Beyond the City: Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty in Rural America

When President Johnson first declared a war on poverty in January 1964, he had neither a concrete battle-plan nor a firm commitment from anyone to run the future program. Just over seven months later he signed the Economic Opportunity Act (EOA), making the fight against poverty a national commitment enshrined in statute. The act created the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), a new operational agency based in the Executive Office of the President; a set of legislative titles and programs to fight poverty; and invested in the director of the OEO (Kennedy in-law and head of the Peace Corps, Sargent Shriver) the authority to coordinate and direct federal resources in the national antipoverty effort.

The president had high hopes for the program, describing it as “a new day of opportunity” and “a new era of progress … opening for us all.”¹ Together with combating disease and ignorance, the War on Poverty was central to Johnson’s own vision of “fighting man’s ancient enemies” and creating the Great Society.²

But poverty was never defeated. Instead of leading the fight on poverty, the OEO, its staff and its programs had to fight annually for their very survival against a highly skeptical Congress, an angry press, and an increasingly wary and preoccupied White House. Only three years after its launch, OEO’s successful congressional two-year reauthorization of 1967 was viewed by many as a political miracle. A member of the House was quoted as saying, “A few months ago … nobody would have bet a nickel we would approve a poverty program in this Congress.”³ By this time the antipoverty programs had become synonymous with petty corruption, mismanagement, embezzlement, political extremism, and even black power militancy.

Amid the tumult of the late 1960s, the OEO and its local staff were accused of playing an active part in the Newark riots of 1967, funding criminal gangs in Chicago, supporting the staging of racist theater performances in New York City, and embezzling federal money in Mississippi. Such key War on Poverty components as the Community Action Program (CAP), the Job Corps, Legal Services, Upward Bound, and even the popular Head Start were often mentioned in sensationalist news stories of violence, corruption, and financial mismanagement. In 1966, Richard Nixon spoke for many when he described the War on Poverty as having been “first in promises, first in politics, first in press releases—and last in performance.”⁴

Almost as quickly as it had risen to the top of the national policy agenda, the War on Poverty and its programs became one of the topics the president and White House least wanted to discuss. If Vietnam became LBJ’s foreign policy albatross, the War on Poverty was viewed by many as his domestic one. Indeed, Time magazine in 1966 wrote that “next to the shooting war in Viet Nam, the spending war against home-front poverty is perhaps the most applauded, criticized, and calumniated issue in the U.S.”⁵

At the center of this maelstrom about the antipoverty programs was Community Action. To some, the idea was simply a management vehicle, a way of coordinating the many disparate and overlapping antipoverty programs existing within the federal, state, and local bureaucracies. Communities consisting of the poor, local government, business, and labor interests would come together and form not-for-profit Community Action Agencies (CAAs) to coordinate, engage, and devise plans for tackling the problems of local poverty. Community Action was in this light viewed as a deliverer and coordinator of services to combat poverty. Certainly, consultation with the poor and participation of the poor were elemental parts of this approach, but this version of Community Action was not about political or social empowerment. It was simply a new way of more efficiently coordinating programs and engaging the poor in an effort to help them help themselves.⁶ By bypassing state government and distributing federal funds directly to the CAAs, this was administratively a relatively new approach,⁷ but based on what the White House and administration viewed as the “traditional and time-tested American...