GREAT SOCIETY

Lyndon B. Johnson, early in his unexpected presidency, 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. Many Great Society programs had their origins under John F. Kennedy but came to fruition after (and in part because of) Kennedy's untimely death. Others were responses to the particular social crises of Johnson's own troubled administration. Whatever their beginnings, however, the programs of the Great Society constituted the most important expansion of the American state since the New Deal.

Unlike the New Deal, which was a response to a severe economic crisis, the Great Society emerged in a period of unprecedented prosperity. Its first and most important programs emerged largely from within the government itself, a result of optimistic planning by policymakers who believed that American economic growth would make possible bold new public efforts. But some later Great Society initiatives were a result of social pressure from below, a response to the increasing militancy and intermittent violence of the black struggle for equality and to the conviction of many liberals that only a major public effort to fight urban poverty could prevent continuing social disorder.

The most important domestic achievement of the Johnson administration may have been the president's success in translating some of the demands of the civil rights movement into law. Two major civil rights acts were passed in the first two years of his presidency. The 1964 act forbade job discrimination and the segregation of public accommodations; the 1965 law guaranteed black voting rights. A third civil rights act in 1968 banned housing discrimination and extended constitutional protections to Indians on reservations. But when historians refer to the Great Society, they usually mean the remarkable array of initiatives launched between 1964 and 1967 designed to expand the social welfare system and eliminate poverty.

Johnson had begun his political career as a disciple of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and his fondest dream was to create a record of domestic achievement comparable to that of the New Deal. Indeed, several of his administration's most important achievements fulfilled pledges that Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman had made a generation before. The Medicare program, which Congress approved in 1965, was a first step toward creating the system of national health insurance that liberals had been advocating since World War II. It provided federal funding for many of the medical costs of older Americans; and it overcame the bitter resistance to the idea of "socialized medicine" by making its benefits available to everyone over sixty-five, regardless of need, and by linking payments to the existing private insurance system. A year later, the government extended the system to welfare recipients of all ages through the Medicaid program.

But the Johnson administration also moved into areas that few New Dealers had contemplated. It shattered a long-standing political taboo by providing significant federal aid to public education. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 offered assistance to underfunded public school districts throughout the country; the Higher Education Act of the same year provided aid to needy college and university students. Other Great Society initiatives included the creation of the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Transportation, the establishment of the National Endowments for the Humanities and the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a dramatic expansion of federal housing subsidies, and environmental legislation to protect air and water.

The most ambitious and controversial part of the Great Society was a federal effort the Kennedy administration had been contemplating since at least early 1963. Johnson launched it publicly in the first months of his presidency: an "unconditional war on poverty" designed finally 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 (oeo) to oversee a variety of community-based antipoverty programs. The oeo reflected a fragile consensus among policymakers that the best way to deal with poverty was not simply to raise the incomes of the poor but to help them better themselves through education, job training, and community development. Central to its mission was the idea of "community action," the participation of the poor themselves in framing and administering the programs designed to help them.

The War on Poverty began with a $1 billion appropriation in 1964 and spent another $2 billion in the following two years. It spawned dozens of programs, among them the Job Corps, whose purpose was to help disadvantaged youths develop marketable skills; Volunteers in Service to America (vista), 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.

In the end, however, the War on Poverty had only a modest impact. Controversial from the beginning, always without funding adequate for its goals, it scored some significant local successes and helped create several programs of lasting value (including Head Start and Food Stamps). But mounting political opposition to the community action programs as well as budgetary pressures caused by the expansion of the Vietnam War brought the War on Poverty to a premature end after 1967. American poverty did decline in the 1960s (although probably as much because of economic growth as of government programs), but it remained an intractable problem precisely where the War on Poverty had attempted to end it: in the inner cities, in rural America, and above all in the growing number of female-headed households in the nation's black communities.

The War on Poverty, and the Great Society of which it was a part, left a mixed legacy. They were responsible for the most important legal protections of civil rights since the 1860s; they permanently expanded the American welfare and social insurance system; and they gave the federal government important new responsibilities in such areas as the environment, education, and the arts. But the largest Great Society programs—Medicare and Medicaid—proved to be highly inefficient and unwieldy; they ultimately became two of the most costly items in the federal budget. And the gap between the expansive intentions of the War on Poverty and its relatively modest achievements fueled later conservative arguments that government is not an appropriate vehicle for solving social problems.

Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor (1989); Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America (1984); James T. Patterson, America's Struggle against Poverty, 1900-1980 (1981).

Alan Brinkley

See also Affirmative Action; Black Ghettos; Civil Rights Movement; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Medicaid; Medicare; Poverty; Welfare and Public Relief.