THE PASSAGE of the first antipoverty bill marked a transition. Through 1964, the rationale for new social action programs was the one set by Kennedy: The government should take a more active role in helping people get on their feet. Then new agenda, new assumptions, and a rush of events (not the least of them Vietnam) complicated the situation.
For one thing—and the importance of this must not be forgotten during the ensuing discussion—an accident of history brought a master legislator to the presidency at a moment when the other forces were converging. The antipoverty bills, Food Stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, public housing programs, manpower training, expansions of entitlements, all followed pell-mell. It was a legislative blitzkrieg, not the implementation of a master plan.
Apart from the idiosyncratic influences of Lyndon Johnson’s ego and skills, a fundamental shift in the assumptions about social policy was occurring. Four forces pushed it: The economists seemed to have found the secret of lasting prosperity; policymakers and intellectuals discovered structural poverty; the civil rights movement moved north; and the original antipoverty programs failed to show the expected results. Together with other, less directly related tides in the American polity, they worked the revolution. In only three years, from 1964 to the end of 1967—what I shall refer to as the “reform period”—social policy went from the dream of ending the dole to the institution of permanent income transfers that embraced not only the recipients of the dole but large new segments of the American population. It went from the ideal of a color-blind society to the reinstallation of legalized discrimination. They were polar changes that were barely recognized as such while they were happening.
One explanation for the reforms of the 1964–67 period, and why they came then rather than earlier, is so simple that it is sometimes overlooked: 1964–67 was the first time that we thought we could afford them. We were extremely rich and extremely secure about our ability to continue getting richer. The performance of the American economy had been spectacular.
In part, it was a phenomenon that stretched back to the onset of the Second World War. In 1940, just before the war years, GNP had been less than $100 billion. Twenty-five years later, it was $685 billion, a sevenfold increase. Even after discounting for inflation, real GNP had nearly tripled.1
But history alone was not the goad. During the 1964–67 period in which the shift in social welfare premises took place, Lyndon Johnson and the Congress were making decisions under the impression—based on persuasive evidence—that the boom was no longer part of an ungovernable cycle of economic expansion and contraction. The Eisenhower administration had been punctuated by two recessions, recessions that the new generation of Keynesian economists who came to Washington with Kennedy said they could avoid. Kennedy had cautiously implemented their advice. And it had worked, exactly as the economists had said it would: steady growth, no inflation. From 1961 to 1965, GNP went from $520 billion to $685 billion in increments of $40 billion, $30 billion, $42 billion, and $53 billion. The inflation rate was about 1 percent per year.
Hubris won out. “We can’t prevent every little wiggle in the economic cycle,” Johnson’s budget director, Charles Schultze, acknowledged, but, he added confidently, “we now can prevent a major slide.”2 Keynes was on the cover of Time’s last issue of 1965. “Even the most optimistic forecasts for 1965 turned out to be too low,” the magazine wrote. “If the nation has economic problems, they are the problems of high employment, high growth, and high hopes.”3
The next two years brought more of the same—growth of $65 billion in the GNP in 1966 and $44 billion in 1967. Inflation was a bit higher, around 3 percent, but still manageable. There was no recession, no stumbling. “We are all Keynesians now,” said Richard Nixon, and it seemed to be eminently reasonable to be so. It appeared that the economists were making good on translating theory into practice.
Thus we made our decisions about the poor and about social policy from what seemed at the time to be a position of impregnable economic strength. Not only were we enjoying an unprecedented boom, we now thought we had the tools to sustain it indefinitely. If there was poverty amidst plenty (a favorite phrase among writers of the time), and its solution did not come as easily as the initial optimism had projected, then there was still no good reason to back off. All the changes in policy during the 1964–67 period must be considered in light of this central fact: At the time, almost everyone thought the economic pie would grow ever larger.
Even as the War on Poverty was beginning, its premises of self-help and open opportunities were lagging behind a new intellectual consensus that would shape policy very shortly.
To understand its power, one first must understand that poverty did not simply climb upward on our national list of problems; it abruptly reappeared from nowhere. In the prologue to this book, 1950 was described as a year in which poverty was not part of the discourse about domestic policy—indeed, as a year in which the very word “poverty” was seldom used. The silence was not peculiar to 1950. From the outset of the Second World War until 1962, little in the popular press, in political rhetoric, or in the published work of American scholars focused on poverty in America.4
When poverty did get into the news before 1964, the treatment of it tended to reflect surprise that it existed at all. In November 1960, three weeks after the presidential election and the day after Thanksgiving (a deliberate juxtaposition), Edward R. Murrow broadcast a CBS Reports called “Harvest of Shame.” It showed that tens of thousands of migrant workers were miserably paid, housed, educated, and nourished—problems that middle-class America apparently associated only with the 1930s and The Grapes of Wrath.
The viewing public and numerous editorial writers were shocked—a fact in itself illustrative of the obliviousness toward poverty. The more instructive reaction, however, was Murrow’s own. A few months later, the day after he was sworn in as director of the United States Information Agency, one of his first acts was to try to persuade the BBC to cancel a scheduled broadcast of “Harvest of Shame” That Edward R. Murrow, the embodiment of journalistic independence, would try to stop a news show on grounds that it would be taken out of context suggests how aberrant the poverty in “Harvest of Shame” was taken to be.
In the intellectual community, phenomena such as poverty among migrant workers were seen as peripheral. Norman Podhoretz, recalling the leftist intellectual circles in which he moved during the 1950s, points out that the essential economic success of the American system was taken as a given even by those who were most bitterly critical of the social system. He continues:
That there were still “pockets” of unemployment and poverty, and that there was still a great spread in the distribution of income and wealth, everyone realized. But the significance of such familiar conditions paled by comparison with a situation that now seemed to defy the rule that there could be nothing new under the sun: the apparent convergence of the entire population into a single class.5
Podhoretz’s observation held true through the 1960 presidential campaign. Poverty was, in the terms of that campaign, something that happened mostly in Appalachia—not only in the Kennedy campaign rhetoric, but in the minds of those Democrats who considered themselves true liberals. When Arthur Schlesinger decided to proselytize among members of the liberal establishment on behalf of John Kennedy in 1960, he made his case on issues that he knew to be the ones that were exercising his friends and colleagues in the liberal wing of the party. He chose as his theme that Kennedy was the man for an era in which the struggle for material subsistence had essentially been solved.6
Against this backdrop, the emergence of the structural view of the poverty problem was unexpected and rapid. As of the beginning of 1962, no one was talking about poverty; by the end of 1963 it was the hottest domestic policy topic other than civil rights. But it was not just “poverty” that was being talked about. “Structural poverty” was now at issue.
“Structural poverty” refers to poverty that is embedded within the nature of the system (or demographics) and will not be eradicated by economic growth. Its elimination, according to the proponents of this view of poverty, requires radical surgery. “The most visible structuralists,” writes James Patterson, “were not social workers or government bureaucrats looking for ways to improve the situation of individuals, but social scientists and left-wing writers who took a broad and reformist view of the functional relationship between inequality and the social system.”7
One such writer was Michael Harrington, who in 1962 published a book that was the most visible single reason for the sudden popularity of poverty. The book was The Other America. Its thesis was that a huge population of poor people—fifty million by his count—was living in our midst, ignored. They consisted of the aged, the unskilled, the women heading households with small children, and others who were bound to be bypassed no matter how much economic growth occurred, because of the way that the system distributed income.8
The importance of Harrington’s book was not in its details but in its central message: America was not the single-class, affluent society that a complacent intellectual establishment had assumed, but a deeply riven society in which the poor had been left to suffer unnoticed. Kennedy read The Other America and Dwight MacDonald’s evangelizing review of it in The New Yorker and ordered the beginning of the staff work that Lyndon Johnson would later seize upon for his crusade.9
It was a time when books became banners for causes—Silent Spring was published at about the same time, and Unsafe at Any Speed followed a few years later—and it is always difficult in such cases to determine how much was cause and how much effect. Certainly others had been forwarding a structuralist view of poverty both within and without the Kennedy administration.10 But even if the poor were bound to have been rediscovered in the early 1960s, Harrington was their pamphleteer, The Other America their Common Sense.
Once the argument had been made, it became very unfashionable for an intellectual in good standing to argue with it. A few, such as Irving Kristol, made note of Harrington’s factual inaccuracies and his reliance on dubious evidence.11 Later, even some of Harrington’s sympathetic colleagues would dispute the centerpiece arguments about intergenerational poverty.12 But much of what Harrington had to say seemed indisputable. The population did include large numbers of poor people, and they didn’t seem to be moving up the way that they were supposed to do. To quibble was to sound like the Chamber of Commerce.
If poverty was not an aberration, not a matter of “pockets” but structurally built into the American system, then it was necessarily true that the initial antipoverty bills represented a half-hearted and wrong-headed approach to the problem. Poverty was not going to be eradicated by a Job Corps or a few loans to small businessmen. Sweeping changes in the income distribution system were needed—a cool analytic conclusion to some, but more often a conviction held with “a passionate sense of urgency,” as Jeremy Lamer and Irving Howe put it. “[I]n a nation as rich as the United States,” they declaimed, “it is an utter moral scandal that even the sightest remnant of poverty should remain.”13
In a technical sense, the structuralists made a case only for the proposition that much, not all, of American poverty derived from structural characteristics. Their message was an antidote to the folk wisdom that anyone with enough gumption could make a good living. But the “passionate sense of urgency” got in the way of balance. What emerged in the mid-1960s was an almost unbroken intellectual consensus that the individualist explanation of poverty was altogether outmoded and reactionary. Poverty was not a consequence of indolence or vice. It was not the just deserts of people who didn’t try hard enough. It was produced by conditions that had nothing to do with individual virtue or effort. Poverty was not the fault of the individual but of the system.
For the Harringtons, it was a statement of political and economic dogma. For the politicians and policymakers and implementers of the programs, it was about to become the indispensable rationale for coping with two empirical developments that few were anticipating when the War on Poverty got under way.
Speaking to an interviewer in 1967, Daniel Patrick Moynihan summed up in a few sentences the toils in which the social welfare experiment had wound itself when the civil rights movement moved north.
In the South . . . there were a great many outcomes—situations, customs, rules —which were inimical to Negro rights, which violated Negro rights and which were willed outcomes. Intended, planned, desired outcomes. And it was, therefore, possible to seek out those individuals who were willing the outcomes and to coerce them to cease to do so.
Now, you come to New York City, with its incomparable expenditures on education; and you find that, in the twelfth grade, Negro students are performing at the sixth grade level in mathematics. Find for me the man who wills that outcome. Find the legislator who has held back money, the teacher who’s held back his skills, the school superintendent who’s deliberately discriminating, the curriculum supervisor who puts the wrong books in, the architect who builds the bad schools. He isn’t there!14
By and large—not perfectly by any means, but by and large—the legal system outside the southern states had rid itself of designed-in racism. There were no voter ‘’literacy” tests to get rid of, no Jim Crow laws to repeal. While northern racism might simply be more subtle, as many black leaders claimed, it provided few specific, reified targets to hit out against.
And yet equality of rights under the law had not been accompanied by equality of outcome. Blacks in the North as in the South lived in worse housing than whites, had less education, ate less nutritious food, and so on down the list of indicators that were used to measure well-being. On virtually every one, a large difference between black and white remained, and it was always to the disadvantage of the blacks. Whites were made aware of this by accounts such as Kenneth Clark’s “Youth in the Ghetto,” passed everywhere in mimeograph by poverty planners long before it was published.15 Blacks who lived in the ghetto did not need to read about it. Their response followed a pattern that could be used as a textbook example of a revolution of rising expectations.
The first phase of the civil rights movement culminated in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on 3 July. For all practical purposes, the national legislative struggle for equality was over. The Voting Rights Bill remained to be enacted a year later, but the generalized legal clout granted in the 1964 act was enormous: No one could with impunity deny someone access to the institutions of this country because of race without being liable to criminal penalties or inviting a nasty and probably losing lawsuit. The civil rights movement had triumphed—and thirteen days later came the first of the race riots, in Harlem.
The riots continued that summer in Rochester, Paterson, Philadelphia, and Dixmoor, a suburb of Chicago. They quieted during the winter, then erupted again in Watts, in August 1965, with a violence that dwarfed the disturbances of the preceding year. They would crescendo in 1967, with riots in more than thirty cities.
The riots changed, or coincided with a change in, what had until then been a movement of legal challenges, nonviolent demonstrations, and coalition-building. Writing from a Marxist perspective, some observers saw this as the trigger for the explosion in social spending that occurred during the same period: The white power structure needed to control the restiveness of blacks, and the shift from “a hand, not a handout” to income transfers was in the nature of a bribe.16
A careful review of what bills passed when, with what support, casts doubt on this argument, though it retains intuitive plausibility.17 But the post-1964 militancy unquestionably had another and arguably more pernicious long-term effect. It tightly restricted the permissible terms of debate within academia and the government on issues involving blacks— which is to say, virtually every issue associated with social policy.
Specifically, the riots and the militancy adjoined the moral monopoly that the civil rights movement of 1964 still enjoyed. The year 1964 was not only the year when the Civil Rights Act passed and the first riots occurred. It was also the year when Martin Luther King, Jr., won the Nobel Peace Prize. It was the year when Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were tortured and killed in Mississippi. It was, in short, the year in which all that created the moral monopoly was most in evidence.
Black leaders blamed the riots on whites—or, coextensively, The System. Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown said it with a rhetoric as bloody-minded and as unapologetic as the rioters. Martin Luther King said it with more elegance, thoughtfulness, and political astuteness, but said it nonetheless. “A profound judgment of today’s riots,” King told a convention of social scientists, “was expressed by Victor Hugo a century ago. He said, ‘If a soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness/ “18
As a statement about ultimate causes, the black interpretation was nearly unarguable. But history was not the issue. The exigent question was: What do we do now, today, in response to people rioting in the streets? Devising an answer put whites in a terrible moral bind—not one that blacks were likely to have much sympathy with, but a bind nonetheless. A white who had supported the simple, purely “good” civil rights movement against the nasty southerners and now said, “Wait a minute, that doesn’t mean you can start burning northern cities” was exposed as a summer soldier. Manifestly, racial discrimination continued to exist; manifestly, it was a moral perversity. Therefore. . . . And that was the hard part. What came after the “therefore”?
Whites who saw themselves as friends of the civil rights movement had to agree that the riots were regrettable but not the fault of blacks. The inevitability of the riots, even their reasonableness, had to be accepted, not as a matter of historical causation but as the basis for the white policy reaction. Of course the civil rights legislation had not forestalled violence, Newsweek told us. After all, “The promises of the present could not undo in a day the ugly legacy of the Negro past,” the magazine wrote in its lead paragraph on the Watts riot. “A summer ago, that past exploded in a bloody war of rioting across the urban North. And last week, on a steamy, smoggy night in Los Angeles, it exploded again.”19 A few pages later, a poll of whites’ reactions to the riots divided the discussion into two paragraphs —the “intelligent” reactions, meaning those who understood that the riots were an understandable manifestation of past injustice, and those who were “less perceptive,” meaning the people who said that the rioters were breaking the law and ought to be punished. The two stands were widely perceived as being mutually exclusive.
Not everybody agreed. “White backlash” was a phrase coined at about the same time as “black power.” The year 1966 saw the the election of an ideologically adamant conservative governor in California, Ronald Reagan, and widely publicized campaigns by racial hardliners like Boston’s Louise Day Hicks. But even on Main Street, well into the riot years, a majority remained in favor of taking new steps to remedy black grievances.20
Within the Establishment (for lack of a better term), a much narrower, circumscribing mindset took hold: The blame is embedded in the structure of the system, and the system must be made right.
The most vocal advocates for sweeping reform were from the left, but it would be mistaken to treat the sense of guilt as “liberal” versus “conservative.” The mea culpa resounded everywhere, including the most unlikely places. For example:
[W]e are creating a monster within our midst, a people being alienated from the mainstream of American life . . . [We must] cease thinking of racial relations as a nice and good thing, as one important national and local task—among many others —to do. American race relations today, like religion and basic ideologies historically, must have an absolute priority or we are as a nation lost! [Emphasis in the original]21
Strong words—not from a political rostrum, but from the lead article in the January 1967 issue of The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, a sober academic journal. But they were no more unexpected than an angry editorial, entitled “Cry of the Ghetto,” complaining bitterly of “white society’s stubborn refusal to admit that the ghetto is a problem it must solve, that its promises, broken and inadequate, are no longer tolerable.”22 It appeared in The Saturday Evening Post—the staid, middle-American, Norman-Rockwell-covered Saturday Evening Post—during that bloody August of 1967.
The National Commission on Civil Disorders, headed by an ex-governor of Illinois and comprising a distinguished selection of Americans from the business and professional worlds as well as from public life, put the imprimatur of the federal government on the explanation for the riots, concluding that “[w]hite racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.”23 The report presented no proof for this statement, but few objected. Its truth was self-evident.
Whether the Establishment view of the black condition in the last half of the 1960s was right or wrong is not the issue that concerns us. The fact that this view was so widely shared helped force the shift in assumptions about social welfare. White America owed black America; it had a conscience to clear.
The moral agonizing among whites was strikingly white-centered. Whites had created the problem, it was up to whites to fix it, and there was very little in the dialogue that treated blacks as responsible actors. Until July 1964 most whites (and most blacks) thought in terms of equal access to opportunity. Blacks who failed to take advantage were in the same boat with whites who failed to take advantage. By 1967 this was not an intellectually acceptable way to conceive of the issue. Blacks were exempted. Once more, in a new and curious fashion, whites had put up the “Whites Only” sign.
White confusion and guilt over the turn of events in the civil rights movement created what Moynihan has called “a near-obsessive concern to locate the ‘blame’ for poverty, especially Negro poverty, on forces and institutions outside the community concerned.”24 The structuralists, with their view of poverty as embedded in the American economic and social system, provided a ready-made complement to this impulse. If society were to blame for the riots, if it were to blame for the economic and social discrepancies between whites and blacks, if indeed it were to blame for poverty itself among all races, and if society’s responsibility were not put right by enforcing a formalistic legal equality, then a social program could hardly be constructed on grounds that simply guaranteed equality of opportunity. It must work toward equality of outcome. A “hand” was not enough.
The riots and black militancy constituted one of the two empirical developments that made the structural view of poverty attractive. The second was the early realization, within the ranks of the Johnson administration as well as among its critics, that the antipoverty programs were not working as expected.
For this part of the story, we return to the fall of 1964, when the first antipoverty bill had just been passed and the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) was being organized. Our focus shifts from the academicians, the journalists, the cabinet officers and congressional leaders to the people who did the work—the middle- and lower-echelon officials who designed and implemented the programs that constituted the War on Poverty.
They were an assortment of New Frontiersmen (Sargent Shriver at OEO being the most conspicuous example) and people who came into the bureaucracy especially to play a role in the great social reform that Johnson had launched. Few were bureaucrats, few were from the social-work tradition. They tended to see themselves as pragmatic idealists. “Hardnosed” was a favorite self-descriptor in the Kennedy years, and it carried over. The first poverty warriors did not intend to get bogged down in interminable debates about doctrine. They had a job to do and, from the accounts of people who participated in those early years of the Great Society, it was an exciting job. The recountings have the flavor of war stories—of all-night sessions preparing for crucial Senate hearings; of small, sweaty working groups designing new programs on impossibly short schedules; of meetings in Newark or Chicago or Biloxi where the people across the table were not mayors and city planners, but the heads of tenants’ associations and ghetto churches and street gangs. Speaking of his staff, the director of one of the early programs wrote:
All were the antithesis of the stereotyped bureaucrat cautiously protecting his career. Their approach right down the line was: “What needs to be done? How can we do it best, and faster?” When the answers were clear, they were all willing to risk their careers and their health and sacrifice their personal lives, to get the job done well and quickly. Something happened to us all... that created a rare combination of shared dedication, excitement, and satisfaction.25
Such people characterized the early years both in Washington and in the field offices. They had no serious doubts that they would have an impact on the poverty problem. It seemed obvious to them (as it did to many observers at the time) that the only reason we continued to have poverty at a time of such manifest national affluence was that nobody had really been trying to get rid of it. Once the effort was made, so their assumption went, progress would surely follow.
Their optimism had two bases. One was that the programs depended on human responses that seemed natural and indeed nearly automatic to them. The gloomy implications of the “culture of poverty” argument did not carry much weight at OEO in 1964 and 1965. A sensible, hard-working poor person would find much to work with in the opportunities offered by the initial antipoverty programs. Or to put it another way, if the people who ran the programs had suddenly found themselves poor, they probably would have been quite successful in using the antipoverty programs to rescue themselves. The early programs put chips on the table; as their advocates had promised, they did indeed give some of the poor a chance at a piece of the action, with the operative word being “chance.” The staff at OEO and its companion agencies scattered around Washington did not think that the loan programs or the community development programs would transform the ghetto instantaneously, but they had no doubt that such programs would be individually successful—steps in the right direction.
In the case of the training programs such as the Job Corps, success seemed to be still more natural. The logistics of providing training were straightforward. The educational technology was adequate and in place. There were plenty of welfare recipients who said they wanted jobs and who acted as though they wanted jobs. During the 1960s, and especially after the Vietnam War heated up, jobs were available for people with the kinds of skills that could be acquired in the training programs. The training programs would work, without question. What was to stop them?
It would be important to document the successes that were about to emerge. In the spirit of cost-effectiveness that McNamara had taken to the Pentagon, the early poverty warriors were prepared to be judged on the hardest of hardnosed measures of success. The programs would be removing enough people from the welfare rolls, from drug addiction, and from crime to provide an economically attractive return on the investment.
But how was this information to be obtained? Social scientists who had been at the periphery of the policy process—sociologists, psychologists, political scientists—had the answer: scientific evaluation. The merits of doing good would no longer have to rest on faith. We would be able to prove that we had done good, as objectively as a scientist proves an hypothesis.
In the space of a few years, applied social science and especially program evaluation became big business. In Eisenhower’s last year in office, 1960, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) spent $46 million on research and development other than health research.26 It took three more years for the budget to reach $90 million, followed by sizable jumps in 1964 and 1965. Then, in a single year, 1966, the budget doubled from $154 million to $313 million. Similar patterns prevailed at the other departments, agencies, institutes, and bureaus engaged in the antipoverty struggle.
The product of all this activity and money was a literature describing what was being accomplished by the antipoverty programs. It is what scholars call a “fugitive” literature, with most reports being printed in editions of a few dozen photocopies submitted to the government sponsor. The release of a major evaluation might get a column or two on a back page of a few of the largest newspapers. But otherwise, the work of the evaluators went unread by the outside world.
Within those governmental circles where the reports were read, they led to a rapid loss of innocence about what could be expected from the efforts to help people escape from welfare dependency. Starting with the first evaluation reports in the mid-sixties and continuing to the present day, the results of these programs have been disappointing to their advocates and evidence of failure to their critics.
The War on Poverty had originally struck on two fronts: For depressed neighborhoods and entire communities, “community action” programs were funded in profusion, to further all sorts of objectives; for individuals, manpower programs provided training or job opportunities. We shall be discussing the substance of what the evaluators found, not only in 1964–67 but subsequently, when we examine explanations for the breakdown in progress. For now, a few examples will convey the tenor of the findings.
The community action programs fared worst. A number of histories and case studies are available to the public at large, Moynihan’s Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding being the best known.27 With the advantage of hindsight, it is not surprising that the community development programs so seldom got off the ground. Faith in spontaneity and in ad hoc administrative arrangements were traits of the sixties that met disillusionment in many fields besides the antipoverty programs. Surprising or not, the record they compiled was dismal. For every evaluation report that could document a success, there was a stack that told of local groups that were propped up by federal money for the duration of the grant, then disappeared, with nothing left behind.
Each project had its own tale to tell about why it failed—an ambitious city councilman who tried to horn in, a balky banker who reneged on a tentative agreement, and so on. There were always villains and heroes, dragons and maidens. But failure was very nearly universal.
The course of the projects followed a pattern. To see how this worked in practice, we have the example of the Economic Development Administration’s major employment and urban development program in Oakland, the subject of a scholarly case study.28 This was the sequence:
The story broke with considerable fanfare. The Wall Street Journal of 25 April 1966 had it on page one, under the headline “URBAN AID KICK-OFF: ADMINISTRATION SELECTS OAKLAND AS FIRST CITY IN REBUILDING PROGRAM.”29 The governor of California and the assistant secretary of commerce for economic development held a press conference announcing a program of $23 million in federal grants and loans. The program was an assortment of community-run economic development projects bankrolled by the government. Various incentives were designed to prompt private business to invest in the ghetto. In the short term, 2,200 jobs were to be provided, and more were to follow from “spinoff s.” These jobs would go to the unemployed residents of the inner city.30
As far as its national publicity told the story, the program was a great success. A book (Oakland’s Not for Burning) was in the bookstores by 1968, claiming that the program “may have made the difference” in preventing a riot in Oakland.31 The New Yorker told its readers that the program had “managed to break a longtime deadlock between the Oakland ghetto and the local business and government Establishment.”32 Oakland was a showcase of the War on Poverty.
It was not until a year after these stories had appeared that the Los Angeles Times printed a follow-up story revealing that the activities described in the book and in The New Yorker had in actuality never gotten beyond the planning stage. All told, only twenty jobs had been created. The program was bogged down in bureaucratic infighting.33 The authors of the case study, writing from the perspective of four years later, concluded that the effect of the project on “despair and disillusionment” among blacks was probably to have made matters worse.34
The Oakland project was not chosen for study as an example of failure; the study began while hopes were still high. The Oakland experience was representative, not exceptional, and the gradual realization of this by those connected with the poverty programs was one source of their dampened hopes for the “hand, not a handout” approach. Few of them reacted by giving up; through the rest of the 1960s and well into the 1970s, it was argued that the community action programs were slowly learning from their failures and would do better next time. But if their proponents did not give up, neither did they speak so boldly about the imminent end of the dole.
The failure of the training programs was a greater surprise still. These of all programs were expected to be a sure bet. They dealt with individuals, not institutions, and teaching a person who wants to learn is something we know how to do. But starting with the first evaluation reports in the mid-sixties and continuing to the present day, the results failed to show the hoped-for results, or anything close to them. The programs were seldom disasters; they simply failed to help many people get and hold jobs that they would not have gotten and held anyway.
As with the community development programs, the findings varied in detail but not in pattern. In one of the most recent and technically precise studies of the Manpower Development and Training Act (MDTA), the linchpin of Kennedy’s original program and one that eventually grew to a multibillion dollar effort, the final conclusion is that male trainees increased their earnings between $150 and $500 per year immediately after training, “declining to perhaps half this figure after five years.” For the females, the study found a continuing effect of $300 to $600 per year.35 A panel study of the effects of vocational training found a wage increase of 1.5 percent that could be attributed to the training.36 The early studies of Job Corps trainees found effects of under $200 per year, and these early findings have been repeated in subsequent work.37 Effects of this magnitude were far from the results that had been anticipated when the programs began.38
Even as the program designers and evaluators debated what to do next and how to do it better, they could not avoid recognizing some discomfiting realities. It was quickly learned that people on welfare do not necessarily enroll in job training programs once they become available. Those who enroll do not necessarily stick it through to the end of the program. Those who stick it through do not necessarily get jobs. And, of those who find jobs, many quickly lose them. Sometimes they lose them because of their lack of seniority when layoffs occur. Sometimes they lose them because of discrimination. Sometimes they lose them because they fail to show up for work or don’t work very hard when they do show up. And—more often than anyone wanted to admit—people just quit, disappearing from the evaluator’s scorecard.39
Unable to point to large numbers of trainees who were escaping from welfare dependency, the sponsors of the training programs turned to other grounds for their justification. They found two. First, a cost-effectiveness case could be wrenched even from small increments in income. If the average trainee’s earnings increase even by a few hundred dollars, sooner or later the increase will add up to more than the cost of the training, and it was this type of calculation to which the sponsors were reduced. “The average effect [on earnings] for all enrollees is quite large,” we find in one evaluation of Job Corps, then read on to the next sentence, where it is revealed that the “quite large” effect amounted to $3.30 per week. It was a statistically significant gain.40
Second, the training programs lent themselves to upbeat anecdotes about individual success stories: John Jones, an ex-con who had never held a job in his life, became employed because of program X and is saving money to send his child to college. Such anecdotes, filmed for the evening news, were much more interesting than economic analyses. They also wer useful in hearings before congressional appropriations committees. Tacit or explicit, a generalization went with the anecdote: John Jones’s story is typical of what this project is accomplishing or will accomplish for a large number of people. That such success stories were extremely rare, and that depressingly often John Jones would be out of his job and back in jail a few months after his moment in the spotlight—these facts were not commonly publicized. The anecdotes made good copy. Thus the training programs continued to get a good press throughout the 1970s. They were the archetypal “hand, not a handout” programs, and they retained much of the intellectual and emotional appeal that had made them popular in the early 1960s. To some extent, whether they worked or not was irrelevant.
We have been scanning a record that has accumulated over the years since the first antipoverty projects in the early 1960s. But the loss of innocence came early. It soon became clear that large numbers of the American poor were not going to be moved off the welfare rolls by urban development schemes or by training programs.
At another time, that might have been the end of the attempt. Or, at another time, perhaps we would have done a better job of learning from our mistakes and have developed less ambitious, more effective programs. But the demands for urban renewal programs and jobs programs and training programs were growing, not diminishing, as the disappointing results began to come in. We were not in a position to back off, and, in fact, funding for such programs continued to grow for years. Neither, however, could we depend on such programs to solve the poverty problem.
The forces converged—not neatly, not at any one point that we can identify as the crucial shift. But the intellectual analysis of the nature of structural poverty had given a respectable rationale for accepting that it was not the fault of the poor that they were poor. It was a very small step from that premise to the conclusion that it is not the fault of the poor that they fail to pull themselves up when we offer them a helping hand. White moral confusion about the course of the civil rights movement in general and the riots in particular created powerful reasons to look for excuses. It was the system’s fault. It was history’s fault. Tom Wicker summed up the implications for policy toward the poor:
Really compassionate and effective reforms to do something about poverty in America would have to recognize, first, that large numbers of the poor are always going to have to be helped. Whether for physical or mental reasons, because of environmental factors, or whatever, they cannot keep pace. . . . Thus the aim of getting everyone off welfare and into “participation in our affluent society” is unreal and a pipe dream. . . . [A] decent standard of living ought to be made available not just to an eligible few but to everyone, and without degrading restrictions and policelike investigations.41
The column ran on the day before Christmas, 1967. It followed by only a few months an announcement from the White House. Joseph Califano, principal aide to Lyndon Johnson, had called reporters into his office to tell them that a government analysis had shown that only 50,000 persons, or 1 percent of the 7,300,000 people on welfare, were capable of being given skills and training to make them self-sufficient.42 The repudiation of the dream—to end the dole once and for all—was complete.