Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (78 page)

Radicals such as Harrington understood and highlighted the depth of these structural roots of poverty. "The entire invisible land of the other America," he wrote, "[had become] a ghetto, a modern poor farm for the rejects of society and the economy." Harrington went further in his condemnation of American society to argue that many of America's poor lived in a "separate culture, another nation, with its own way of life." He concluded, "The most important analytic point to have emerged in this description of the other America is the fact that poverty in America forms a culture, a way of life and feeling, that makes it a whole."
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Harrington employed the concept of a "culture of poverty" to dramatize the seriousness of the problem and to force politicians to act. Conservatives, however, made the most of the idea in subsequent debates over the nature of poverty. If poverty was rooted in the very culture of many low-income Americans, they said, then it was foolish for policy-makers to think they could do much about it.
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Liberal efforts, it followed, at best were a waste of the taxpayers' money. At worst they were counterproductive, for they would encourage "undeserving" people—"drunks," "deadbeats," "welfare mothers"—to rely on the government. Conservatives further insisted that most "poor" people managed all right. To be "poor" in the 1960s, they said with some asperity, was to live far more comfortably than "poor" people had lived in the 1930s or at the turn of the century.
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Some of these conservative arguments were hard to refute. Most of the people defined by the government as poor in the 1960s had central heating, indoor plumbing, and television. Many owned cars. In much of the world they would have been considered well-off. But in comparing living standards in the 1960s to the past, conservatives failed to appreciate that escalating expectations were beginning to affect the poor as well as more affluent people. Television heightened these expectations by blanketing the screen with programs and commercials that advertised the affluent society. Low-income people, realizing what they lacked, developed an ever more acute sense of relative deprivation. As their expectations intensified in the next few years—in part because of hype from the "war" against poverty itself—this sense increased. It underlay much of the acrimonious social conflict that arose later in the decade.
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Conservative arguments about a "culture of poverty" were also flawed. To be sure, durable subcultures, most obviously among racial minorities, persisted in the United States. Notions about cultural "consensus" that had been widespread in the 1950s seemed increasingly wrong-headed in the 1960s, when blacks and other self-conscious ethnic groups reasserted their cultural roots. And some of these groups, such as blacks, Mexican-Americans, and Native Americans, had rates of poverty that were much higher than those of whites. But most low-income people, blacks included, continued also to subscribe to mainstream cultural values such as the blessings of democracy, hard work, and long-term marriage and family life. They were not isolated in a puncture-proof or inferior "culture" of their own. Where they were often most different was not in culture but in class standing. They lacked money. Lacking money, they lacked power, and they felt aggrieved. Many institutions, moreover, seemed distant or irrelevant to them. Labor unions, which had assisted upward mobility in the 1930s and 1940s, were weakening and offering relatively little help. Many low-income Americans, living in such a world, grew angry and resentful. Others remained apathetic, thereby appearing to confirm negative stereotypes about them. Feelings such as these exposed class and racial divisions that radicals like Harrington deplored.

Johnson, Shriver, and the others who developed the war on poverty, however, were not radicals. They were optimists who reflected the confidence of contemporary American liberal thought. Unlike radicals, they thought that most poor people needed only a helping hand to rise in life. Unlike conservatives, they had great faith that government could and should extend that hand. Largely unaware of rising feelings of relative deprivation, they gave little thought to the idea (which was politically unrealistic) of redistributing wealth or income. They were not much concerned about inequality. They focused instead on programs to promote greater opportunity—a politically attractive goal—and pushed ahead impatiently for congressional action.

When Shriver and his advisers sent their handiwork to the Hill, Republicans and many Democratic conservatives hotly opposed it. Senate Republican leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois called the idea "the greatest boondoggle since bread and circuses in the days of the ancient Roman empire—when the Republic fell."
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But the legislative outcome was never much in doubt, for Johnson had worked with Shriver to assure that he had more than enough loyal Democrats—and a few liberal Republicans—to pass the bill. That they did on heavily partisan but nonetheless comfortable votes (226 to 185 in the House and 61 to 35 in the Senate) in August. The final measure included most of the various ideas and programs that had surfaced earlier in the year: loans for small business and rural development, funding for work-study benefiting college students, and the domestic peace corps idea, which was entitled Volunteers in Service to America, or VISTA. The bill also authorized establishment of Job Corps centers to provide job training and of a Neighborhood Youth Corps to create low-wage jobs for young people, mainly in central city areas. Finally, it called for development of community action programs, to be worked out by local leaders in concert with Washington. The act, underlining the focus on providing opportunity, set up an Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO)."
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To no one's surprise Shriver became head of OEO, whereupon he moved quickly to create the necessary bureaucracy and to hasten the flow of money before election time. Shriver believed sincerely in the capacity of government programs to help the needy, and he was an aggressive administrator. He proved especially adept on Capitol Hill, where he spent much of his time in the next few years trying to ensure continued support for the "war." Some of the initiatives pioneered by OEO-funded community action programs, moreover, generated fairly considerable support over time, notably Head Start and Follow Through, which aimed to improve the educational opportunity of poor children.
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Another CAP initiative, Neighborhood Legal Services, was much more controversial but managed to offer sorely needed legal advice to welfare recipients and others. These efforts returned the problem of poverty, long neglected, to on the agenda of national policy-making.

OEO, however, was poorly funded from the first. Congress appropriated at most $800 million in new money in 1964. This was less than 1 percent of the federal budget. With at least 35 million people officially defined as poor at the time, this came to a little more than $200 per poor person per year. And very little of the money went directly to the poor. Most OEO dollars, instead, covered the salaries and expenses of administrators, professionals, and government contractors who provided services such as Head Start or job training. Some of these officials were upwardly mobile blacks who for the first time secured fairly dependable employment with the government; for them, the war on poverty was a true opportunity. But few of them had been poor. Not only radicals like Harrington but also many liberals deplored the miniscule character of the program. It was at best a skirmish, not a war.
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If the United States had faced a depression in 1964, larger sums for a "war" on poverty might have been acceptable on Capitol Hill. For a brief spell in the mid-1930s Congress had authorized $3 billion a year for relief and public employment, more than one-third of the federal budget. But 1964 promised great and continuing economic growth, and few people applied pressure for larger expenditures to help the poor. On the contrary, most Americans maintained historically durable and largely conservative attitudes about the subject: aside from special "categories" of the "deserving poor"—people who were disabled, widows with children, the elderly without social insurance—the needy should normally take care of themselves. In the face of such widely held faith in individualism, it was unthinkable in 1964 that Congress would do much more than it did.

Lack of money, to be sure, was a drawback if one sought truly to fight a war. But low funding was not, as some observers later claimed, solely the fault of a fiscally prudent Congress or of a subsequent rise in military spending that threatened growth in domestic programs. On the contrary, Johnson himself never sought much more than he received. This was not only because he focused on providing opportunity rather than handouts. It was also because he truly hoped to hold down spending. He came close, managing to reduce federal expenditures slightly from 1964 to 1965—from $118.5 billion to $118.2 billion—and the annual deficit from $5.9 billion to $1.4 billion. Federal government spending as a percentage of gross domestic product actually decreased a little in the early 1960s, from 18.3 percent in 1960 to 17.6 percent in 1965, before rising again to 19.9 percent in 1970.
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Conservatives who railed at LBJ (and more generally at liberals in the 1960s) for "throwing money at problems" somewhat distorted the realities of government fiscal policies. Indeed, increases in federal spending for domestic purposes, while substantial by 1968, were hardly lavish. It was not until the supposedly more conservative 1970s and 1980s that public spending for domestic programs—especially health care and Social Security—exploded in size and created huge deficits. Some of this increase was attributable to growth (largely unforeseen) in programs from the Johnson years, but much also stemmed from legislation in the early 1970s.
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Nor was lack of money the only drawback. As indicated, OEO-type programs failed to attack the problems of the poor. Take job training, for example. Some trainees managed to find work, but it was far from clear that the training turned the tide for them. To some extent, Job Corps and other manpower programs "creamed" upwardly mobile people who would have found work in any event. Moreover, some of the trainees who found employment replaced other workers, canceling out any net gains. Otherwise, the OEO made no effort in the short run—such as providing public jobs—to fight underemployment and unemployment. It did nothing to lessen inequality. To have placed more federal money in job training—or in educational programs such as Head Start—would have enhanced the life-chances of some of America's poor, but perhaps not very many. In the short run, offered neither work nor welfare, they remained poor.
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Flaws such as these might not have mattered much if all that was at stake was a billion or so dollars a year. And indeed they did not matter in the fall of 1964, when Shriver pressed ahead excitedly with his plans. At that time, the existence of the war on poverty enhanced Johnson's reputation among liberals as a man who cared about the unfortunate and who could get Congress to do his bidding. LBJ's political timing, in which he took justifiable pride, had been good as he readied for the presidential campaign.

But the flaws did matter in the longer run—even as early as 1965. This was in part because Johnson and his aides greatly oversold their efforts, thereby raising unrealistic expectations, both among liberal observers and among the poor themselves. The struggle against poverty was hailed as the centerpiece of LBJ's liberal program. It was to be an "unconditional war." Poverty, Shriver said, could be wiped out (with sufficient funding) within ten years. Predictions such as these were an understandable and to some extent pardonable aspect of political salesmanship. But given the obduracy of destitution in all human societies, they were astonishing. When the predictions failed to materialize, mounting disillusion and cynicism undermined the liberal premise even as the expectations survived.
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S
ECURING PASSAGE OF A TAX CUT
and a war on poverty helped to establish Johnson's credentials as a skilled and successful leader of Congress. But the civil rights bill that Kennedy had introduced in June 1963 represented the central test of LBJ's presidential abilities. Johnson's struggle to get it passed absorbed most of his time and effort for the first six months of 1964.

Several considerations led Johnson to throw himself into the cause. First and foremost, he believed in it. Having grown up in Texas, he had seen first-hand the viciousness of racial discrimination, and he empathized with the victims. As a congressman he had battled to ensure that federal agricultural programs treated blacks and whites equally. Milo Perkins, a top official in the Farm Security Administration at the time, recalled that Johnson "was the first man in Congress from the South ever to go to bat for the Negro farmer." When Congress approved appropriations for public housing in 1937, Johnson persuaded officials of the United States Housing Authority to select Austin as one of the first three cities in the nation to receive funding. He then got the city to "stand up for the Negroes and the Mexicans" and to designate 100 of the 186 housing units for them.
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Although he moved cautiously as a senator so as not to offend white supporters, he remained well to the left of most southern politicians at the time. When he singled out Kennedy's civil rights bill in his speech to Congress five days after the assassination, he made it clear that he was sincere and determined.