POV: LBJ’s War on Poverty 50 Years Later
Some success, but New Deal way may have been better
President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Economic Opportunity Act, August 20, 1964.
The 50th anniversary of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty has generated much commentary and controversy. Understandably, most attention has been paid to levels of poverty in the years since his declaration in January 1964 and what may account for how much or how little progress has been made. Yet assessing the degree to which “the war” was won or lost comes down to determining which so-called war we’re talking about and how to measure the results.
Regarding which war, most of today’s retrospectives address the wide range of actions the federal government has taken over the years in the name of addressing poverty; we’ll return to those momentarily. Yet the “war” declared by Johnson centered almost exclusively on one of the Great Society programs, the Economic Opportunity Act (EOA), a widely heralded but modestly funded piece of legislation. It centered on youth training, community action, small business loans, a work experience program for welfare recipients, and addressing family disintegration and child abandonment issues. Community Action Programs (CAP), to the surprise of the program’s designers, morphed from a benign “maximum feasible participation” in local affairs to militancy and confrontation in a number of cities. A modest Job Corps program was later phased out, while the Head Start program, inaugurated with CAP funds, has continued to this day, its effectiveness the subject of competing studies.
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Last, there is one remarkable and positive exception to these mixed antipoverty results. Largely due to Social Security, poverty rates among people aged 65 and above have fallen by a factor of four since 1959, from 39 percent to 9 percent. Without question, this represents America’s most successful poverty reduction intervention, and it speaks to both the policy and political accomplishments that can be brought about through targeted universal and non-means-tested programming.
Robert Hudson, a School of Social Work professor of social welfare, can be reached at rhudson@bu.edu.
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