still permitted “the distribution of wealth and income to be determined by the natural distribution of abilities and talents,” leaving distributive shares to be “decided by the outcome of the natural lottery,” an outcome “arbitrary from a moral perspective.” Because of the practical impossibility of securing “equal chances of achievement and culture for the similarly endowed,” he continued, “we may want to adopt a principle which recognizes this fact and also mitigates the arbitrary effects of the natural lottery.”
His “difference principle,” that is, the primary claims of the least advantaged, drew Rawls to an alternative conception of equal opportunity: “To treat all persons equally, to provide genuine equality of opportunity, society must give more attention to those with fewer native assets and to those born into the less favorable social positions.” The difference principle rested on values at variance with those at the core of liberal equality. “It transforms the aims of the basic structure so that the total scheme of institutions no longer emphasizes social efficiency and technocratic values.” The difference principle was, instead, “an agreement to regard the distribution of natural talents as a common asset and to share in the benefits of this distribution whatever it turns out to be.”105
A “properly organized democratic state,” according to Rawls, differed little from other social democratic blueprints for a welfare state. Besides guarantees of liberty, freedom of thought, equal citizenship, and a just, open political process, the government should ensure “fair (as opposed to formal) equality of opportunity,” and guarantee “a social minimum either by family allowances and special payments for sickness and employment, or more systematically by such devices as a graded income supplement (a so-called negative income tax).” Rawls offered liberals what they badly needed: a fresh, cogent legitimation of the welfare state. But it came too late, and it veered too sharply from the utilitarianism that now underlay social policy. Within a year after A Theory of Justice appeared, the initiative had passed to conservatives, and the War on Poverty, for all practical purposes, was over.106 The formal abolition of the Office of Economic Opportunity happened in 1975. The newly created Community Services Administration—housed in the Department of Health and Human Services—picked up its oversight of community action agencies—until it, too, was ended by President Ronald Reagan in 1981. The Department of Health and Human Service’s Office of Community Affairs now supervised community services block grants, the important but defanged remnant of the Community Action Program.107
The value of AFDC benefits in real dollars is a reasonable, if rough, index of national generosity. It peaked in 1972 and then declined precipitously. Until AFDC’s abolition in 1996, welfare rights activists expended more energy protecting earlier gains than on extending them, and they lost their battle. What had been won in the War on Poverty and by the Great Society? And of these victories, which ones proved lasting? How should we think about the War on Poverty and Great Society as a moment in intellectual history?
The War on Poverty, Great Society, and extension of public social benefits reinforced the historic distinction among the three tracks of the public branch of the American welfare state: social insurance, public assistance, and taxation.108 In the social insurance track, Social Security benefits increased and were indexed. In the public assistance track, SSI folded programs into new forms of means tested relief. Congress added a broadened and liberalized food stamp program to public assistance, whose benefits were lower than Social Security’s. Health insurance also divided into two programs, one, Medicare, part of the social insurance apparatus was offered universally to all Americans age sixty-five and over, the other, Medicaid, which included payments for nursing home care for individuals with extremely low incomes and no assets, was part of the public assistance track. The benefits they provided and the reimbursement they paid providers differed sharply. At the same time, the preference for delivering benefits through the tax code increased, most notably through the Earned Income Tax Credit, which hardened the line between the employed and nonemployed poor, solidifying the place of the latter as the preeminent undeserving poor. Statistics of government expenditure tell the story. Social insurance received by far the greatest share of public funds and provided the highest benefits. In 1970 Social Security payments to the elderly, $3.3 billion, already exceeded AFDC payments by about ten times. In 2012 Social Security payments, which were indexed to inflation, had mushroomed to $116 billion. TANF’s costs, which were not indexed, amounted to about $18 billion while spending on the EITC grew from $5 billion in 1975 to $60 billion in 2010.109
Nonetheless, despite their limitations, Medicare and Medicaid resulted in vast increases in the availability of medical care for the elderly and indigent. By May 31, 1966, enrollment in the optional Part B of Medicare had become nearly universal, and the use of medical care by the elderly soared: between 1964 and 1973, hospital discharges of the elderly rose three-and-one-half times. At the same time, the share of Americans visiting a physician rose, and the proportion never examined by a doctor plummeted from one-fifth to 8 percent as poor people started to visit doctors at the same rate as everyone else. Prenatal visits by poor women to doctors also increased dramatically between 1965 and 1972, while, among blacks, infant mortality dropped by half and the gap in life expectancy between blacks and whites contracted from about eight to five years.110
The achievements of a number of service-based programs also deserve recognition. Operation Head Start helped significant numbers of poor children prepare for school; Upward Bound prepared large numbers of adolescents for college; and financial assistance permitted thousands of young people from families with low or modest incomes to take advantage of higher education while the funds provided by the Elementary and Secondary Education Act channeled unprecedented dollars to local schools, allowing them to hire staff and develop programs for students from impoverished families. As Legal Services opened access to litigation by poor people for the first time, lawyers used class action suits to expand the rights of the poor in several key areas: medical aid, landlord-tenant relations, state housing laws, consumer credit, and welfare administration. However, despite the success of some Job Corps centers, manpower training and employment programs remained disappointing, although the jobs provided by the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) were an important form of work relief to many individuals and a source of staff to many public and private service sector programs.111
Community action, the most controversial part of the War on Poverty, for all its problems, nourished a growing citizen’s movement, reshaped local politics, and launched a new generation of minority leaders, many of them women, into public life.112
The intersection of the Community Action Program with the Civil Rights Movement and affirmative action opened up vast numbers of jobs to African Americans. Indeed, public and quasi-public sector jobs (jobs located in the private sector but funded in whole or part by public money) became the distinctive occupational niche of African Americans. The percentage of working African American women in them escalated from 13 percent in 1950 to 43 percent in 2000. These jobs formed the backbone of a fragile but growing African American middle class. The public and service sector job cuts that resulted from the Great Recession that began in 2008 dealt this new African American middle class a savage blow.113
The War on Poverty and Great Society could have left a profound intellectual legacy. On one side was the new stream of legal and philosophic scholarship represented by Reich, Simon, Rawls, and others, which formulated new approaches to the legitimacy of the welfare state and distributive justice. On the other was a debate about strategies of social change and welfare reform led by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward primarily in two influential books, Regulating the Poor and Poor People’s Movements, which recast the history of public welfare and challenged liberal approaches to reform through legislation, organization, and reliance on disinterested elites.114 In fact, the intellectual legacy left by the War on Poverty and Great Society turned out to be a lot less than its promise. As American politics moved rightward after the mid-1970s, entitlements came under increasingly fierce attack. The 1996 “welfare reform” legislation buried the idea of a right to welfare. Aligning social welfare policy more closely with the market—not with distributive justice—became the lodestone of social policy, as Chapter 4 explains. The Heineman Commission’s preference for throwing social welfare to the market, not Charles Reich’s or John Rawls’s calls for active government, won the intellectual day and, increasingly, the policy day as well.
A new bureaucratic definition of poverty constituted another intellectual legacy of the War on Poverty and Great Society. The War on Poverty began without an official definition of poverty—the United States only started collecting income statistics in 1940. The Office of Economic Opportunity, which needed a defensible standard as a yardstick for diagnosing poverty and measuring progress against it, drew on the work of economist Mollie Orshansky in the Social Security Administration’s Office of Research and Statistics. The Orshansky index, as it was called, assumed that poor families spent about one-third of their income on food, so it pegged the poverty line at three times the cost of the Department of Agriculture’s low-cost budget for food, adjusted for family composition and rural-urban differences. Reliance on the Department of Agriculture’s food budget found precedents in both public and private sectors. “Food plans prepared by the Department of Agriculture,” observed Orshansky, “have for more than 30 years served as a guide for estimating costs of food needed by families of different compositions.” Indeed, for many years, welfare agencies had used the low-cost plan to keep down the cost of food allotments to needy families.115
Orshansky never harbored illusions about the adequacy of the low-cost food budget. It assumed, she pointed out, “that the housewife will be a careful shopper, a skillful cook, and a good manager who will prepare all the family’s meals at home.” It included no “additional allowance for snacks or the higher cost of meals away from home or meals served to guests.” It established, at best, a “crude criterion of income adequacy.” In fact, Orshansky developed the index as a research tool, not an instrument of policy or a criterion for determining eligibility for anti-poverty programs. She wanted to determine the demography of the poverty population and to identify groups at risk. The index, she wrote, “is not designed to be applied directly to an individual family with a specific problem. Nor even as a screening device can it be expected to stand unchallenged as an exact count of the poor in absolute numbers. But it can delineate broadly the relative incidence of poverty among discrete population groups and in this way outline targets for action.” The poverty line, she said, identifies “groups most vulnerable to risk of poverty” even though it cannot measure poverty precisely. “The best that can be said of the measure,” she wrote, “is that at a time when it seemed useful, it was there.”116
Contrary to Orshansky’s intentions, the Office of Economic Opportunity adopted her index as its standard, only it utilized estimates based on the Department of Agriculture’s economy food plan, which was about 25 percent lower than the low-cost plan used by Orshansky. In 1968 the Social Security Administration, concerned about the index’s adequacy, proposed adjusting it “to conform to the higher general level of living,” but the Bureau of the Budget’s Office of Statistical Standards overruled the proposal. Instead, a Federal Interagency Committee, created in October 1968, reconsidered the poverty line. The committee decided to retain 1963 as the base year but to “switch to the Consumer Price Index as the price inflates for annual updating.” As Orshansky pointed out: “This meant, of course, that the food-income relationship which was the basis for the original poverty measure no longer was the current rationale.” Another important alteration to the poverty index had taken place two years earlier, when the Census Bureau “quietly dropped its method of estimation of unreported incomes” and, as a consequence, reduced the number of persons in poverty by about 1.5 million.117 As many critics have observed, the official poverty index remains far too low. It rests on unrealistic assumptions about the relation of food to income; it does not include noncash benefits; it does not vary with regional differences in the cost of living; and it ignores changing standards of consumption. But it established a new way of looking at poverty. For the purposes of government policy, poverty is not deprivation; it is bureaucratic category.
If nothing else, the history of the poverty line illustrates the politics of numbers. Federal administrators waged a quiet but persistent campaign against increased poverty thresholds and, at every junction, chose the lowest plausible figure. In this way, they both checked the expansion of benefits, which a higher threshold would have triggered, and minimized the problem of poverty in America, thereby avoiding embarrassment. Had the Census Bureau updated its thresholds to account for “more recent nutrition standards and consumption practices,” asserted Orshansky, the number of poor people in America in 1975 would have risen “from 26 million to 36 million, or from 24 million to 37 million, depending on which census survey you use.”118
The days of the old poverty standard finally are numbered. Criticism of it mounted from many sources, culminating in a 1995 National Academy of Sciences report calling for a revamped poverty line. In 2009, responding to the NAS report, the Census Bureau established an interagency technical working group, which in 2012 published a Supplemental Poverty Measure. In New York City, a blue ribbon commission on poverty appointed by mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2006 attacked the existing poverty line, calling for New York’s nascent anti-poverty program to adopt a more realistic standard, which, it showed, would substantially boost the number of New Yorkers living in poverty. The major issue addressed by the new poverty line is non-cash benefits. For US poverty-line reformers, this became the nub of the issue. Poor Americans receive a number of noncash benefits such as food stamps and housing vouchers, which, the critics argue, need to be incorporated into a more realistic measure. At the same time, the measurement of income should deduct expenses, such as those related to child care, employment, or medical care. The net result increases the number of elderly who fall below the poverty line and decreases the number of children, but the proportion of all Americans in poverty goes up. This shift in the measurement of poverty does not represent an intellectual revolution or paradigm shift. It still measures poverty by an absolute standard, when much of the rest of the world uses a relative standard—generally, relation to median income. With poverty measured as an income less than half the median income, a standard common among other nations, the number of Americans in poverty rises still further.119 The official US poverty rate for 2010 was 15.3 percent, but an authoritative study by the Luxembourg Income Study found 18 percent of the US population with incomes below half the median income in 2010, compared to 8 percent in Germany and 12 percent in Canada in 2007. Among the countries in the study, only in Mexico, India, and Guatemala did more people live on incomes this low.120
In the 1960s public policy reconceived poverty not only by adopting an official poverty standard, but also by its appetite for research. Indeed, the distinguished economist Robert Haveman, former director of the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Research on Poverty, the semiofficial poverty think tank of the US government, argues that between 1965 and 1980, social science transformed American public policy.121
In the early 1960s anthropologists and sociologists took the lead in applying modern social science to contemporary poverty. However, the core concept—the culture of poverty—drew devastating criticism, and their ethnographic methods did not help policymakers in need of systematic data. The angry protest following Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, as we have seen, helped bury both the culture of poverty and the black family as acceptable topics in liberal social science and to pass the leadership in poverty research to economists. Economists met government’s need for systematic data, predictive models, and program evaluation. From its “outset,” writes Haveman, “the War on Poverty was conceived as an economic war; the designs, the debates, and the evaluations were all conducted in economic terms. Economics was the central discipline in both the action and the research components of the war.”122
Massive new government spending on poverty and social welfare prompted new research, most of it funded by the federal government. In part, the government stressed research for reasons of political convenience. The “politics of federal antipoverty policy,” writes Haveman, “made research spending an attractive option. Research support was clearly less controversial and risky than, say, community action or a guaranteed income program.” However, the emphasis on research had other sources as well. From the earliest planning for the War on Poverty, claims Haveman, “the presumption that research and evaluation should guide policy decisions was a principal tenet.” This emphasis reflected “the movement to place government on a more rational and analytic basis” stimulated by Robert McNamara, President Kennedy’s secretary of defense, who in turn had been influenced by his experience at the Ford Motor Company. McNamara urged the application of systems analysis techniques to war planning and staffed the Defense Department’s new and influential Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation with military analysts from the Rand Corporation. The federal government’s chief poverty warrior, Sargent Shriver, first director of OEO, appointed key staff with Defense Department and Rand Corporation backgrounds. As a result, OEO’s Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation “embodied the philosophy of PPBS [planning-programming-budget system]” pioneered at Defense.123 PPBS tightened the links between the Cold War, the war in Vietnam, and War on Poverty.124
OEO, which turned to agencies outside the government for most of its research, established the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin and funded a great deal of other poverty-related research as well. Between 1965 and 1980, in current dollars, annual federal spending on poverty-related research increased from $2.5 to $160 million or from 0.64 percent to 30.12 percent of all federal research and development spending. This increased government spending changed research priorities in the social sciences. Between 1962 and 1964, five leading economics journals published only three articles on poverty-related research; by 1971–1973, the number had increased to fifty-nine. For five leading sociology journals, the increase in the same period was from fifteen to forty-five.125
Poverty researchers’ first task was descriptive: how to assess and measure changes in economic well-being, poverty, and inequality, and how to incorporate noncash transfers into measures of economic status. Because academic literature on these topics in the early 1960s was nearly nonexistent, the adoption of an official government poverty line became an early priority. This is why OEO seized on Orshansky’s index so eagerly and put it to uses for which it was not intended. The unplanned expansion of the nation’s income support system also posed urgent research questions: did welfare programs and income transfer policies cause people to work less? Although research showed only very modest work disincentives, it did highlight the inequities that resulted from administrative discretion and benefit variations among states. As a result, most poverty researchers began to advocate a unitary, uniform, and national income maintenance program.
Only the creation of data sets that followed individuals and families over longer periods of time could provide the answer to another question: Was poverty primarily permanent or transitory? OEO funded the Panel Study of Income Dynamics at the University of Michigan, which in 1968 began to trace a representative sample of the American population. The analysis showed the great differences that emerged from longitudinal, as contrasted with cross-sectional, methods. Sociologists also used new longitudinal data sets for increasingly detailed and sophisticated studies of mobility. (Mobility studies, claims Haveman, had a great influence on sociology but little impact on policy.) Research on a variety of other topics also shaped thinking about poverty. Studies of the relations among education, income, and social mobility called into question not only human capital models, but also the entire educational strategy of the War on Poverty. In the same years, dual labor market hypotheses forced modifications in neoclassical economic theories—modifications that proved to be temporary.126
Poverty research also influenced social science methods. First, and to Haveman most important, poverty researchers pioneered large-scale social experiments. Indeed, randomized experiments became the gold-standard in public policy research. Although the implications of poverty research supported a guaranteed national income program, no one could predict its impact. As a result, OEO sponsored income maintenance experiments designed to test the effect of income guarantees on work incentives. These enormously complicated and costly experiments proved ambiguous. Nonetheless, Haveman feels, the “social policy experiments stand as the clearest example of a breakthrough in the methodology of social science attributable to the War on Poverty.” Other breakthroughs were the development of new methods for correcting bias selectivity (dealing with samples that are not representative), and the creation of microdata simulation models to estimate the effects of policies on large populations.127
Together with PPBS, poverty research fostered the creation of public policy analysis as a discipline. New schools within universities trained policy analysts who found work in higher education, government, private research centers, and a burgeoning evaluation research industry. In the process, poverty became a technical subject to be discussed only by experts.128
Haveman, like many others, recognized the limited impact of research on policy: the path between the results of empirical research and policy, even when they are clear, which often is not the case, never runs straight. Politics always intervenes. In this situation, Haveman advocated a modest but crucial role for research as a brake on ideology and an arbiter of public debate.129 In recent years, even this unimpeachable goal has grown more evanescent.
Great Society poverty research proved to be the last hurrah of twentieth-century liberalism. It rested on an expectation with roots in the Progressive era that reason, science, and expertise could inform public policy and persuade a benevolent state to engineer social progress. By placing government policy on a scientific basis, poverty researchers hoped to transcend politics and ideology. In the end, although they won several battles, they lost the intellectual war. They developed new measures with which to chart the contours of poverty; invented dazzling methods with which to experiment, evaluate, and predict; and created a new discipline. But they remained unable to agree on a definitive answer to the most ancient question about poverty and welfare.
For more than two centuries, reformers, critics, and administrators all have asked: Does social welfare leave the poor less willing to work? The economists who dominated poverty research also remained obsessed with this question, even though they disagreed on its answer. Rarely did economists consider the role of politics or capitalism in the production of poverty or examine their assumptions about the role of market incentives or the limits of market models as the basis for public social obligations, and they either ignored or belittled the few alternative frameworks proposed. It is telling that nowhere in his intelligent, even-handed analysis does Haveman mention the heuristic connection (discussed in Chapter 2) between American poverty and the dependency theory advanced by black scholars in the late 1960s early 1970s. As a consequence, research failed to shore up the intellectual foundation of the welfare state. Almost no one noticed that it had crumbled, until it was too late.