Stemming from a decision made in November 1963 to pursue a legislative agenda that economic advisers to President John F. Kennedy had planned, the War on Poverty consisted of a series of programs in the areas of health, education, and welfare that Congress passed in 1964 and 1965. When President Lyndon Johnson declared an "unconditional war on poverty" in his 1964 State of the Union address, he referred to federal aid to education and medical care for the elderly as important parts of that war. Although these measures passed in 1965, an omnibus act, prepared by a special task force of President Johnson's Council of Economic Advisers, became the legislative vehicle most closely associated with the War on Poverty. The House Education and Labor Committee began to consider this legislation, known as the Economic Opportunity Act (EOA), in April 1964, and the measure passed Congress that August.
The Office of Economic Opportunity
Run as part of the Executive Office of the president and directed by Sargent Shriver, a brother-in-law of President Kennedy, the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) served as the bureaucratic center for the war. Shriver's Office of Economic Opportunity contained assistant directors for each of the three most important components of the Economic Opportunity Act. The Job Corps, the first of these components, based on New Deal models such as the Civilian Conservation Corps, recruited 10,000 people by 30 June 1965 to receive vocational training in urban training centers, frequently located on abandoned military bases, or in smaller conservation camps managed by the Agriculture and Interior departments. The conservation camps stressed the value of discipline and physical labor in rural settings such as forests and recreational areas.
By the end of 1966, the Job Corps encountered serious opposition in Congress. Training inner-city youths for meaningful jobs turned out to be an expensive and difficult task. The fact that some Job Corps trainees committed crimes and that a riot erupted at one Job Corps training center added to the negative publicity. Nonetheless, the program survived as a public-private partnership run by the Department of Labor. Between 1966 and 2000, the program served more than 1.9 million disadvantaged young people.
The Community Action Program, the second of the important components of the Office of Economic Opportunity, functioned as a grant program from the federal government to local Community Action Agencies. These local agencies, either private or governmental organizations, had the assignment of mobilizing the resources of a given area and using them to plan and coordinate an attack on the causes of poverty. Part of their mission was to involve local residents in the decision making process. After urban riots in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts in the summer of 1965, Congress began to question the efficacy of the Community Action Program. President Johnson also began to distance himself from the program, particularly after receiving complaints from local politicians that local Community Action Agencies were operating as centers to organize political movements in opposition to the incumbent mayors and city council members. In 1967, Representative Edith Green (D-Oregon) helped to save the Community Action Program by offering a successful amendment that placed all of the more than 1,000 community action agencies under the control of local or state governments.
Although the Community Action Agencies were intended to function as local laboratories for reform, the OEO fostered "national emphasis" programs, designed to be adopted across the country. The most influential of these programs was Head Start, launched in the summer of 1965. Head Start grew into a permanent program with its own funding stream and provided education, health, and nutritional services to more than 18 million low-income preschool children. Begun as a six-week summer program with a budget of $96 million, Head Start became a nine-month school-year program with an allocation of nearly $5.3 billion in fiscal year 2000.
Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), the third important part of the OEO, resembled the Peace Corps that had been established in the Kennedy administration and, like the War on Poverty, headed by Sargent Shriver. The program allowed the federal government to recruit, train, and fund volunteers who would spend a year living among the poor and working on antipoverty projects in both urban and rural areas. By June 1968, 5,000 VISTA volunteers were in the field, working on 447 projects in every state except Mississippi. As with Head Start and the Job Corps, this program survived, so that between 1965 and the end of the century some 120,000 Americans performed national service as VISTA volunteers.
Other War on Poverty Components
Beyond these three core programs run by the OEO, the Department of Labor administered the Neighborhood Youth Corps, authorized by the Economic Opportunity Act (EOA) of 1964 and designed to keep needy students in school by offering them such incentives as a stipend, work experience, and "attitudinal" training. Another part of the War on Poverty, run by the Department of Agriculture, provided for loans to low-income farm families for business initiatives and attempted to improve the living conditions of migrant farm workers. Still other components of the EOA were designed to mesh with the rehabilitation services offered to welfare beneficiaries and authorized by the 1962 Public Welfare Amendments.
The most important and effective measures of the War on Poverty, not included in the EOA, provided federal funds for the education of children in low-income families (Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965) and for the medical care of elderly individuals and individuals on welfare (Medicare and Medicaid, created by the Social Security Amendments of 1965). These programs, the outgrowth of legislative battles that had raged throughout the 1950s, enjoyed more support in Congress and received far more funding than did the programs authorized by the Economic Opportunity Act. Significant expansions of the Social Security program in 1968 and 1969 worked far more effectively to lower the poverty rate among the nation's elderly than did all of the components of the Economic Opportunity Act combined.
Even by 1966, it became apparent that legislators in Congress favored certain programs, such as Head Start, over other antipoverty programs, such as the Community Action Program. As a consequence, Congress earmarked funds for Head Start at the expense of Community Action and the Job Corps. During the second Nixon administration, Congress replaced the Office of Economic Opportunity with the Community Services Administration and hastened the process in which favored parts of the antipoverty program were exported to established executive agencies, such as the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. In 1981 the Reagan administration abolished the Community Services Administration, leaving only individual programs such as legal services and Head Start as the bureaucratic survivors of the War on Poverty.
Three years later, Charles Murray, an analyst in a conservative think tank, published Losing Ground, in which he argued that the antipoverty programs of the 1960s ended up increasing the rate of poverty, rather than eradicating poverty. Murray's book precipitated a national debate over the efficacy of the War on Poverty and Great Society programs at a time when the Reagan administration made concerted efforts to cut government spending for social welfare purposes. President Ronald Reagan himself distinguished between the programs of the New Deal, which he deemed effective, and the programs of the Great Society that featured a War on Poverty in which, according to Reagan, poverty won.
The creators of the War on Poverty had hoped to create a flexible approach that would allow local communities to experiment with what worked best. Although such an approach failed to materialize, the Office of Economic Opportunity sponsored important research into the causes of poverty and the best means of alleviating it. The economists in the Division of Research, Planning and Evaluation viewed the poverty legislation as an avenue for policy evaluation and research. Hence, it seemed natural to them to test the notion of a guaranteed income that would be paid both to the working and the nonworking poor, to families headed by women, and to "intact" families that contained both a father and a mother living at home. In a remarkable development, the economists secured approval to conduct one of the largest social experiments in the nation's history, undertaken in the late 1960s and 1970s and known as the Negative Income Tax Experiments. These experiments yielded valuable data on the effects of social programs on people's behavior and in particular on how the receipt of income from the government affected labor supply and such crucial life decisions as whether to marry.
The War on Poverty, then, failed to end poverty and raised questions about the federal government's ability to provide effective social services. At the same time, it spawned several programs, notably Head Start, that have withstood the test of time and been evaluated as an effective means of improving educational performance. Furthermore, the era of the War on Poverty witnessed the passage of programs such as Medicare that have become enduring parts of American life and improved the access of Americans to health care and other vital services.
Bibliography
Berkowitz, Edward. America's Welfare State: From Roosevelt to Reagan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.
Gillette, Michael L. Launching the War on Poverty: An Oral History. New York: Twayne, 1996.
Murray, Charles. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980. New York: Basic Books, 1984.
O'Connor, Alice. Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001.
