A look back at 1964: Part II - Johnson's War on Poverty

                                           (Photo credit: LBJ Library photo by Cecil Stoughton)
                                            
Robert Caro’s book, The Years of Lyndon Johnson; The Passage of Power provides some insight to perhaps a fundamental flaw with Johnson’s War on Poverty. For example, the book recalls a remark made by Mr. William M. Capron, an early architect of the war on poverty program, “We started out with the notion that we were not talking about big new budget resources, and that was a constraint. That’s why…we talked about a targeted demonstration program. We used the argument that we were all terribly ignorant about poverty and programmatic ways to do something about it, that we had to learn a lot more. We were not talking about a massive program at all.”

Source: Library of Congress

Within four months, Whitney M. Young who served as the Executive Director of the National Urban League spoke at a April 1964 congressional hearing on the War of Poverty program, “…We support the poverty package. We feel, however, that it is a minimum package in light of the massive problems that we are facing, in the light of the massive problems of unemployment particularly that the Negro citizen faces, and the problem of undereducation and inferior education and inferior vocational education, housing and what-have-you…” [1] 



Source: Library of Congress



James Farmer's Annual report to the 1965 CORE National Convention outlined the barriers that would inherently negatively impact the President’s proposed anti-poverty programs. “Powerful lobbies, such as the financial and the real estate interests, exert tremendous pressure to see that programs to relieve poverty do not threaten their interests. Further, it is impossible for the government to mount a decisive war against poverty and bigotry in the United States while it is pouring billions of dollars down the drain in a war against people in Vietnam. The billion dollars available to fight poverty is puny compared with the need and insignificant compared with the resources expended in wars.” Mr. Farmer continued, “Yet it would be fatal to think that the anti-poverty program alone can make the necessary changes in the social and economic life of Black Americans." [2] 

The 50th anniversary has reignited the long-standing debate regarding the success or failure of the War on Poverty. Articles and various reports splashed all over the Internet touting its success, highlighted its failure and somewhere in between. But how do you gauge or measure the Johnson’s anti-poverty effort as a success or failure? Do you start with President Johnson’s rhetoric, “Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it”? Do you look at the $15 trillion spent, the programs that assisted millions of Americans, including the elderly, funds lost to mismanagement, incompetence, or political corruption. The Blackboard spoke with Dr. Wilhelmina A. Leigh, who serves as a Senior Research Associate with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. Dr. Leigh says that the War on Poverty has been a mixture of both success and failure. Dr. Leigh tells The Blackboard, “I think the country started out on a real good foot, they decided they were going to go with a number of different programs and see which ones worked, and they did that, “Dr. Leigh continues, “where it fell down, and perhaps it was not done by accident, by not implementing fully, all the programs that was found to have worked.” Dr. Leigh cited Headstart and Job Corps as examples. “Think of the world that we might be living in if every 3 or 4 year old was able to sign up for Headstart…it would be a very very different world.”

Dr. Jared Ball, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Morgan State University and co-editor of “A Lie of Revinvention: Correcting Manning Marable’s Malcolm X,” told The Blackboard, “The war on poverty was a total success from the perspective of the political elite that would want to promote a false idea of change. It had a moderate level of success,(and) it has allowed people to think to a certain extent that an effort was made to get rid of poverty, when in reality the war on poverty was really a way of masking the structural inequality, predicable and necessary inequality and to keep people from rebelling.”

Considering the recent national celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday, Dr. Ball spoke with The Blackboard about Dr. King. “We have to remember that Dr. King at the end of his life was demonized by the national press, he was put under surveillance by the major intelligence agencies in this country, and he was being ostracized by members of the civil rights movement as funding was being taken away by white liberals,” Dr. Ball continues, “Given the way that King responded to the poverty of his day, which was identical to the levels of poverty that we see today, you have to remember that towards the end of his life, Dr. King was an open critic of capitalism as an economic model, he was quietly approaching the socialism economic model, he was working on developing a poor peoples movement, and he was looking to disrupt the nation’s ability to function as normal. These were the types of things Dr. King was looking at toward the end of his life that doesn’t get attention.”

By the end of 1967, Dr Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference organized a Poor People's Campaign to address issues of economic justice and housing for the poor in the United States, aiming itself at rebuilding America's cities. In King’s last book: Where do we go from Here; Chaos or Community? Dr. King wrote, “When the war against poverty came into being in 1964, it seemed to herald a new day of compassion. It was the bold assertion that the nation would no longer stand complacently by while millions of its citizens smothered in poverty in the midst of opulence. But it did not take long to discover that the government was only willing to appropriate such as limited budget that it could not launch a good skirmish against poverty, much less a full-scale war." [3] 

Notes:

[1] Jr. Young, Whitney, M. “For a Federal War on Poverty.” Black Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century. Eds. August Meier, Elliott Rudwick, and Francis L. Broderick. New York: Macmillian, 1986. 430-437. 

[2] Farmer, James. “We must be in a position of power.” Black Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century. Eds. August Meier, Elliott Rudwick, and Francis L. Broderick. New York: Macmillian, 1986. 460-466.

[3] Jr. King, Martin Luther.  Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Boston: Beacon Press, 1968. 86

Correction: Dr. Ball was incorrectly quoted, "...The war on poverty was a total failure from the perspective of the political elite that would want to promote a false idea of change." It should have said "success" and not "failure". The Blackboard apologizes for any inconvenience.