Early efforts to generate ideas for specific components of a federal anti-poverty effort had produced little more than a rehash of existing departmental programs and old proposals. Little fresh thinking seemed to be occurring. This was the idea of community action. It was based, in turn, on the concept of opportunity theory, which had been developed by Columbia University sociologists Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin. Opportunity theory had originated as a strategy for addressing the problem of youth gangs in low-income urban neighborhoods—an issue that had been a prominent concern in major cities during the s and early s.
Like most Americans, they sought social status, personal security, material comfort, even wealth, but they lacked access to the normal range of opportunities for achieving such goals. As a result, such young people turned to the gang as an alternative social structure that would meet these basic needs. The solution to gangs and juvenile delinquency thus lay in opening the blocked avenues of opportunity in such communities, thereby reducing the allure of the gang.
The best way to do this, Ohlin and Cloward argued, was to involve both gang members and others in their communities in planning social services and educational and vocational programs that responded to the needs of the individuals involved.
Beginning in , Ohlin and Cloward attempted to implement the opportunity theory idea in an experimental program in New York City known as Mobilization for Youth.
Additional experiments funded by the Ford Foundation and a presidential committee on juvenile delinquency headed by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy expanded the opportunity theory concept into a strategy for attacking the problem of poor communities more generally. With that effort floundering, they suggested the community mobilization approach of opportunity theory as a specific strategy for fighting poverty.
Renamed community action, the concept provided the thematic and st rategic coherence that the anti-poverty task force had sought for much of the fall. Lyndon Johnson, however, had little interest in pilot projects. He wanted action, and he wanted to make bold strides in attacking a social evil.
Upon being briefed on the community action concept during a Christmas meeting at his Texas ranch, Johnson initially rejected the idea—and possibly the entire anti-poverty effort itself—before accepting it on the condition that it be vastly expanded.
This meant that an academic concept that had barely been tested in a real-worl d setting would suddenly form the core of a major federal social policy endeavor. With the decision made, Johnson and his closest advisers prepared to unveil the new program to the nation. Launching a War on Poverty presented immediate advantages in dramatizing the issue and pushing the legislation through Congress. For the same reasons, future presidents would deploy the military metaphor against foes ranging from cancer, to drugs, to terrorism.
The first consisted of equipping the poor to take advantage of opportunity, while demanding that they then help themselves. Anderson that. The NYA was a New Deal program that provided work-study jobs for high school and college students and work experience jobs for unemployed young people. Johnson first came to national notice through his innovative projects and efficient implementation of the Texas program.
He envisioned the War on Poverty as a revived NYA, both in actual programmatic content and in administrative style. I put a little steel in some statewide roadside parks. But I got 4, of them down there now. And I got a dollar to show for every dollar I spent. First, it suggested that the best approach to fighting poverty lay in equipping young people, and specifically young men, to take on responsible and productive positions in the economy and in national life.
Second, it suggested that such efforts could be facilitated by relying on innovative local and state administrators of the type he had worked with in the Texas NYA.
On 20 January , he told Chicago mayor Richard J. By the end of the month, he had concluded that the planners needed a more coherent approach and more guidance from a firm administrative hand. As a result, in a series of four lengthy telephone calls on 1 February, the President cajoled and even bullied Peace Corps director R. Sargent Shriver into accepting a second position heading the task force that would write the anti-poverty legislation.
As the husband of Eunice Kennedy, the sister of John and Robert Kennedy, Shriver provided a link to the Kennedy clan and their supporters, many of whom were deeply alienated from the new President and posed a potential political threat. Second, as the director of the successful and popular Peace Corps, Shriver had great credibility with Congress, the media, and, to a lesser extent, the public. He would be a valuable ally in securing passage of the bill. Despite his initial hesitance, Shriver threw himself into the planning work and quickly became the public face of the War on Poverty.
After an initial briefing from the task force on the existing plans, Shriver and his top deputy, Adam Yarmolinsky borrowed from the Department of Defense , quickly concluded that community action alone would not provide a sufficient programmatic base for what Johnson had already promised.
We had independently reached agreement that the program they were presenting to us made no political sense. Over the following six weeks, an expanded task force engaged in a frenzied flurry of legislative drafting and program development, conducted in a series of makeshift offices around Washington. By mid-March, the legislation had been drafted and a presidential message to Congress had been prepared.
Now known as the proposed Economic Opportunity Act of , the legislation included a range of training, educational, and service programs, along with community action.
The newly added programs included the Job Corps, which would provide educational and vocational training for poor young people in residential camps; the Neighborhood Youth Corps, which would offer work-training and work-study programs for high school and college students; programs of loans for low-income farm families and for small businesses; the Volunteers in Service to America VISTA program, which would recruit volunteer anti-poverty workers as a kind of domestic parallel to the Peace Corps; and new or expanded programs for adult basic education, job training for unemployed fathers, and aid to migrant workers and dependent children.
In his imagination, they would provide the skills and the work ethic necessary to connect young men to the opportunities of the wider society, building on but also transcending the legacy of the New Deal. Unlike the New Deal, however, the bill made no provision for the direct creation of jobs for the poor. Willard Wirtz had proposed the inclusion of a public jobs component. It simply took for granted that the Keynesian macroeconomic management strategies heralded by the tax cut would create sufficient opportunities for the newly empowered poor, and that they would do so in or near the communities wh ere the poor actually lived.
Such assumptions would soon prove highly problematic. Community action supporters such as Richard Boone had included this language to insure that African Americans would not be cut out of the program, especially in the still-segregated South. This view was anathema to mayors like Richard Daley, and as later tapes show to the President himself. Maximum feasible participation would cause significant controversy and pose dangerous political dilemmas for the Johnson administration, especially in the first 18 months of the program.
Yet it also represented the most transformative, radical dimension of the War on Poverty. At its best, it led to the transfer of power and resources to low-income people, many of them minorities and women, who had never had access to them before. Without a political commitment to the concept, though, and without a deeper engagement with the underlying economic problems and needs of poor communities, this transformation would too often prove fleeting, vulnerable to the recriminations of those threatened by such change, and susceptible to the cutoff of the very resources and authority that made them possible.
Shriver, however, wanted a separate agency, vested with presidential authority, and he received the backing of a number of Cabinet members and, eventually, the President, too. OEO managed the remaining programs and had overall oversight of the War on Poverty. However, it also increased the risk to Johnson because it linked any failures to the President himself. On 16 March, Johnson delivered his message on poverty to Congress, and with it he officially submitted the anti-poverty bill.
Landrum of Georgia as the floor leader for the bill in the House. This had earned him the enmity of union leaders—key parts of the Democratic coalition—and many northern liberals.
In the midst of the civil rights struggle, however, Johnson believed that he needed a southern floor leader who could reassure his regional colleagues that the bill was not simply an extension of the Civil Rights Act. As many of the conversations show, Landrum proved to be an adept tactician who managed to hold an often-fractious coalition together. Over the period preceding the start of the first War on Poverty volume, the recorded conversations about the War on Poverty capture questions of legislative strategy, struggles regarding jurisdiction over the bill, and occasional controversies over its implications.
Even more challenging was the conservative segregationist who chaired the House Rules Committee, Representative Howard W. His 6, native auxiliaries as it proved later on could not be relied upon in a civil war. And our views of poverty and social betterment, or what is possible and what is not, are still largely conditioned by it.
In the old world, poverty seemed, and poverty was, the natural and inevitable lot of the greater portion of mankind. New Word List Word List. Because it has only been adjusted for inflation and not for increases in living standards, the poverty line has fallen to just under 30 percent of median income as of The supplemental poverty measure is a more comprehensive measure of poverty that incorporates additional items such as tax payments and work expenses in its family income estimates.
It also provides crucial information on the effectiveness of work and income supports in lifting families above the poverty line. Thresholds used in the measure include data on basic necessities—food, shelter, clothing, and utilities—and are adjusted for geographic differences in the cost of housing. This measure serves as an additional indicator of economic well-being and provides a deeper understanding of economic conditions and policy effects.
One major difference between these two measures is that the federal poverty level does not take into account the impact of anti-poverty policies. This can create the false impression that poverty is intractable and will persist no matter what government does.
According to a recent Columbia University study that used the supplemental poverty measure, our safety net reduced the number of Americans living in poverty from 26 percent in to 16 percent in Without these programs, the study estimates that more Americans—29 percent—would be in poverty today.
It is necessary to take into account the impact that these critical programs have on individuals and families in order to establish whether or not our anti-poverty policies are working. David Ballard. Rachel West , Katherine Gallagher Robbins. The Sargent Shriver Peace Institute website also contains the history of legal aid and of other programs that were born during the War on Poverty and because of the War on Poverty.
The War on Poverty represents one of the most substantial government-led strategies to address poverty in the United States. As its leader, Sargent Shriver was tasked with creating policy and programs that would not just alleviate poverty, but provide a pathway towards eliminating it permanently.
On February 1, - barely two months after the assassination of President Kennedy, and the morning after returning from a grueling, three-week trip to Asia as Director of the Peace Corps -- Sargent Shriver received a phone call at home from President Lyndon Johnson.
The President informed him that, at a press conference that afternoon, he would be announcing Shriver's appointment as the Director of the War on Poverty; you can hear their conversation here. Johnson was adamant. Now, you may not have the glands. He would remain the director of The Peace Corps and lead The War on Poverty, becoming its conceiver, administrator, and architect.
It does not try to make men good - because that is moralizing. It does not try to give men what they want - because that is catering. It does not try to give men false hopes - because that is deception. Instead, the War on Poverty tries only to create the conditions by which the good life can be lived - and that is humanism. Shriver began with research. As Shriver uncovered the systemic roots of poverty - towns in Appalachia that did not have access to running water, black Americans in the South who were segregated and oppressed by Jim Crow laws, housing ghettos in the North - the necessity of The War on Poverty began to come into sharp focus.
As Shriver felt frequently in his life, he was being called to serve.
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