War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964-1980

Conclusion: The War on the War on Poverty and American Politics since the 1960s

ANNELISE ORLECK Conclusion The War on the War on Poverty and American Politics since the 1960s We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night. Well that was probably true. They were all on a diet. Ronald Reagan, A Time for Choosing, October 1964 My friends, some years ago, the Federal Government declared war on poverty, and poverty won. Ronald Reagan, 1988 State of the Union Address If there is a prize for the political scam of the 20th century, it should go to the conservatives for propagating as conventional wisdom that the Great Society programs of the 1960s were a misguided and failed social experiment that wasted taxpayers’ money. Joseph A. Califano, aide to President Lyndon Johnson and secretary of health, education, and welfare under Jimmy Carter, 1999 THE WAR ON POVERTY FROM LBJ TO JIMMY CARTER The War on Poverty and the programs it spawned have had a complicated and ambivalent history since the 1960s. They have been attacked rhetorically on all fronts. Politicians across the political spectrum have consistently portrayed Lyndon Baines Johnson and his Great Society as symbols of all that is wrong with big government and as arguments against future expansions of federal poverty programs, especially those built on the idea of mobilizing the poor on their own behalf. That widely accepted narrative of the War on Poverty as both an exercise [438] Orleck in naïveté and a destructive failure played a crucial role in the ascendancy of conservative thought in U.S. national politics from the 1960s to the 1980s. This idea has continued both to drive conservative politics and to constrain the liberal policy imagination into the twenty-first century. For almost half a century, conservative politicians have deployed negative imagery of the War on Poverty to drain public support from liberal policy initiatives. At the same time, Democratic leaders from Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton to Barack Obama have carefully distanced their policies from those of Johnson and his poverty planners. Yet behind this public politics lies a very different, largely hidden, policy reality. Antipoverty programs initiated under lbj and built on, adapted by, and extended by several of his successors make up some of the most enduring and unassailable strands of the national social safety net. It is not hyperbole to say that the War on Poverty programs have had a vast impact on U.S. government policy from the municipal to the federal level. The transformations in the federal government and the American social welfare state that began as part of the Great Society have, despite their bad name and decades of criticism from both the Left and Right, proven as durable as those of the New Deal. Almost all of the most important and visible poverty programs created during the Johnson years have survived—even if in altered form—into the twentyfirst century. Their long-term existence has created a sense of permanence and inevitability that has not been easily dismantled, even by presidents with deep ideological commitments to doing so. The most conservative presidents since the 1960s, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, publicly made war on federal poverty programs and their beneficiaries. These presidents enacted deep program cuts and empowered investigatory agencies to crack down on “waste” and “corruption” in poverty programs. These crackdowns deepened the suffering of millions already mired in poverty. But at the same time, each of these presidents quietly increased allocations for a variety of poverty programs. And after Johnson , the president who oversaw the greatest expansion of War on Poverty programs was a Republican, the complicated and paradoxical Richard Nixon. Nixon’s presidency in many ways exemplifies how public rhetoric around the War on Poverty often diverged from the hidden mechanics of policymaking . Nixon publicly condemned the centralization of federal power that the War on Poverty had promoted. He campaigned for president insisting that Johnson’s poverty program had been a wasteful failure: accepting the 1968 Republican presidential nomination, Nixon said, Conclusion [439] For the past five years, we have been deluged by government programs for the unemployed; programs for the cities; programs for the poor. And we have reaped from these programs an ugly harvest of frustration, violence and failure across the land. And now our opponents will be offering more of the same—more billions for government jobs, government housing, government welfare. I say it is time to quit pouring...