Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (77 page)

Johnson's belief in bread-and-butter liberalism as advanced by the New Deal reflected his regional interests. He insisted that federal aid was the key to breaking down the isolation and destitution of the South, by far the nation's most poverty-stricken region. He took care while President to direct as much federal money as possible to the South and West, thereby helping to bring the Sun Belt, as it became called, into the mainstream of the American economy. But Johnson's faith in the State as benefactor of socio-economic progress transcended regional particularism. In this belief, the essence of his political philosophy, he was very much in tune with liberals of his generation.

As J
OHNSON PREPARED
his domestic programs in late 1963, he knew—everyone knew—that he possessed an enormous advantage that liberal predecessors had been denied since the late 1930s: a national mood so eager for strong presidential leadership that even Congress and interest groups had to take heed. A number of developments helped to encourage such a mood. Kennedy's expansive rhetoric about a New Frontier, although ignored on the Hill in his lifetime, had kept a liberal agenda alive. Surging growth of the economy since 1962 helped enormously: the nation, it seemed, could afford expensive federal programs. And highly optimistic liberal bureaucrats, such as Walter Heller of the Council of Economic Advisers, were certain that social science expertise and computerization gave government the tools to change the world.

Forces such as these, however, paled in power compared to the impact of Kennedy's assassination. This impact, to be sure, did not move everyone in the same way. Some people thought that sinister forces had overtaken the country: reform in such a satanic society was futile. Conservatives clung to historically powerful doubts about the capacity of government to improve on the market. Special interest groups continued to resist changes that appeared to endanger them. Millions of Americans, as always, remained apathetic or apolitical. Still, Kennedy's assassination touched many people as they had not been touched before. Could the murder of so young and promising a leader be redeemed? Must his life be wasted? A palpable popular yearning for determined political leadership seemed ubiquitous.

Johnson provided it. In the months following Kennedy's death he scarcely wavered in his certainty that he, like FDR, could develop public programs to benefit society and to secure the progress of the "Free World." He was equally confident that the United States had more than enough resources to accomplish these things. Indeed, he epitomized the rise of grand expectations that captured many liberals in the 1960s. "I'm sick of all the people who talk about the things we can't do," he told an aide in 1964. "Hell, we're the richest country in the world, the most powerful. We can do it all."
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In pushing for such an expansive liberalism, LBJ (as many people called him) devoted unprecedented attention to Capitol Hill. "There is," he explained later, "but one way for a President to deal with the Congress, and that is continuously, incessantly, and without interruption. If it's really going to work, the relationship between the President and Congress has got to be almost incestuous. . . . . He's got to build a system that stretches from the cradle to the grave, from the moment a bill is introduced to the moment it is officially enrolled as the law of the land." He added, "A measure must be sent to the Hill at exactly the right moment. . . . Timing is essential. Momentum is
not
a mysterious mistress. It is a controllable fact of political life that depends on nothing more exotic than preparation."
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Johnson worked as hard at accommodating congressional sensibilities as any President in modern American history. Again and again, and at all hours, he picked up the phone to call and to flatter legislators, among them junior people who had never heard from the White House before. Leaving nothing to chance, he insisted that his political aides be on the Hill at all times. With characteristic crudeness he told them, "You got to learn to mount this Congress like you mount a woman." He told Califano never to take a congressman's vote for granted. "Don't ever
think
about those things. Know, know,
know!
You've got to
know
you've got him, and there's only one way you know." Johnson raised his right hand, made a fist, and looked at it. "And that's when you know you've got his pecker right here." LBJ then opened his desk drawer, unclasped his fist as though he were dropping something, slammed the drawer, and smiled.
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One of Johnson's first major efforts after Congress resumed work in early 1964 was to secure passage of the tax cut that Kennedy had supported. A version of it had previously passed the House, but a companion bill was stalled in the Senate by determined fiscal conservatives who demanded that the administration also agree to pare expenditures in the coming fiscal year. Heller and other liberals resisted this pressure and held out for a budget that would set spending at $101.5 billion. Johnson broke the stalemate by siding with the conservatives. "If you don't get this budget down to around 100 billion," he told Heller, "you won't pee one drop."
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Congressional conservatives, pleased by Johnson's concession, soon approved a bill. It called for cuts totaling $10 billion over the next two years, and Johnson signed it in February. As many liberals had predicted earlier, the law mainly helped upper-income groups and corporations. Loopholes persisted, unchallenged by congressional liberals or conservatives, for years thereafter. Still, Johnson's accommodating stance on taxes helped to produce a law that had seemed badly bogged down before Kennedy's death. His flexibility thereby enhanced his reputation as a legislative leader. The law, moreover, promised to benefit a good many people, pleasing members of Congress in an election year. Some economists, Heller included, hoped that the tax cut would indeed stimulate the economy and thereby demonstrate the virtues of Keynesian ideas.

Johnson's next major effort pursued a goal that he grandiloquently announced in his State of the Union message in January: "This administration, today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America."
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This idea, too, he had taken in part from Kennedy, whose economic advisers had been developing plans to battle poverty in the last weeks of his life. Heller managed to see Johnson on the evening of November 23, one day after the assassination, and to mention in a general way what Kennedy and his advisers had been thinking. "That's my kind of program," Johnson replied. "Move full speed ahead."
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Heller, elated, proceeded to do so. So did others in the governmental bureaucracy who had already been working on related problems. Among them were officials on the President's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, which Kennedy had set up in May 1961. Exploring programs in various cities, the committee had become especially attracted to Mobilization for Youth, an experimental effort on the Lower East Side in New York City. Theorists for MFY, as it was called, believed that social problems such as delinquency stemmed mainly from blocked economic "opportunity" and that the remedy lay in community planning to increase such opportunities.
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Impressed, the Kennedy administration awarded MFY a grant of $2.1 million in May 1962.
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This idea, that poor people needed government help and guidance to promote wider opportunity, lay at the heart of subsequent liberal efforts in the 1960s to fight poverty.

Michael Harrington's
The Other America
, published in late 1962, gave added force to liberals who wanted to battle against poverty. Harrington maintained that 40 to 50 million Americans, or as much as 25 percent of the population, were deeply in need. The book attracted widespread attention, especially after it received a long and laudatory review by Dwight Macdonald in the
New Yorker
in January 1963. Kennedy apparently read the article. While Harrington had little effect on the details of subsequent policy-making—he was far to the left of administration liberals—his book did much to place the subject on the national political agenda. Poverty, having been "invisible" (in Harrington's word) for years, had now been "rediscovered."
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Government officials, meanwhile, were sharpening their analytical skills to produce the concept of a "poverty line." In 1964 this line was estimated to be around $3,130 for a family of four and a little more than $1,500 for a single individual.
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By that standard, 40.3 million people were "poor," around 21 percent of the population of 192 million.
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Certain groups, moreover, clustered below the line, including more than half of black Americans, nearly one-half of people living in female-headed families, and one-third of people over 65.

With poverty in the news, Johnson jumped at the chance to tackle it. He remembered the good that the NYA and other New Deal social programs had done in the 1930s, and he wanted to be the President who finished what FDR had started. Equally important, he shared the contemporary liberal view that the United States, a rich and resourceful country, could afford to do something. Johnson also believed unquestioningly in another liberal faith: that government had the skill to improve the lot of its citizens. What motivated Johnson to fight poverty, in short, was not the worsening of a social problem—higher percentages of Americans had been poor in the 1950s—but the belief that government could, and should, enter the battle. These optimistic expectations, not despair, lay at the heart of American liberalism in the sixties.

Political motivations further influenced Johnson's enthusiasm for a war against poverty. He was anxious to draw upon Kennedy's ideas and to get something passed in order to demonstrate his skills with Congress. He especially wanted to be able to point to solid accomplishments in the forthcoming presidential campaign. In February he named R. Sargent Shriver, a brother-in-law of Kennedy who already headed the Peace Corps, to develop a bill. Shriver, like Johnson, was less interested in the details of legislation than in results on the Hill, and he fashioned a hodgepodge of presumably popular prescriptions against poverty. These included programs to improve education for pre-schoolers and adults, to expand job training, and to create a domestic version of the Peace Corps that would send idealistic volunteers into poverty-stricken areas.
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Neither Shriver nor Johnson intended their efforts to increase governmental spending on public assistance. Both hated the very idea of long-term welfare dependency and of costly governmental outlays for public aid. "Welfare," indeed, remained a dirty word in the lexicon of liberals as well as of conservatives in the United States. Instead, Johnson hoped that a "war" on poverty would provide the "opportunity" necessary to help people help themselves. Welfare, thereby rendered unnecessary, would wither away. The goal, Shriver said repeatedly, was to offer a "hand up, not a hand out," to open "doors" to opportunity, not to establish federally financed "floors" under income. Johnson also made it clear that he would not increase taxes—after all, he had just signed a tax cut—for a large-scale program of public employment. Having promised conservatives to control spending, he intended to hold the line. From the beginning, therefore, the war on poverty had limited firepower. It was to rely mainly on educational programs and job training, mostly for young people, in order to improve their skills and their equality of opportunity. Enhancing opportunity was a profoundly American idea, rooted in a tradition dating to Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence.
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The poverty bill that Shriver and others fashioned in the spring of 1964 also included the idea of "community action." Those who coined the phrase did not define it with precision. Without much reflection they hoped that poverty programs would promote community development—another cherished American faith—and that local leaders would be involved at some level with formulating and carrying out the war. Only later, when the war against poverty got started, did it become clear that community action programs, or CAPs, would become the heart of the effort.
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A few of the draftsmen in early 1964 went further and imagined that poor people themselves should play important roles in developing community action. In the phrasing that appeared in the legislation, the poor were to have "maximum feasible participation." What the phrase meant did not become clear, and it attracted little notice during congressional debates over the bill. It was only later that a few radicals and activists tried to assign "maximum feasible participation" to themselves. In doing so they clashed sharply with local authorities, including Democratic politicians who had other ideas for the money. "Community action" and "maximum feasible participation" then became fighting words that divided the Democratic party. Such were some of the longer-range consequences of a bill that Johnson had expected to bring him praise and gratitude.
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These, to be sure, were unintended consequences. Neither Johnson nor Shriver foresaw them in the spring of 1964. Still, they can be faulted for their haste. Hurrying to start the war, they did not wait for studies to be done that might have told them more about the nature of poverty, which had complicated structural roots that their bill scarcely considered. The majority of poor people in the United States—as in any industrialized economy—needed more than education, job training, or the engagement of domestic peace corps workers. Millions were too old, too sick, or too disabled to benefit much from such efforts. Single mothers with young children confronted multiple problems, including the need for costly day care. Blacks, Mexican-Americans, and other minorities faced widespread discrimination in housing and jobs. Unemployment, underemployment, and low wages afflicted millions of people in the labor force. Farm and migrant workers had long been among the poorest of people; approximately 50 percent of Americans living on farms in 1960 were poor by government definition. The South, a predominantly rural region, then and later suffered from the highest incidence of poor people in the nation.
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