Great Society Programs

Lyndon B. Johnson called on the federal government to create a “great society” in America. That phrase has since become synonymous with the domestic record of the two Democratic administrations of the 1960s, and the programs of the Great Society constituted the most important expansion of the American state since the New Deal. New legislation addressed civil rights, voting rights, and discrimination in housing and established the Medicare and Medicaid programs. For the first time, federal aid was provided for elementary, secondary, and higher education. The Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Transportation were created, and the National Endowments for the Humanities and the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting were established. Federal housing subsidies were dramatically expanded, and environmental legislation to protect air and water was passed into law. Finally, a “War on Poverty” was designed to eliminate hunger and deprivation from American life.

The centerpiece of the War on Poverty was the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which created an Office of Economic Opportunity to oversee a variety of community-based antipoverty programs, among them the Job Corps, whose purpose was to help disadvantaged youths develop marketable skills; Volunteers in Service to America, a domestic version of the Peace Corps, which sent middle-class young people on “missions” into poor neighborhoods; the Model Cities program for urban redevelopment; Upward Bound, which assisted poor high school students entering college; legal services for the poor; the Food Stamps program; and Project Head Start, which offered preschool education for poor children.

These combined efforts had a huge impact on the mostly unknown field of evaluation: Politicians and citizens alike wanted to know if these new social [Page 177]programs were working, who was being affected, and how. A presidential executive order gave employment and financial support to those who wished to apply their analytical skills to examine questions relating to efficiency and effectiveness and gave birth to large social policy organizations such as Abt Associates and the Urban Institute, for example.