War on Poverty

President Lyndon B. Johnson's legacy is one of the most conflicted in American presidential history. His escalation of the war in Vietnam is juxtaposed with his unrelenting desire to make the United States fulfill a vision of The Great Society in which equality was promoted in all spheres of public life. The War on Poverty, as it came to be called, was a dramatic challenge that Johnson presented to the country. The War on Poverty and its associated reforms became a lightning rod for conservative criticism as well as an idealistic touchstone for liberals for generations.

After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963 and the appointment of Vice President Lyndon Johnson as president, Johnson's State of the Union Speech of 1964 announced an “unconditional war on poverty in America.” Johnson did not stop there; he continued to treat poverty with a message that did not state that the poor were to get an unearned handout. Instead, Johnson's notion was that of opportunity. His desire was to address the national disgrace of poverty (of nearly 20% at the time), which he felt merited a national response. Further, he identified the cause of systemic poverty not as personal moral weakness of the poor but as a societal failure. Johnson, in his 1964 State of the Union address, said, “The cause may lie deeper in our [Page 931]failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a lack of education and training.” Johnson made clear that the opportunities he sought to extend were to those who were most disenfranchised, including all Americans regardless of race, ethnicity, and gender. The speech was historic in its idealism for the creation of a more just society. Several months later, Johnson proposed an even broader dream for America in a speech at the University of Michigan. He hoped The Great Society would emerge from a broad range of efforts such as the War on Poverty, as well as White House task forces on civil rights promotion and strengthening education.

The rhetoric of the War on Poverty quickly found its way into law and the creation of new administrative organizations. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 (Public Law 88–452, 78 Stat. 508, 42 U.S.C. § 2701) was passed by Congress and became law on August 20, 1964. The Act created the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), which administered various programs that were directed at the poor, including Job Corps, Youth Corps, Head Start, VISTA, and legal representation. In 1966, a program to improve the nutrition of children of the poor was also implemented.

However, this great explosion of programs was short lived. From the outset, Johnson encountered resistance from almost all quarters (the South on issues of race, conservatives who thought federal money should not be spent, and liberals who thought his reforms did not go far enough) to his call for an appropriate response to what he saw as a significant crisis. Johnson's War on Poverty was soon eclipsed by a backlash against his policies and, eventually, the human and economic costs of the Vietnam War. As opposition to the Vietnam War mounted and American society became deeply divided over issues of national policy, Johnson's administration was crippled, and he felt he could not muster enough popular support to be a viable candidate for reelection in 1968.

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