War on Poverty

The War on Poverty, announced with great fanfare by President Lyndon B. Johnson in early 1964, was a modestly funded program that had an enormous impact on urban politics and federal social policy. The legislation that created the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) launched the War on Poverty with an allocation of $500 million and responsibility for coordinating what President Johnson and many of his aides assumed would be a broad-gauged effort to open the gates of economic opportunity to individuals excluded from the growing abundance of post–World War II America and give them the same chance as others to develop and use their abilities. Forty years after its creation, the War on Poverty is remembered mainly for Head Start, a preschool program for poor children, and the Job Corps, a job training and educational program for disadvantaged youths. But in the 1960s, the War on Poverty was at the core of a revolution in federal social policy and a racial upheaval in urban politics, as African Americans struggled for political power and influence in the nation's largest cities.

The initial idea for a war on poverty grew out of the turmoil in northern cities, as black unemployment rose and protest erupted in the early 1960s. John F. Kennedy launched the War on Poverty in June of 1963 when he decided to link his proposed civil rights legislation to several modest policy proposals designed to address black poverty and unemployment. By the time Lyndon Johnson publicly declared war on poverty, Kennedy's idea had been transformed into a presidential initiative designed to empower poor communities and redistribute federal resources to the poor. From the outset, then, the War on Poverty was tied to the African American struggle for civil rights and equality.

The federal officials who planned the War on Poverty rejected redistribution of income to the poor in favor of upgrading their job skills and education as a solution to economic poverty—as the Johnson administration was fond of saying, the War on Poverty was a “hand up, not a handout.” Johnson's poverty strategy was predicated on transforming the poor through job training and educational services, yet OEO was meagerly funded. Federal poverty planners intended to make up the shortfall in needed resources by using the authority of OEO, a presidential agency, to redirect existing federal programs to the poor and to reallocate federal resources to social welfare programs from other federal programs. Although OEO carried out its own programs, retargeting and reallocation of federal resources to the poor were pivotal to both the War on Poverty and the Great Society. As a consequence, federal appropriations for education, job training, and social services for the poor rose by 80 percent between 1964 and 1969, compared to 8 percent for all other discretionary spending. New programs for the poor were created, such as the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and older programs such as manpower training and vocational rehabilitation shifted their resources from middle- and working-class clienteles to the rural and inner-city poor.

The controversial community action program was the other significant innovation of the War on Poverty. Some planners of the poverty program thought of community action as a device to coordinate the delivery of federal services at the local level of government and stimulate innovation—it would help, they thought, overcome bureaucratic rigidity in local education and social welfare agencies. However, many of the program's originators thought of community action as a device to include the poor in decision making, a strategy calculated to transform the poor by encouraging participation in the program. The poverty legislation required the “maximum feasible participation” of the poor, an ambiguous phrase that made political poverty—exclusion from local decision making—one of the goals of the program in addition to economic poverty. Although Johnson thought the maximum feasible participation requirement would prevent white Southerners from excluding poor African Americans, some enterprising poverty officials plotted to use community action as a tool to mobilize the poor.

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