“To Judge Harshly”: The Troubled Legacy of America’s Struggle with Poverty

During the last half of the twentieth century, Americans heard two of the more important declarations in U.S. history. The first happened on January 8, 1964, when President Lyndon Johnson, in his “State of the Union Address,” declared “unconditional war on poverty.” In 1988, the second occurred when President Ronald Reagan asserted that, although the “Federal Government declared war on poverty, . . . poverty won.” Johnson’s announcement came wrapped in the euphoria of a growing economy, a stable, still relatively peaceful world, and the confidence that the most powerful nation in the world, the United States, had the tools and resources readily available to create a “Great Society.” Calling on Congress to address civil rights, health care, and education, and to fight an “all-out war on human poverty,” Johnson had high hopes for America—hopes he believed were within reach. “If we fail, if we fritter and fumble away our opportunity in needless, senseless quarrels between Democrats and Republicans, or between the House and Senate, or between the South and North, or between the Congress and the administration, then,” Johnson cautioned, “History will rightly judge us harshly.”¹

Reagan’s statement did just that. His pronouncement cast a dreary pall over those very efforts—a dark cloud that, for most Americans, continues to this day. Drawing on a critique of American government and society that dated from the early 1960s, Reagan contended first that federal antipoverty efforts were “soft-headed and simple-minded,”—that there was nothing the government could do to ameliorate poverty. Building on this rhetoric, Reagan launched a political career that repeatedly and increasingly linked federal social reform efforts with “inefficiency, corruption, and the undeserving poor.”²

Politicians and the general citizenry are not the only ones to “judge harshly” the social programs of the 1960s. Both published in 1984, Charles Murray’s Losing Ground and Allen Matusow’s The Unraveling of America began the scholarly critique of the War on Poverty and the Great Society. Typically, coming as they did on the heels of the end of the “official” War on Poverty, Murray and Matusow painted their pictures with broad strokes and, like Reagan, focused on a win-lose binary. They too arrived at harsh judgments. Murray interpreted the social programs as a boondoggle, a program that created “poverty traps” that actually increased the number of Americans on welfare. As his title exclaimed, Murray contended that America had lost ground in the fight against want. For his part, Matusow found as much fault with the administration of the “war” as with the results. Because it failed to achieve any substantial change, Matusow concluded that the War on Poverty was “declared” but never actually “fought.”³

For the remainder of the twentieth century, as illustrated for example by President Clinton’s 1993 “Empowerment Zone” initiative and the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, the country in general remained focused on the basic efficacy of the nation’s welfare policy. In 1998, however, Thomas Kiffmeyer’s “From Self-Help to Sedition,” published in The Journal of Southern History, illustrated how the War on Poverty exposed the stark economic and power inequities in Pike County, Kentucky. Building upon that, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, scholars including Annelise Orleck, Marc Rodriguez, William Clayson, Robert Bauman, Kent Germany, and Susan Youngblood Ashmore linked the War on Poverty with the concomitant struggle for civil rights by Hispanics, African Americans, and women. Rejecting the simplistic win-lose scenario, this...